Beware the intolerant certainties of European liberals
By Trevor Phillips
The Independent, 25 October 1997
The problem with European liberals (small “l”) is their intolerance. They will oppose, to the death, any kind of bigotry but their own. Their capacity to know what is best for others is unlimited, riding roughshod over the fact that people may not choose the same values as most Western Europeans. The famous Voltairean assertion of the right to free speech appears to be limited to precisely that – a defence of a man or woman’s right to say what he or she likes, as long as he or she does nothing about it; at that point, tolerance runs out. Such is the liberals’ certainty that their own version of the world is right that they entertain no doubts at all about condemning others’ traditions, even where adherence to those traditions is the free choice of nearly a billion people worldwide.
This week the civilised, “rationalist” version of liberalism swung into action against Islam. Some people, including Polly Toynbee in these pages, clothed it in an assault on all religious practice, but the issue here is the growth of Islam, and the critique is moving rapidly from being a defence of human rights to a disrespect for others’ beliefs that verges on the racist.