The narcissism of the western conscience

Brilliant take by Mark Steyn on how Columbia University’s decision to provide a platform for Ahmadinejad, with university president Lee Bollinger providing a ‘challenging’ warm-up act, was an example of the ‘risk-free dissent’ which passes for courage among craven and solipsistic western intellectuals:

And afterwards Mr. Bollinger got raves even from the right for ‘speaking truth to power.’ But so what? It’s like Noel Coward delivering a series of devastating put-downs to Hitler. The Fuhrer’s mad as hell but at the end of the afternoon he goes back to killing and dear Noel goes back to singing ‘The Stately Homes Of England.’ Ahmadinejad goes back to doing — to persecuting, to murdering, to terrorizing, to nuclearizing — and Bollinger cuts out his press clippings and puts them on the fridge.

The other day National Review’s Jay Nordlinger was musing about our habit of referring to some benighted part of the world’s ‘humanitarian needs,’ and wondered when we’d stopped using the term ‘human needs,’ which is, after all, what food, water and shelter are. And his readers wrote in to state the obvious: that ‘humanitarian’ prioritizes not the distant Third World victim but the generous western donor — the ‘humanitarian’ relief effort, the ‘humanitarian’ organizations, the NGOs, the western charities: it’s about us, not them…The pen is not mightier than the sword if your enemy is confident you will never use anything other than your pen. Sometimes it’s not about ‘freedom of speech,’ but about freedom. Ask an Iranian homosexual. If you can find one.

Do read it all.