Theodore Dalrymple comments on the latest act of Islamic savagery in France and the pathetic, self-flagellating, weak-kneed responses that will likely follow from the politically-correct, liberal Western European intelligentsia.
The night before the latest Islamist outrage in France, in which a terrorist killed three people in the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Nice, I was reading a short book about Islamist terrorism in Europe, preparatory to writing an article about the beheading by a Chechen refugee of Samuel Paty, the teacher who had used the cartoons of Muhammad in his civics class to teach about freedom of expression, two weeks ago.
Perhaps that “peculiar state of mind” is just another ideology, according to which humanity can be divided into two groups: the oppressors and the oppressed, and the members of the latter group, being victims, cannot be held responsible for their actions (while the members of the oppressors’ group are responsible even for the things other group members committed a long time ago.) If it were just pity let loose than people with that frame of mind would feel pity for every sufferer and not just for members of one group and never for the members of another). In the case of Hauken, the rapist being a member of an “oppressed group”, he can be only a victim, whatever he does, not an aggressor, and poor Hauken had to find some explanation to excuse him, to avoid “cognitive dissonance”.
So he speaks about the rapist’s culture: another tenet of this ideology is that all cultures are of equal value. But if we lack a system of standards external to all cultures to judge them by, on what basis can we blame anybody for doing things — for instance rape or beheading and the like — that are parts of his so-called culture?