On the Danish Cartoons


If, as the news reports, some clerics really believe that the editors and cartoonists of Jyllands-Posten should be beheaded or have their hands cut off, we need to reacquaint ourselves with the attitude of the British general Charles James Napier. Assigned to Britishcontrolled India, Napier was told he just didn’t understand that wife-burning was a revered custom in India. He responded, in effect, that he understood completely. “My country also has a custom,” he said. “We hang people who burn women.” He proposed building the gallows next to the pyre. The wifeburning stopped. In American culture, we don’t put up with violence and arson in response to speech. We’re a funny people that way.

NJO: Originally posted on the blog Feathers of Steel at liberabit.blogspot.com.

Inside the Mind of the Rutgers Professor, Part I: Multiculturalism

Indoctrination has Led to the Decline of Our College Experience

BY JAMES O'KEEFE

Multiculturalism

Every student at Rutgers is required to take a “non-western” course in the humanities or social sciences, though there is no required course in “western” humanities or social sciences. The multiculturalist administration wants to incorporate “excluded” works of literature, art, and philosophy into our curriculum that have been unaccounted for due to prejudices of our culture. To the multiculturalist, appreciation for American Culture is completely baseless, founded only in prejudices and propaganda perpetuated by ignorant, racist dead white men. Furthermore, the multiculturalist says principles like natural rights, which unite us, are not grounded in any sort of truth, but are arbitrary and hostile to “diversity” and our differences. Although the word “multiculturalist” sounds like an appeal to a sense of community, to them, an isolated non-Westerner is more “cultured” than a Southern American Christian, even though the Southern American Christian is far more exposed to people with different beliefs and lifestyles. Thus, eventually culture turns into a sort of non-conformist individualism – exactly the type that is celebrated by Davey Thoreau. This explains the contempt American liberals have for rural folk in the heartland with common virtues and a strong sense of community and tradition. It also explains the contempt for patriotism and civic virtue. One often sees Rutgers students in class or on a bus, walking or sitting with their heads down, drowning out their environment with music playing on their Ipods. These students have evolved in educational institutions that have enforced so much independent thought, they find solace in isolation, in virtues they can find only in themselves (thanks to Instant Messenger, students rarely need to leave their dorm rooms). The emphasis on the self is further promoted by the influence of Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud and his perverted philosophies. Students sometimes congregate (due at times to things like mandatory meal plans), but state universities like Rutgers, despite their numbers, are remarkably lonely places. This is because the virtues that bring us together, like respect for the (or any) concept of God, allegiance to the ideals of Country, and reliance upon ethics to govern our actions toward one other, are despised.

The multiculturalist connoisseur desires a “transcendent” view, a “cultured” view, a “different” view, other than that native to his homeland. Multiculturalist Rutgers professors have become eccentric elites, sadly out of touch with American culture, family and purpose.

NJO: Originally printed in the September 2005 issue of The Centurion.