Intolerance

To understand just how intolerant British liberalism is, you just need to look to Oxford. The world-famous Oxford Union Debating Society invited two of the most reviled figures in Britain, Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party and David Irving, the revisionist historian made famous by being imprisoned in Austia for denying the accepted details about the Holocaust.

Just inviting them to speak and defend their views raised the ire of the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.  Julian Lewis, the Shadow Defence Minister resigning his life membership in the union in protest. These responses were mild compared to what happened on the night.

For inviting the two controversial speakers, the president of the society, Luke Tryl was subjected to chants of “Kill Tryl!” Some protesters attacked attendees with placards as they tried to enter. Others broke into the chamber and one tried to attack a member of the society’s staff. About 30 people sat in the debating hall singing protest songs.

It was 1960s hippies co-opting Islamic radical tactics.  After all, you have to work hard to look worse that Nick Griffin or David Irving, but the Unite Against Fascism group and their hangers on seem to have managed to do so.

Sudan Drifts Further From Civilisation

The situation involving Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in Sudan, has deteriorated. With the intervention of British consular officials, she has gone from faving 40 lashes for naming a teddy Muhammad to a possible three years in prison for sedition. It would seem that naming a teddy after the False Prophet is the same as inciting the children to rebellion against the Sudanese government.

A rather unenlightened professor at the University of Kartoum showed just how far Islamic academic quality has fallen.”In our culture, there can be no image of the Prophet,” he said. “You cannot even show him in a film or a play. To show him as a bear is unthinkable.” The only thing is that no one ever suggested that the bear was an icon of the False Prophet. I can’t imagine the same scholar has the same problem with half of Muslim boys being named Muhammad. Are they showing Muhammad as a another person?

I would have thought that the teddy would be seen to honour Muhammad. It’s just the sort of thing Aisha, his nine-year-old favourite wife, would have loved. She could have had a teddy and a husband with the same name.

I hope that the Islamic world is not looking at Ms Gibbons as a scapegoat for launching another attack on the West, find some sort of excuse for claiming insult against the inventer of their religion.

Revisionism

There hardly so popular an option in GCSE history than the American modules, especially the 20th century ones. Many more British high school students learn about American history than American students learn about British history, or at least British history after 1783.

I have looked through at least three British GCSE textbooks covering the early 20th century. It appears to me that in every instance, the goal it to teach students anti-American history. The worst Americans are, of course, Southerners. After all, Northerners may have unjustly executed Sacco and Vanzetti, but all Southern whites were members of the KKK and they went around lynching all the blacks. American history, British style, would be very comfortable with the James Loewen view that especially in the South it is really all about racism.

But what really got me was trying to teach about the Scopes Trial. All Southerners went to church all the time and didn’t believe in evolution. Can you believe it?

So I just told them that most Americans at the time went to church and didn’t believe in evolution. What’s more, I showed them the 2005 CBS poll indicating that most Americans today don’t believe in evolution. It is too advanced and not in the curriculum to deal with historical revisionism. They can’t grasp that the British view of the Scopes Trial in 2007 is not the American view, especially not in 1925.

They see Clarence Darrow demolishing William Jennings Bryan with his interrogation. They don’t see that Bryan didn’t get to cross-examine Darrow, since the court stopped with Darrow’s questions and struck them from the record, ruling them irrelevant. When Bryan’s questions with Darrow’s answers were published in newspapers the day after the trial, even the New York Times wasn’t impressed that all Darrow could say was, “I don’t know.”

The textbooks even mischaracterise the end of the trial. They note that the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed Scopes conviction. What they don’t say is that the conviction was overturned on a technicality, because the judge imposed a $100 fine and under Tennessee law at the time any fine in excess of $50 had to be imposed by the jury. The Court upheld the enforcement of the Butler Act. As the Court said, “Those in charge of the educational affairs of the State are men and women of discernment and culture.”

This is not the view that the those in charge of the educational affairs of this nation want students to have of the people of Tennessee or the American South.