Once again the Daily Telegraph has the guts to publish a well written, clearly argued piece that cuts across the liberal orthodoxy.

There’s a fuss in England at the moment because state funded schools in predominantly Asian communities are being taken over by Muslims with an agenda. They are loading the school board and attempting to turn the schools into Muslim academies.

Allison Pearson writes here about the blind foolishness of shallow multiculturalism. The Brits, like most liberal Europeans, have openly welcomed Muslims and pleaded for ethnic diversity, forced diversity training on everyone and given Muslims every chance to succeed. What they have forgotten is that many Muslims regard Western culture and values as intrinsically evil and their desire is to destroy Western society–most especially Christianity.

Pearson argues that huge exceptions were made for Muslims. School children being allowed to break school dress codes, skip school to “return home”, thirteen year old girls disappearing from school because they’ve been married off to some person back in Pakistan, Muslim children being pulled out of school whenever the fundamentalist parents take the smallest objection to something, increased numbers of birth defects because of Muslim family members marrying cousins…and the list goes on.

Pearson takes the table turning stance of saying that yes, actually, some cultures and religions are better than others. That she does so from an essentially liberal point of view is delicious. She makes the obvious point that yes, allowing a girl and boy to choose who they want to marry is better than an arranged marriage between a twelve year old girl and an old man she has never met. Yes, it is better for girls to get an education and better for society if ethnic groups are successfully integrated.

She could go on and praise Christianity–the religion that has brought the world university education, modern scientific method, modern classical music, not to mention the greatest achievements in architecture, jurisprudence, politics, art and literature.

Of course there are smudgy parts of Christianity and there are wonderful Muslims and great Islamic achievements, but Pearson is right. Not all cultures and not all religions are equal.

And we shouldn’t pretend they are.

Read Pearson’s article here.