Cultural relativism is perhaps the most morally perverted concept ever formulated in the academic left’s out-of-touch ivory tower. Under the banner of “tolerance,” the Left is willing to condone cultural and religious practices that would make Satan himself blush. Nowhere is this truer than when the Left obfuscates the truth about female genital mutilation to avoid offending Islam. The vile practice, carried out by certain sects of Islam, is objectively evil. Anyone with a beating heart knows instinctively that FGM, or female genital mutilation, is child abuse. To think otherwise requires an unfathomable amount of leftist indoctrination and “multi-culturalism” brainwashing.
Cue The New York Times.
On Friday, the “newspaper of record” whitewashed the brutality of the misogynistic practice by substituting the term “cutting” for “mutilation,” suggesting that the term FGM was “culturally loaded” when asked by The Daily Caller.
“There’s a gulf between the Western (and some African) advocates who campaign against the practice and the people who follow the rite, and I felt the language used widened that chasm,” wrote Times science and health editor Celia Dugger.
Dugger justified her political decision to minimize the utter brutality of FGM by citing her personal experience witnessing the practice performed in Africa.
Here’s what Dugger said when challenged by a Times reader:
I began writing about this back in 1996 when I was an immigration reporter on the Metro desk covering the asylum case of Fauziya Kassindja. I decided in the course of reporting that case — especially after a reporting trip to Togo, her home country, and the Ivory Coast — to call it genital cutting rather than mutilation. I never minced words in describing exactly what form of cutting was involved, and there are many gradations of severity, and the terrible damage it did, and stayed away from the euphemistic circumcision, but chose to use the less culturally loaded term, genital cutting. There’s a gulf between the Western (and some African) advocates who campaign against the practice and the people who follow the rite, and I felt the language used widened that chasm.
As The Daily Caller notes, the Times, as a whole, may be following Dugger’s lead.
“Dugger has apparently pushed the editorial direction of the The NYT to follow her lead. The only time ‘female genital mutilation’ appears in an April 13 report from NYT reporter Jacey Fortin on the Michigan doctor is in a statement from an acting assistant attorney general within the Department of Justice,” reports The Daily Caller. “Otherwise the piece uses Dugger’s preferred term ‘cutting.’”
During the golden age of the Islamic caliphs, Muslim overlords had a name for non-Muslims who obsequiously followed the law of the land and paid vast sums of taxes in exchange for protection against indiscriminate slaughter. That word was “dhimmi.”
Today, no other word describes the so-called journalists at the Times better. The ethical negotiations that are taking place in Manhattan in order to appease the easily-offended Muslim community would be funny if they weren’t so incredibly sad.