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Opinion

Melanie Phillips nails it

July 29, 2011 12:36
1 min read

Strikingly, it is the intelligentsia, the people of reason, who are the main problem. Bigotry is now correlated with education and class.

"The lower down the social and educational scale, the more people are sane and realistic and decent about the Middle East and the threat to the free world from radical Islam. But as soon as you get people who’ve been through higher education, you find that so often they’re the ones who are bigoted and irrational about such matters.

They make truly ridiculous claims about Israel, such as its perpetration of apartheid or ethnic cleansing – claims which, to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the situation, are demonstrably ridiculous.

So how can it be that the most educated are now the most irrational?