Posted on 08/02/2002 6:09:50 PM PDT by aculeus
I had dinner with a medical school dean last week. A virologist of distinction, he told me that there recently had been an outbreak of Muslim fundamentalism in his medical school.
Female Muslim medical students had suddenly started to appear at classes clad in a full veil, with only a narrow slit for the eyes. Alarmed, the medical school authorities consulted the General Medical Council, the official body that supervises medical education in Britain. Fortunately, a pre-existing rule that the whole of a student’s or doctor’s face must be visible to patients undergoing examination allowed the school authorities to tell the veiled students that they must remove their veils or cease to study medicine.
They complied; and it subsequently emerged that they had never wanted to veil themselves in the first place but were pressured—or blackmailed—into adopting the custom by male Muslim medical students, among whom was a cleric. They were susceptible to blackmail because, just as intellectuals were once afraid to appear insufficiently left-wing (pas d’ennemis sur la gauche), so Muslims now fear appearing insufficiently rigorous and orthodox in their observance. The woman who does not comply with the most rigid interpretation of the rules easily can find herself depicted as someone of loose morals, virtually a whore. Given such pressures, who knows what passions might be found beneath the burkas and veils of Muslim women, not just in the West but across the Middle East? There may be a ferocious pent-up yearning for freedom.
At the same time as the epidemic of veils broke out, Muslim medical students met with the dean to request that the school set aside a prayer room for the use of Muslim students. An outright refusal would, of course, have ignited claims of prejudice and condemnation by the the liberal press, ever on the lookout for a stick to beat established institutions.
The dean answered, yes, they could have a prayer room, provided that they shared it with students of other faiths, such as Christians and Jews. This was the last he heard of the request for a prayer room in the medical school, which has thus remained secular, whatever the private religious views of its staff and students. The Muslims did not wish to share with others: so much for their participation in our glorious new multiculturalism.
Good answer. Some other universities and colleges should take note!
If that happens, what do you think the leftists will be able to say was wrong with Nazism?
They'll pretend there's no contradiction whatever, just as they apologized for Stalin and his mass murder of 20 million (or more) Russians during the purges, and the forced starvation in the satellite states. The Left has been doing this tap dance ever since the 1930s. They can condemn Nazism out of one side of the mouth, yet support Stalinism, Maoism, AND Islamofascism right out the other side, and not even lose a wink of sleep over it.
Sometimes - and especially in the West, out of the direct influence of Muslim regimes - they're much more devoted Muslims.
In all patriarchal societies men feel themselves more relaxed then women; when they live in predominantly non-Muslim environment, they relax even more. Not so women: they are those who maintain traditions and customs in the family, and this role of their's becomes even more important when abroad.
I observe this going on in an Iranian family of my acquaintance. Masud, the husband, just loves his bacon and eggs for breakfast. He insists his son to look after himself and his room as his NZ mates do. He thinks that his daughter's university studies are priority No 1.
His wife is always ready to interrupt their daughter studying in her room and to order her clean up her brother's one. She's also the one who is trying to keep pork and other non-chalal things away from the kitchen. For her, priority No1 for the daughter is to marry a suitable Muslim guy; the priority No 1 for herself is to find a groom for the daughter.
Well, let's hope it'll cure the author of this item, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple from The New Statesman liberal rag.
Or, as M Steyn'd put it recently, he rarely misses an opportunity to give the Islamists the full Monica.
They does, and Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is just one illustration of that.
To blame the Right for Nazism is an old Leftie game. There are books published as long ago as in the 50s that proove the leftism of the Fascism and Nazism. They also show that the game of reversing the blame was old even then.
Mussolini was the best orator of the Socialist Party in Italy, and the best writer of its organ AVANTI! He left the party and founded his own - Fascist one - because in his view the Italian Socialists weren't radical enough.
And what to say about the National Socialist Workers Party - the full name of the Nazis which contemporary Left just hate to pronounce? Rest asured, it was socialist and workers' not only in name!
"Anything" is not the same as "everything". I think the point of Chesterton's quote is that the atheist will be swayed by, and change his belief system, according to whatever winds of doctrine seem appealing at the moment. As opposed to one who's value system is based on unchanging absolutes established by an external creator.
In other words, there's no telling what an atheist may believe tomorrow.
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