Intelligence2 debate

Intelligence2

10 October 2007

Lloyd Evans on Tuesday night's debate

The great thing about the Intelligence2 debates is their vitality, pace and compression. A week-long seminar couldn’t have covered as much ground as we traversed in 100 minutes on Tuesday night. The motion ‘We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values’ was proposed by the author Ibn Warraq. He contrasted the West’s openness and flexibility with the ossified ‘closed book’ culture of Islam. ‘Easterners flock to collect their degrees from Oxbridge, Harvard and the Sorbonne,’ he said. Traffic in the other direction is minimal. Rejecting the ‘mind-numbing certainties’ of Islam in favour of the ‘liberating doubt’ of Bertrand Russell, he asked us if Islam would tolerate an equivalent of The Life of Brian.

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TDK

October 12th, 2007 11:07am Report this comment

I'd like to comment on William Dalrymple's claim of Tasmanian annihilation. This claim has been challenged by historians including Keith Windschuttle. http://www.sydneyline.com/Fabrication.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_Wars No genocide took place. The systematic exaggeration of real western atrocities and manufacture of false ones illustrates precisely why we need to defend the "west"

Salomon Benzimra

October 15th, 2007 5:38am Report this comment

Several years ago, when former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi stated his conviction of western culture superiority, he was roundly blasted by his European colleagues. Which showed the collective blindness of Europeans who are incapable of recognizing a factual truth for the sake of the sacrosanct political correctness.

Robin Hard

October 17th, 2007 7:14pm Report this comment

'He reminded us that the explorer Magellan, on arriving in Madras, ordered the extermination of all the city’s Jews and Muslims.' That would have been quite an achievement considering that Magellan never went there, and there were no Jews to kill in Madras until the 17th Century.

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