Clinic head Kaj Wedenberg chooses his words very carefully.

“In part, I wonder if a caregiver within the public health system has the right to make reference to their own views and the dominant view in our country about gender’s equal value, in preventing a patient, with perhaps a different valuation, from learning the gender of the fetus,” he writes.

The “dominant view” in Sweden also accepts abortion as a woman’s right.  Given that, it’s hard to raise a principled objection to this woman’s actions.

h/t: ProWomanProLife

The 57-year-old says her problems started when new governors joined the governing body of her school in 2004 and, among other things, accused her of Islamophobia and racism.

In a landmark case at the High Court, she is seeking hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation from Surrey County Council, for not providing her with enough support.
[…]
Ms Connor claimed some of the governors, including convert Paul Martin and Mumtaz Saleem, effectively “railroaded” meetings and subjected her to a barrage of criticism.

After being accused of Islamophobia, an investigation of the school was conducted, acquitting it of any race-related accusations.

But the complaints continued and a second report published which criticised Ms Connor’s perceptions of multiculturalism and concluded that the school “had not been responsive to the needs of the faith community”.

The council maintains that Ms Connor “had to expect debate and criticism” in her position and that it is not responsible for the activities of the governing body. The hearing continues.

Connor left the school in September 2005 and is now living with her mother in Abergavenny, Wales.

“We are very skeptical toward the experiment taking place around Sweden right now, with maths being taught in Arabic. The risk is that it will worsen students’ development of Swedish language skills,” said Christer Nylander, a Liberal Riksdag [Parliament] member and head of the party’s working group on education policy, to the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.

The proposal has drawn criticism from the Green Party, which wants to give children and young people who come to Sweden from other countries the right to learn both maths and English in their mother tongue.

“It’s not only effective for teaching mathematics, but it’s also been shown to be effective for learning Swedish. The Liberal Party is going against everything they stand for with this idiocy,” Green Party spokesperson Maria Wetterstrand told SvD.

Exactly how does studying math in Arabic improve a student’s ability to learn Swedish?

Predictably, an ivory-tower academic opposes the Swedish-only proposal because it will hurt students’ feelings.

Carla Jonsson, a researcher at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism [...] at Stockholm University, thinks the ban would not only prevent learning in students’ mother tongues, but that their knowledge of the subject and of the Swedish language would also suffer.

“It would also send out the signal that minority languages aren’t worth anything and lead to students feeling a diminished desire to learn Swedish,” she told the newspaper.

Students who want to pass their courses and graduate will have a very strong desire to learn Swedish.

h/t: Torchlight

The biggest left-wing political party in the Netherlands, the Dutch Labour Party, has released a position paper calling for an end to the country’s failed model of “tolerance”.  Immigrants should be expected to integrate into Dutch society, and the government must be free to criticise cultural practices it finds repugnant.

The paper said: “The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance.”

Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of “loss and estrangement” felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs.

Newcomers, according to [Labour chairperson Lillianne] Ploumen, must avoid “self-designated victimization.”
[...]
Instead of reflexively offering tolerance with the expectation that things would work out in the long run, she said, the government strategy should be “bringing our values into confrontation with people who think otherwise.”

Confront people with those who do not accept our “values”?  For a European leftist, that is very blunt language indeed.  And there was more:

“Hurting feelings is allowed, and criticism of religion, too.”

A Muslim extremist stabbed Theo van Gogh to death in the streets of Amsterdam for criticising Islam, while Ayaan Hirsi Ali was forced to flee the country after government authorities refused to protect her any longer.

Are Dutch politicians finally waking up to the disaster coming upon the nation largely because of their own weakness and foolishness?  We shall see when it comes time to translate the Labour Party’s sensible words into policy action.

h/t: Religion News Blog

Multicultural ideology is anti-intellectual, amoral, and runs counter to the very idea of civilisation.

One of the building blocks of multiculturalism is non-judgmentalism. All cultures, we are told, have their own validity. And, after all, who are we to question what someone else does? Why, that would be cultural imperialism. The anti-intellectualism and amorality of this position is simply breathtaking, yet it’s a widely held notion. After the 9-11 attacks, the president of Mount Holyoke College, where young women are presumably educated, actually praised her students for being non-judgmental about the people who had just hijacked and murdered. Even college presidents chimed in, informing us that we didn’t really comprehend the cultural factors driving the suicide bombers.

You know, if only we understood German frustration, we could deal with this man Hitler.

Non-judgmentalism violates one of the most fundamental concepts of civilization – that to be civilized means making choices, including cultural choices. The citizen is called upon to judge and evaluate all the time – in elections, in trials, in determining social policy. The basic American history text in Robert Hutchins’s college at the University of Chicago was called “The People Shall Judge,” not “The People Shall be Non-judgmental.” We not only have a right to judge, we have an obligation, and that obligation extends across cultures. We had an obligation to judge apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States. We had an obligation to judge the Gulag in the Soviet Union. We have an obligation to denounce the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia.

Champions of multiculturalism are loathe to talk about the failings of non-Western cultures because that would require discernment and exercise of judgment.

Mr Katz’s biography indicates a wide range of experience. A graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and former editor at The New York Times Magazine, he has also worked as a CIA officer, political aide, and writer of novels and television comedy.  Currently, he blogs at Urgent Agenda and Power Line.

From The New York Times to blogging. Some journalists and journalism professors would regard that as traitorous.