Against Chi Ta-wei (紀大偉)

Sirs,

Unrecognized irony has been in plentiful supply in your editorial pages of late. The title of Chi Ta-wei's (紀大偉) short editorial in Monday's edition - "The Bell Is Tolling For Inclusive Ideologies" - was just such an example. Far from being "inclusive", policies of multiculturalism have encouraged disintegration, distrust and consequently social exclusion throughout Western Europe.

The definition Chi Ta-wei offers, that multiculturalism is...

"...support for the idea that, within a community people can be open about their different identities, including gender, sexual preference and ethnic identity, instead of hiding and having no chance to participate in society or express themselves..."

... omits to mention the one real, substantive issue here, one which ought to be obvious.The spread of religion, particularly Islam and its fanatical and explicitly anti-liberal, anti-women, anti-homosexual variants, is precisely why European political leaders are now considering former policies in support of multiculturalism to have been a mistake. Should anybody be ignorant enough to need convincing on this point, they could do worse than to consider why Theo Van Gogh was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004, or why it is that Ayaan Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands, purportedly one of the most tolerant societies in Western Europe, to live in the United States. That Chi Ta-wei chose to deliberately denigrate the seriousness of this most politically salient aspect of multiculturalism is disgraceful.

Chi Ta-wei wrote that British Prime Minister David Cameron wants...

"to force Muslims to drop those values in their own culture that differ from the values of mainstream Britain..."

... and that this mainstream culture is "right-wing in nature". In response to this I am not, in fact, sorry at all to pose the following questions:

• Is it "right wing" to demand that you do not threaten - in public - to actually behead those who refuse to submit to the political demands of an openly fascist variant of Islam?
• Is it "right wing" to demand that you do not lobby for the imposition of openly fascist Islamic Sharia Law in the UK? And let us be clear: laws which would see homosexual people punished, and barbarically so, for what they are? Laws which could see women accused of adultery whipped in public?
• Is it "right wing" to demand that you do not mutilate the genitalia of your baby girl for the sake of the insane mumblings of your 7th-Century dark ages cult?

I submit that Chi Ta-wei's editorial is an illustrative example of that part of the political Left which either does not understand the enormous intellectual and political debt it owes to Liberalism, or is knowingly trying to undermine what remains of it. As the Marxist scholar Norm Geras recently told a conference at the University of Newcastle in England:

"I am sorry to say that to be a member of the Marxist left today is to be part of something, a body of opinion, a political current, that is accursed."

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Tuesday 22nd February 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)