JULIE BURCHILL: Mary Beard: a feminist for Islam?
Two-thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-seven people were murdered on 9/11, including more than 400 first responders (among them 343 firefighters and paramedics) and hundreds of plane passengers. Many more have since died due to illnesses linked to toxic exposure at the site of the Twin Towers. They came from 77 different countries – truly ‘diverse’, as opposed to their 19 killers. Colm Tóibín wrote an excellent letter to the LRB about Beard’s essay:
‘Over the past 25 years in Ireland I have made a point of asking anyone who was at school with members of the IRA, the INLA, the UDA and the UVF what these people were like at the age of 10. All have agreed that each child displayed a nasty early sign of terrorism long before he had a “cause”. Had a cause not come their way, these people would have beaten their dogs or their wives and children, attacked one another at hurling matches or taken out their resentment on a long back garden. Would Mary Beard refer to these actions as “extraordinary acts of bravery”?’
As if it couldn’t get worse, AI tells me that Beard is ‘celebrated for her sharp insights, especially on Roman life, women in history and bringing classical studies into mainstream culture, making her a “national treasure”’. Of course she is. The watchwords of NT-ism are ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ – but the approved views on everything from breakfast to Brexit, penises on women to Palestine, must be held. NTs are the cuddly face of the enemy within, part of the never-ending war against anyone who dares think differently from their betters and wetters. Many are little more than peppy propagandists, there to make us swallow through the medium of sport and entertainment what we have already choked on and vomited up when it was fed to us straight. The UK National Treasure gang can easily embrace a woman who, if she saw her best female friend being ‘done’ by a member of Hamas at one end and a member of Hezbollah at the other, would probably ask the poor woman what she said to provoke them.
As Mark Steyn wrote 20 years ago, “our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists.”