The Wall Street Journal's Tunku Varadarajan has an intriguing and informative interview with Oriana Fallaci. (I read Fallaci's The Rage and The Pride and wholeheartedly endorse it.) I encourage you to read the entire thing, but I want to highlight an excerpt from an essay by the new Pope before he was Pope, as recounted by Fallaci. (Talk about odd couples -- Fallaci's an atheist.)

"The West reveals . . . a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . . . no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure."

The inherent evil of western civilization is the basis for today's multiculturalism. What was once an effort to teach about diverse cultures has become a crusade to elevate those cultures above our own -- both by demonizing us and sugar-coating them.