Post-modern Leftists in Europe are critical of the cartoons and supportive of the Islamic reaction to the cartoons. Their reasoning is simple: they say the cartoons were too provocative, and all cultures shoud respect one another since all cultures are functionally and structurally equivalent - (the basic presupposition of cultural relativism).
These Leftists are REALLY saying, essentially, that the Muslims right to practice their religion the way they want to practice it (without any depictions of their prophet - and including their right to threaten non-believers --- who obviously have no such proscriptions) - TAKES PRECEDENCE over our own culture's freedom of the press and our inherent right to freedom of expression.
What this means - in all practicality - is that they value the tenets of Muslim culture more than the tenets of own their own culture. They are willing to subordinate our own practice of universal human rights, to the Muslim's anti-humanitarian theocratic totalitarianism.
WHY DO THEY FEEL THIS WAY?! WHY ARE THEY MORE DEFENSIVE OF ISLAM THAN THE WEST!? SIMPLE: The post-modern Left is anti-West, and anti-Judeo-Christian. WHY?! SIMPLE: They've been brain-washed to believe that Third World poverty is the result of First World colonialism and imperialism - (as if the Third World was once rich or would have been rich if the West had never "interfered" with them).
These post-modern Leftists believe that Western Civilization is basically harmful to the environment and harmful to humanity, and that Westerners - especially practicing Judeo-Christians - live an inauthentic life, a life alienated from reality, a life where people have been alienated from their sexuality and from nature. They still believe in the Marcussian Revolution.
They believe that the USSR and China failed becasue it wasn't "true Marxism", and that Marxism never took root in the UK or in the USA because the Anglo-Amecian proletariat had become ENBOURGOISEIFIED. By gaining middle-class living standards, the working class lost its identity as an exploited class; this process they call enbourgoisification. And it makes us in the West inauthentic, in the minds of post-modern Leftists.
Post-modern Leftists believe that people of the Third World - what used to be called "primitive cultures - live an authentic life, with values which are in harmony with their environment and culture. And they believe that the West has a lot to make up to the Third World. And the Muslim Wolrd is a major part of the Third World to whom we owe a lot.
These post-modern Leftists see Israel as an outpost of colonialism, and the GWOT as the just desserts for colonialism. The post-modern Left is fond of saying - as regards 9/11 and it's after math: "The chickens have come home to roost."
When the Third World threatens the First, the post-modern Left sides with the Third World. They think this is just. hence their knee-jerk defence of the
CARTOON INTIFADA.
In fact: THE POST-MODERN LEFT HAS IT ALL WRONG. Prosperity is a by-product of individual ingenuity and enterprise. When people (anywhere) are liberated and are free to exploit their own ingenuity through enterprise, propserity results.
Lack of liberty, the lack of rule of law, the lack of transparency, and the lask of industrialization and free trade are the true roots of Third World poverty.
The more the Third World EMULATES the First World - (and becomes a part of it though trade), the richer they become and the higher the standards of living they achieve. Post-Maoist China proves this, as does post-Soviet Russia, and Zimabawe. SIMPLY PUT:
The more liberty the people have - and the more transparency and accountability their government has - THE RICHER PEOPLE GET.So, in summary: post-modern Leftists are hypocritical when they adopt culturally relativist positions AND side with Muslims in the
CARTOON INTIFADA. By siding with vestigial totalitarianists they deny that there are universal human rights, and basically say that Muslims have more right to practice their religion than we have the right to practice freedom of the press. AND, by siding with these vestigial totalitarianists, they basically consign Muslims to an inferior future of continued poverty, degradation, and violence.
I CAN PROVE THEY ARE WRONG TO DENY UNIVERSALISM: If there are no universal human rights, then there is no basis for outlawing slavery or infanticide or genocide, for without the notion that all humans everywhere are entitled to inalienable human rights solely by virtue of their being human there is no basis for one nation or culture to interfere with ANY PRACTICE in another culture or nation. The only MORAL basis for such interference is the notion of universality. (Post-modern Leftists believe that only when there's cross-cultural or multilatertal/international CONSENSUS can there legitimately be any international or cross-cultural interference. Cross-cultural consensus has relaced universal values for the post-modern Left. Hence their over-valuation of the UN, and hence the result that humanity has JUST RECENTLY allowed countless genocides to occur - all of which could have been AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN stopped. But nothing was done and MILLIONS DIED. becasue no consensus was reached.)
And this is simply no longer a notion that the Left believes in. The lack of a belief in universality is basically what divides old-time liberal from the post-modern Leftists. Old-time liberals - like FDR and Truman and JFK - were hawks. They believed that all people everywhere deserved to be free. They'd be neo-cons today, not post-modern Leftists. They defend the cartoons and the cartoonists, and not those who threaten our hard-won liberties. They'd condemn those who would deny us our human rights - whether they did so in the name of Marxism or Islamicism.
I believe that every woman born everywhere is entitled to do whatever she can achieve in life and that shew should not be forced to marry her married cousin, and not be prevented from learning to read, and not be forced to cover herself in public, and not be the victim of "honor-killings."
And I believe that a people who use religion to foment these practices are ESSENTIALLY ANTI-HUMAN AND EVIL AND SHOULD BE WIPED OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH.The ideology which foments these practices is worse than Nazism - which we unabashedly wiped out last century.
I do not think it right to sit idly by as Muslim women are SYSTEMATICALLY denied their human rights. I do not think it's okay for my fellow Westerners to be threatened for saying what they believe.
People who systematically degradate (and often murder) their own mothers and sisters and daughters and female cousins are of course more than happy to mistreat us, to lie to us, to chreat us, and to kill us. Anybody who can murder their own daughter to "re-gain family honor" can of course commit more horrible atrocities against infidels. And they will if we let them. THEY ARE: 9/11; Atocha; 7/7; the Weding attck in Amman. And now they threaten us for publishing cartoons!
WELL: When they seek to deny us our inalienable human rights must be taught a lesson they shall never forget. If we do not, then they will try to get away with more the next time. We must teach then a harsh lesson, and the sooner the better.
WHAT MIGHT THIS BE? Well, for starters we should cut them off from our civilization: no trade, no services, no goods, no travel, no contact for any nation which doesn't respect Universal Human Rights. They must give ALL WOMEN UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE, and end polygamy and endogamy AT ONCE! If they do not, then, we should isolate them - ostracize them.
They must be made to pay for their inhuamnity to their own. And for their attacks on our civilization.
Appeasing them sends the opposite message: it says threatening us WORKS! Which means: THREATEN US SOME MORE! Everytime we let them badger us into ANY submission we are appeasing them and this only enpocurages them to do it again - only worse the next time.
So ... it's time to draw the line. It's overdue.
