In a piece entitled “The silence of the artistic lambs,” Mark Steyn writes, “Most writers and filmmakers ignore today’s epic cross-cultural war. It’s safer that way.”

[A] recent panel convened at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London [discussed] the topic “Is All Modern Art Left Wing?” The formal discussion was dreary and predictable but things turned livelier when it was opened to the floor, and the question of double standards was raised: “Courageous” artists seemed happy to mock Christianity but curiously reluctant to hurl equivalent jibes at Islam. Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize-winning transvestite artist who looks very fetching in his little Disney-princess frocks, reveals that he self-censors when it comes to Muslims because “I don’t want my throat cut.”

But that doesn’t entirely explain it, does it? Earlier this year, Channel 4 in London broadcast a documentary called Undercover Mosque in which various imams up and down the land were caught on tape urging men to beat their wives and toss homosexuals off cliffs. Viewers reported some of the statements to the local constabulary. The West Midlands police then decided to investigate not the fire-breathing clerics but the TV producers. As the coppers saw it, insofar as any “hate crime” had been perpetrated, it lay not in the urgings and injunctions of the imams but in a TV production so culturally insensitive as to reveal the imams’ views to the general public. As The Spectator’s James Forsyth put it, “The reaction of West Midlands police revealed a mindset that views the exposure of a problem as more of a problem than the problem itself.”

Exactly. Did you see the latest remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers? It sank without trace a couple of months back and not just because it had Nicole Kidman in the lead. The new version relocates the story from small-town America to Washington, and sees it as a metaphor for power: cue endless references to Iraq and glimpses of Bush on the TV screens. Yet Bodysnatchers isn’t about power so much as a seductive conformity. That’s what the West Midlands police were attempting to enforce with Channel 4, and what the Rotterdam police managed to enforce rather more successfully when they destroyed a mural created to express disgust at van Gogh’s murder. Chris Ripke’s painting showed an angel and bore the words “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” But his studio is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was “racist,” so the cops showed up, destroyed it, arrested the TV crew filming it, and wiped their tape. A “tolerant” society cannot tolerate any assaults on its most cherished myths.

The dogma of multiculturalism holds that all cultures are equal, except Western culture, which (unlike every other society on the planet) has a history of oppression and war is therefore worse. All religions are equal, except Christianity, which informed the beliefs of the capitalist bloodsuckers who founded America and is therefore worse. All races are equal, except Caucasians, who long ago went into business with black slave traders in Africa, and therefore they are worse. The genders, too, are equal, except for those paternalistic males, who with their testosterone and aggression have made this planet a polluted living hell, and therefore they are worse.

Once you understand this, the Multicultural Pyramid of Oppression, you can begin to understand how to turn to your advantage certain circumstances that are beyond your control: such as where you were born, the type of genitalia you were born with, into what race you were born, and the religion of your parents. You see, the fewer things you have in common with The Oppressors, the more you can cast yourself as The Victim. And as The Victim, you are virtuous, so there are certain things you can get away with that others can’t: like actually oppressing people.

According to the rules of Multicultural Hierarchy, oppression can be excused if the oppressor comes from a more exotic group—to Western eyes—than the oppressed. If a documentary filmmaker were slaughtered in broad daylight for making a film about domestic violence among, say, Christian evangelists in the American south, an outcry would rightfully ring out from Hollywood denouncing the violence that’s intended to silence legitimate social commentary. But a documentary filmmaker killed for making a film about violence against women perpetrated in the name of Islam isn’t worth any comment at all from those same folks who are so rarely silent with the rest of their opinions. Identical crimes would have to be interpreted two different ways, because the only variable that matters is the corpse’s placement on the Multicultural Hierarchy relative to that of the murderer.

Consider what happens when you apply this thinking on a societal level: if we convince ourselves that all of the blame for the current state of the world should be placed at the feet of Western civilization, then why would any Westerner think that our civilization is worth fighting for? Or even worth saving? The rules of Multicultural Hierarchy require us to preemptively surrender, because any crime committed against us by a more worthy Victim is somehow deserved. And if we deserve it, then fighting against what we deserve amounts to fighting the administration of justice.

Many times in the years following the September 11th attacks, I’ve heard earnest-sounding commentators and social critics bring up “root causes” of September 11th—we are invariably the root of all causes, it would seem—and suggest that somehow, “we deserved it.”

Well, if we deserved it then—and still do now—then what business do we have defending ourselves? Who are we to stand in the way of justice?

People will rarely admit they favor surrender. But if we buy in to the politically correct thinking of multiculturalism, that’s exactly where we’ll end up.