In a Sydney Morning Herald opinion
piece titled, “After Christchurch
universities have a responsibility: abandon Ramsay,” Riemer argues
that if “Australian universities really want to combat Islamophobia after
Christchurch, only one course is possible: abandon Ramsay immediately.” He’s
referring to the controversial Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation located
in the University of Sydney. The Centre, funded by Australian philanthropist
Paul Ramsey with the biggest education bequest in the country’s history, is
controversial because it dares “to foster and promote an interest in and
awareness of Western civilization,” according to its mission statement. As former Australian
Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a board member at the Centre, put it in an article at Quadrant, “The key to
understanding the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is that it’s not
merely about Western civilisation but in favour of it.”
And for Riemer and the left in general, that,
of course, is the problem with the Ramsey Centre. There is no community in the
First World less in favor of Western civilization than leftist academics,
the vast majority of whom are cultural and/or economic Marxists,
multiculturalists, radical feminists, identity politics ideologues, or any
combination thereof. All are committed to the deconstruction of the incomparable
values, traditions, institutions, and unrivaled achievements of the West. For
decades they have worked tirelessly to subvert our civilizational pride by equating
the capitalist West with colonialist exploitation, the oppressive “othering” of
nonwhite peoples, and the environmental degradation of the planet, among other
evils. Any perspective that runs counter to their perverse viewpoint is simply demonized
as white supremacism.
Riemer is alarmed that “despite all its claims
of non-partisanship, Ramsay’s 2019 public lecture series overwhelmingly
showcases the right.” Among his examples of right-leaning speakers are The
American Conservative’s Rod Dreher – hardly an alt-right firebrand – and
medievalist Rachel Fulton Brown, whom he decries as “notorious for her
celebration of ‘white’ culture.” (The provocative article Riemer specifically
references is one in which Brown sought
“to push back against the negative image of the Western tradition that has
become so prevalent in our national culture, particularly the way in which
people have been talking for decades about ‘white men’ as if they were the
source of everything repressive and intolerant.” For this, Riemer implies that
she is a white supremacist.) It doesn’t seem to occur to Riemer that the reason a pro-West academic
program might be showcasing right-leaning thinkers is that left-leaning
thinkers like himself are almost uniformly anti-West, often rabidly so.
Riemer himself, a member of a social justice pro-refugee organization which seeks permanent
residency and full rights for refugees, has written that political
neutrality in the classroom is “a fiction” and that teachers should not be “pressure[d]
into hiding their convictions” – unless they are conservative, that is; that kind of thinking
must be delegitimized, as he says of the Ramsay Centre.
As FrontPage Mag readers well know,
“Islamophobia” is the phony, weaponized, Muslim Brotherhood-created concept
that non-Muslims who have legitimate concerns about the threat of Islamic
supremacism are simply bigots afflicted with an irrational fear of Islam, and
therefore their concerns can be ignored.
Riemer’s justification for linking the
Christchurch shooter to the Ramsay Centre is the Centre’s suggestion that texts
of the European canon should be studied together in a coherent whole, a unified
program of study. He finds this “separatist cultural essentialism” to be
“deeply alarming” and cut from the same cloth as the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto.
“There is a clear analogy between thinking that European books belong together
and thinking that European people do too,” Riemer declares.
This assumption that the study of Western
civilization encourages white separatism and supremacy is simply wrong. There
is literally no civilization in history less racist and tribalist than that of
the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, Western melting pot. Its individualist values
and freedoms can be and have been embraced by people of every race, religion, and
cultural background. It is the collectivist totalitarianism of the multiculturalist
left, not the right, that foments division, racism, and group identity.
But the Marxist left sees everything through
the lens of the dynamic of oppressor-and-oppressed. Muslims are always the oppressed,
and so Riemer condemns the Ramsay Centre’s admiration for the oppressor West. “If
society is to escape from the murderous civilisational hatred displayed on Friday
in Christchurch – to say nothing of the West’s longstanding, far more deadly
military campaigns against the Muslim world – universities simply must stop
legitimising this kind of thinking,” he writes.
This is typical of the left’s unflagging
support of Islam as part and parcel of their unholy alliance, which is centered
on a mutual desire to destroy Western civilization. Note that Riemer, a pro-Palestinian supporter of the
anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement who has written
about the purported dangers of Western “Islamophobia,” has nothing to say about
the “murderous civilisational hatred” which Islamic fundamentalists have spread
since the time of their warlord prophet Muhammad, all around the world, not
least in today’s Europe, where terrorism, rape culture, no-go zones,
sharia courts, and demands for anti-blasphemy laws are metastasizing in direct
proportion to mass Muslim immigration. Note also that Riemer offers no
criticism of Islam’s “longstanding, deadly military campaigns” throughout the dar-al-harb,
the house of war (i.e. the non-Muslim world), nor does he mention that the
West’s military actions against the ummah have always been responses to Islam’s bloody, imperialist
expansions and/or terrorist assaults. And note as well that he ignores the fact
that the Christchurch shooter claims to have been inspired to take revenge against
Muslims not after taking a course at Ramsay, but after a 2017 Muslim terror
attack in Sweden. Islamists and their apologists like Riemer cannot play the
victim of Western aggression and oppression if they acknowledge these facts.
Riemer claims that the shooter’s intention “was
not just to indiscriminately murder Muslims, but to reset ideas in Western
countries in a way that puts European culture at the centre of national life.” The
slaughter of unarmed people absolutely should be condemned, but as to Riemer’s second
point: why shouldn’t countries founded upon, and by, the values,
traditions, and beliefs of Western civilization place European culture at the
center of their national life? Because for Riemer, the ultimate terrorism is the
promotion of Western civilization, and the Ramsay Centre is seen as leading the
charge. “Many academics,” he asserts vaguely, “have accused Ramsay of being the
intellectual face of a Western supremacist politics, and therefore
fundamentally incompatible with universities’ obligation to support
multiculturalism.” Oh, so universities are obligated to support
multiculturalism but not Western civilization? Let’s be clear: multiculturalism
is not the just, inclusive, balanced worldview it purports to be, but an
intellectually dishonest, anti-white, anti-Western ideology that has helped to corrode
our purported institutions of higher learning into identity-politics indoctrination
mills.
The Progressive journal Overland condemns
the Ramsay Centre and its conservative supporters for what it calls their “paranoid
vision of civilisational struggle.” How could it be paranoid if Islamic supremacists
and their leftist allies openly call for and actively pursue the destruction of
Western civilization? The truth is that we are embroiled in a grand
struggle between those who want to preserve and transmit to future generations the
best of the greatest civilization in world history, and those who demonstrably hate
it and are hell-bent on tearing it down.
“After Christchurch,” Riemer concludes, “the urgency
to accurately identify and obstruct the ideological enablers of racism in
society could not be greater.” I couldn’t agree more, although where we differ
is that Nick Riemer and his ilk see the supporters of Western civilization as
the culprits. In fact, the ideological enablers of racism and terrorism are the
leftist academic apologists for Islamic supremacism.
From FrontPage Mag, 3/24/19
