After their act of desecration, four of the Mount Kinabalu cretins spent three days in a Malaysian prison and were fined $1,000 each. The people of northern Borneo, Dalrymple points out, ‘were not evangelising for their beliefs; on the contrary, they were welcoming strangers to come to their place that they regarded with reverence and awe. Common courtesy should have been enough to suggest to these people that they should not act in this fashion. This behaviour was gross in its offensiveness’One of the effects of the silly, noxious Western ideology of multiculturalism, writes Dalrymple, is that it renders people utterly
uninterested in, or insensitive to, the ideas or feelings of people of cultures other than their own.
Anyone who has tried to understand another culture,
or even master literature in a foreign language, knows that it requires great effort and determination and not just an occasional tasting of a different cuisine. It is unlikely that anyone could master both Pali Buddhist scriptures and the ninth-century Arabic of Moslem philosophers.
The doctrinal, abstract commitment to respect other cultures
is not the same as the effort to understand just one of them.
Dalrymple draws attention to the detestable fashion among Westerners of photographing themselves naked at temples or other sites of cultural or religious significance (though not at mosques — these Westerners are stupid but not insane, so, like their intellectual leaders, they pick targets they think are soft). According to the Paris newspaper the Monde,
it is a kind of epidemic.
They got off lightlyDalrymple expresses his revulsion for the actions of Western tourists in Borneo and elsewhere. He singles out the British, saying:
The conduct abroad of tourists from my own country is notoriously disgusting and disrespectful of local mores.
He points to the connection between multiculturalism as received wisdom and the foul behaviour of these tourists.
