'Frenchman: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly'

John Derbyshire remembers when foreigners were funny.

Why aren’t foreigners funny anymore? The answer is of course: Multiculturalism. When there is a foreign family living in the house next door, and four of the ten people in the office where you work are foreign, it’s hard to crack jokes about foreigners without causing offense. It’s especially hard in a milieu where the ability to take offense instantly and promiscuously, even when plainly no offense was intended, is regarded as a mark of fine and delicate sensibilities, indeed of moral purity.

Mau-mauing the multiculturalists

Ever get the feeling that incidents like this are just guerilla theater meant to spark reactions like this? I picture the guys at CAIR meetings holding their sides with laughter at such Stupid Infidel Tricks.

Defending Ayaan Hirsi Ali from charges of extremism

She's been attacked by multiculturalists as an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" who traded in one ideology for another.

Pascal Bruckner begs to differ.

It's not enough that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has to live like a recluse, threatened with having her throat slit by radicals and surrounded by bodyguards. She - like the French philosophy professor Robert Redeker who has also been issued death threats on Islamicist websites - has to endure the ridicule of the high-minded idealists and armchair philosophers. She has even been called a Nazi in the Netherlands. (6) Thus the defenders of liberty are styled as fascists, while the fanatics are portrayed as victims!

This vicious mechanism is well known. Those who revolt against barbarism are themselves accused of being barbarians. In politics as in philosophy, the equals sign is always an abdication. If thinking involves weighing one's words to name the world well, drawing comparisons in other words, then levelling distinctions testifies to intellectual bankruptcy. Shouting CRS = SS as in May '68, making Bush = Bin Laden or equating Voltaire to Savonarola is giving cheap satisfaction to questionable approximations. Similarly, the Enlightenment is often depicted as nothing but another religion, as mad and intransigent as the Catholicism of the Inquisition or radical Islam. After Heidegger, a whole run of thinkers from Gadamer to Derrida have contested the claims of the Enlightenment to embody a new age of self-conscious history. On the contrary, they say, all the evils of our epoch were spawned by this philosophical and literary episode: capitalism, colonialism, totalitarianism. For them, criticism of prejudices is nothing but a prejudice itself, proving that humanity is incapable of self-reflection. For them, the chimeras of certain men of letters who were keen to make a clean slate of God and revelation, were responsible for plunging Europe into darkness. In an abominable dialectic, the dawn of reason gave birth to nothing but monsters (Horkheimer, Adorno).

Fugitives from justice can take the veil

But travelers to Saudi Arabia can’t bring a Bible. And a British airline is only too happy to enforce that edict.

An air stewardess is claiming religious discrimination against an airline which she says banned her from taking the Bible to Saudi Arabia.

The stewardess has been told by BMI that it is against the law of the insular Middle Eastern country to bring in religious books other than the Koran.

The woman, who is understood to be a committed Christian, takes her bible everywhere she goes and is now set to take the airline to an industrial tribunal claiming discrimination on religious grounds.

BMI, formerly British Midland Airways, said today it was merely following the Foreign Office advice that no non-Islamic materials or artefacts are allowed into the country.

A spokesman from the airline said: "We issue advice to all our staff and passengers that these are the guidelines.

How to get away with murder in the UK

Wear a veil and flee the country.

Police reportedly believe that Mustaf Jamma, a prime suspect in the fatal shooting of Pc Sharon Beshenivsky, used his sister's passport and wore a full niqab to evade checks at Heathrow airport.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis insisted there should be an urgent inquiry.

At the time of the 26-year-old's apparent escape between Christmas Day last year and New Year's Day, he was one of the UK's most wanted men and the airport was on high alert in the wake of the July 7 bombing attacks.

But it is thought that staff rarely ask those departing Britain to remove veils in order to make sure their identification is valid.

A BAA Heathrow spokesman told The Times: "Immigration control staff always do a visual check on people coming into the country but only random checks are made with outgoing passengers."

Via Tim Blair.