Thursday, November 20, 2003



David Frum of London's Telegraph covers anti-war rallies thusly:

I thought of the tens of thousands of marchers I'd seen at the big anti-war demo in October 2002, chanting Islamic slogans from under their caps and hijabs.

They had not been bookish or polite. There was nothing woolly about them.

But they were young and fierce - and numerous. It is they, not these ageing men and women carefully tucking away their litter, who represent the future of the British Left - if, that is, a politics that pooh-poohs the crimes of Osama bin Laden and rallies to aid the last-ditch struggles of the Ba'ath party of Iraq can in any meaningful way be called "Left" at all.

The war on terror has glaringly exposed the moral contradictions of contemporary political radicalism: a politics that champions the rights of women and minorities, but only when those rights are threatened by white Europeans; a politics that celebrates creative non-violence at home but condones deadly extremism abroad; and, perhaps above all, a politics that traces its origins to the Enlightenment - and today raises its voice to protect militantly unenlightened terrorists from the justice dispensed by their victims.
There's a bit more:

Telegraph | News | Why this protest is deeply shameful

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