The facts are as plain as a road sign: the French journalists were murdered for exercising free speech. They were real live people. The Islamists did it in order to intimidate the free world and take away its freedom of speech.
"But..." we hear from all directions, "but..."
"...But those cartoons were offensive to believers."
"...But they overstepped all sorts of boundaries."
"...But this is merely a mutual misunderstanding of each other's cultural traditions."
"...And anyway, let's not confuse terrorism with Islam, which is a peaceful religion."
"...And are you saying that Islam somehow promotes extremism? Are you really equating Islam with terrorism? That sounds like fascism! Shame on you!"
"...And aren't you forgetting that different cultures have different values?"
"...And why all the fuss about those dead journalists when more people are getting killed in the Iraqi war?
West redefines itself. And so on and so forth, until after five or six loops of such "divergent series," the plain fact of a brutal murder transforms into an infinitely complex cultural phenomenon. And with it, anyone speaking against Islamic terrorism transforms into a narrow-minded bigot, ignorant of traditional cultures with their spiritual values, someone who unjustly smears all Muslims and forgets that the West is guilty before the Third World for colonialism.....
As for the mutual misunderstanding of each other's cultural traditions, let's make one thing clear: some traditions are better than others.
At one time India had a tradition of self-immolation of widows in the husband's funeral pyres. The British colonizers could say, as modern intellectuals do, that this was just a different cultural tradition they had to respect. But the British disrespected local traditions and put up gallows next to the funeral pyres. Anyone who tried to throw a widow into the fire was hanged right next to it. That was the end of the burning of widows.
West redefines itselfThe Maori in New Zealand had a cultural tradition of cannibalism. A young warrior would not obtain a proper social status until he'd cut off the head of a man from another tribe. Once again, the British could start talking about the drama of mutually misunderstood cultural values, but they chose to ban cannibalism and head-hunting.
The Aztecs had a tradition of human sacrifice. But the narrow-minded bigot Hernando Cortes, who conquered Tenochtitlan, was not a multiculturalist and so he told the priests, their hair covered in dried human blood, to knock it off. That almost cost him his life, his victory, and Tenochtitlan.
The world has plenty of other spectacular cultural traditions. Some cultures practiced artificial cranial deformation by binding the heads of their infants. Others are still cutting out the clitoris of their young girls. The Etoro people of Papua New Guinea have a remarkable cultural tradition of all-inclusive pedophilia, as they believe young boys must ingest the semen of their elders daily from the age of 7 until they turn 17 to achieve adult male status and to properly mature and grow strong. The procedure is mandatory -- "it's for the children," don't you know.
So not all traditions are equal. Some traditions are absolutely evil. Europe, too, has given up on some of its traditions, like the burning of witches. And China has stopped the foot binding of little girls, along with its time-honored tradition of death by a thousand cuts.
Some may be surprised, but Islam at one point has also abandoned a few traditions. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century Muslims didn't blow anyone up for free speech. On the contrary, their best leaders, such as Kemal Ataturk, or Mohammed Zahir Shah, or Reza Pahlavi brought their respective countries closer to Western standards.
West redefines itselfIt was only after the West betrayed its own standards by adopting moral relativity and multiculturalism, that former Ataturks and Zakir Shahs were replaced by Bin Ladens and the Kuashi brothers.
In this sense, the problem with the modern world is not the strengthening of Islamism. It is the weakening of the West, which keeps refining, recalibrating, and redefining itself to death.It's a fool's errand, to look for precision in the world of fuzzy sets. As theoretical physicist Feynman once said, "it is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing."
At this point in history, precision is the enemy of clarity. The West needs renormalization.
http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/standing-up-to-islam-the-west-redefines-i...Islam is an inferior culture. Say it, don't be afraid.