Covering Up Our Culture to 'Avoid Giving Offense'

by Giulio Meotti • June 16, 2019 at 5:00 am

Recently, some major conservative intellectuals have been sacked in the UK. One is the peerless philosopher Roger Scruton, who was fired from a governmental committee...
Then it was the turn of the great Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose visiting fellowship at Cambridge University was rescinded...
By refusing to confront the speech police, or to support freedom of expression for Salman Rushdie, Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Hebdo, and Jyllands-Posten -- just the tip of a huge iceberg -- we have started down the road of submission to sharia law and to tyranny. We all have been covering up our supposedly "blasphemous" culture with burqas to avoid offending people who do not seem to mind offending us.

In 1988, The Satanic Verses was published, written by Salman Rushdie (left), a British citizen. Iran's "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (right) in 1989 condemned Rushdie to death for writing the book. The Rushdie affair seems to have deeply shaped British society. (Image sources: Rushdie - Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images; Khomeini - Mohammad Sayyad/Wikimedia Commons)

Three years ago, the Italian government made a shameful decision. It veiled its antique Roman statues to avoid offending Iran's visiting President Hassan Rouhani. Nude statues were encased in white boxes. A year earlier, in Florence, another statue featuring a naked man in Greco-Roman style had also been covered during the visit of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. Now, one of the most famous British art galleries has covered two paintings, after Muslim complaints that they were "blasphemous".

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Diplomatic Gesticulations Won't Solve the Iran Problem

by Amir Taheri • June 16, 2019 at 4:00 am

That leaves the remaining members of the P5+1 with a clear choice: either pronounce the Obama [Iran] "deal" dead and seek a framework for new talks on how to solve the perennial "Iran problem" which, paradoxically, all say they are concerned about, or to unite to neutralize the United States and help Iran carry on as usual.
The present impasse may be breached in two ways.
The first is for actual or wannabe mediators to side with the US and tell the mullahs that they cannot have their cake and eat it. Once the mullahs have understood that putative "mediators" could direct their efforts at finding ways of organizing a retreat that avoids utter humiliation for the Khomeinist regime. That should not be difficult as all the remaining P5+1 nations, including Russia, share Washington's concerns about Tehran's "exporting revolution" and developing long-range missiles capable of carrying yet non-existent nuclear warheads.
The second way to breach the impasse is to admit that the Obama "deal" is a dead horse that will not come back to life no matter how one kicks it.

One way to breach the current impasse with Iran is to admit that the Obama "nuclear deal" is a dead horse that will not come back to life no matter how one kicks it. With that admission, the Iran dossier could be returned to the UN Security Council that has already passed seven resolutions trying to deal with it. Pictured: Foreign ministers and other officials from the P5+1 countries, the EU and Iran at the announcement of the Iran "nuclear deal" on April 2, 2015 in Écublens-Lausanne, Switzerland. (Image source: United States Department of State)

What do politicians do when they cannot do anything but are obliged to pretend that they are doing something?

One answer provided by Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is simple: you organize a meeting.

The meeting that Lavrov is setting up, later this month in Moscow, will bring together junior diplomats from Iran plus Britain, China, France and Germany, that is to say the countries (aside from the US) that formed the notorious P5+1 group created by Barack Obama to give a veneer of legal respectability to the so-called "nuke deal" he concocted with the Iranian mullahs.

For all intents and purposes the "deal' died when the Trump administration in Washington decided to simply ditch it. Lacking an enforceable legal status, the "deal" always depended on the willingness of the participants to implement it. With Americans walking away from it, there is no way the other nations still apparently in the game could put it on a life-support machine.

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