What We Stand For

Someone EMailed in response to an EMail thread about the Executive Branch's efforts to squash the film, Innocence of Muslims, which supposedly started and underlies the rioting in various Muslim countres.

Effectively, either our society operates by our own standards that our citizens have decided upon to be good, and hold through centuries of tradition and jurisprudence, or we have a political elite arbitrarily limit them for us to suit the desires of foreigners not to be criticized or offended.

There is, I submit, no bottom for the capacity of the rest of the planet to find pretexts upon which to feel offended by what Americans do or say in our own country, while in comparison, the extent of our freedoms is quite finite.   What exactly is the upside here for us to embark down this road?  A few days of peace until their sensitivity meter is ratcheted up a few more notches? 

I would also suggest, specifically in the case of the Muslim world, for the regimes that encourage savage mob violence against dissenters, ethnic and religious minorities and foreign diplomats, this is a root cause of their economic and educational backwardness, widespread illiteracy, inequality and illiberal political culture.

Then he wraps it up and, in part, brings it back home.

The tolerance of private violence by the state is usually because it abets some kind of tyranny, and this applies whether we are talking about Jim Crow, the Muslim world, Central American oligarchies or Imperial Japan in the 1920's and 1930's

The Jim Crow comment is on target.  The American South of today, with its economic growth and attractiveness to Blacks, was impossible until Jim Crow ended.  And, even well into my lifetime it was a system maintained by mob violence.

This current violence isn't about us.  We can't fix the problems of others by kowtowing to the sensitives of those others.  We can help by providing foreign aid and by setting an example of a free and open democratic society for those others.  We are not perfect in setting a good example, but we are pretty good and getting better.

Regards  —  Cliff