We are raising up a generation of secular ayatollahs
Dalrymple writes:
We have faced the dilemma before, with communist and fascist movements. Now we have Islamic movements and, as yet in embryo, fascist anti-fascism. If we overreact, we destroy our freedom; if we underreact, we allow others to destroy our freedom for us.
A free society
can exist only where there is some cultural, and not merely a legalistic, understanding of a constitutional order: an acceptance of limits of outrage, for example, if you happen to be fortunate enough to live in a tolerably tolerant society, even when that society is not perfectly just or fair (as no society yet known to man is).
He notes that this cultural understanding
is easily lost, and seems to be in the process of decline in Western countries, most dangerously among the very class — the intelligentsia — in whom one might have expected or hoped it to be strongest. Our universities are becoming bastions of unfreedom.
