Ms. Phillips began her talk by emphasising the threat of Islamism, which inverts all logic by, for instance, portraying Israel's attempts to defend itself as unprovoked acts of aggression. Yet Western intelligentsia has adopted the Islamist narrative on the Middle East. Ms. Phillips attributes this to the current tendency among the intelligentsia to be swayed by ideology, rather than rationality and empiricism, on issues such as global warming, the Iraq war, Israel, and scientism. Although these ideological stances are secular in nature, they resemble religious beliefs in many ways, for instance, their intolerance to dissent which is viewed as an obstacle to the "path to perfection."
Taken from the introduction to the web distribution of Melanie Phillips' talk, there is an audio file (MP3) available at this location: http://www.meforum.org/2665/islamists-turned-world-upside-down
# # #
Comments