The Wages of Multiculturalism

A benefit of Islamic terror, Shelby Steele indicates, is that it will force the west to demolish the left-wing game of oppression.

For over a century the left has used the weapon of “oppression” to mute the power of the middle class. Today that means crying “Oppression!” to mute the power of Israel and the United States.

It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power... Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression.

The extremism we are talking about is the monstrosity of anti-semitism and anti-Christianism as practiced by the Islamic fascists. And it feeds on the left-inspired pathology of white guilt.

But white guilt's most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world long ago fell out of history. Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of an inferiority complex. America has done a good thing in launching democracy as a new ideal in this region. Here is the possibility--if still quite remote--for the Islamic world to seek power through contribution rather than through menace.

For the facts are damning. The west has given the Middle East a huge gift: the right to pump oil out of the ground using western organization and western technology and keep the proceeds. And the Middle East has poured that gift out onto the sand and spat on it.

In Britain the sands are running out on the left’s ugly little game of multiculturalism, as The Daily Telegraph is glad to observe.

In 1984, Ray Honeyford, a Bradford headmaster, was forced to retire after writing that multiculturalism was doing a disservice to children from immigrant backgrounds... Last week, in slightly more mangled language, Ruth Kelly, the communities and local government minister, said much the same thing.

That is easy to write, but in the 22 years between Honeyford’s forced retirement and Ruth Kelly’s retreat the left has terrorized the guardians of traditional white Anglo-Saxon culture, as it played out its nasty game of oppression and multiculturalism. And for what? To say, after all, that it was all a mistake.

The problem is that it is more than a mistake. It is going to cost lives, certainly tens of thousands of lives. And maybe it will cost millions of lives before all is done.

All because the left wanted to mute the power of the United States.