Multiculturalism and Feminism: strange bedfellows

For another very cogent example of the hollowness or even shallowness of trumpeting multiculturalism as a watchcry to guide the world, take a look at this interview (thanks to Blithering Bunny for linking to it) from FrontPage magazine with Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a contributing editor to City Journal and the author of his new collection of essays Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses. I was especially struck by this section near the end of the interview:

FP: You discuss the horrifying suffering that women endure under the vicious and sadistic structures of Islam’s gender apartheid. You touch on the eerie silence of Western leftist feminists on this issue, noting “Where two pieties – feminism and multi-culturalism – come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.”

To be sure, the Left has long posed as a great champion of women’s rights, gay rights, minorti rights, democratic rights etc. Yet today, it has reached out in solidarity with the most fascistic women-hating, gay-hating, minority-hating and democracy hating force on the face of the earth – Islamism.

What gives? It’s really nothing new though is it? (i.e. the Left’s political pilgrimages to communist gulags etc.)

Dalrymple: I think the problem here is one of a desired self-image. Tolerance is the greatest moral virtue and broadmindedness the greatest intellectual one. Moreover, no decent person can be other than a feminist. People therefore want to be both multiculturalist and feminist. But multiculturalism and feminism obviously clash; therefore, you avoid the necessity to give up one or the other merely by disregarding the phenomena. How you feel about yourself is more important to you than the state of the world.

And that is the problem that I have with the American Left. It's not all about me, and how I feel about things.