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Showing Original Post only (View all)Taking a radical right-wing position on the part of an outgroup is not "liberalism." [View all]
It makes me sick to my stomach seeing some of the more foolish voices on the left twist themselves in ideological and moral knots whenever Islamic radicals murder someone for "insulting Islam" (aka, exercising their fundamental human rights to free speech and freedom of religion). There's no "yeahbut" on the subject - NONE.
Drawing a Muhammed cartoon is not a "provocation" even if it's intended to be one, anymore than a Jewish person breathing air in Europe in 1941 was a "provocation" of the Holocaust. Exercising a right is not a provocation of those who would deny that right. It's simply refusing their tyranny.
Right-wing psychopathy is the source of that tyranny, regardless of where in the world its roots are, what god or book or flag it uses as its cargo cult, and in what language it issues its terrorist threats. A person is not progressive, or reasonable, or enlightened for defending the monsters who terrorize and defame another culture from within, simply because it's another culture. And there is even less excuse for continuing such a delusional exo-Stockholm Syndrome when the terror of such lunatics impinges on your own society from without, erasing all doubt about what the phenomenon represents.
At best this viewpoint sees people from other cultures as mentally handicapped, and inherently incapable of exercising the same basic human morality as we demand from our own culture. Somehow the people exercising their rights are, in this twisted ideological fantasy world, like cruel wardens of a psychiatric hospital poking and prodding the madman until he finally explodes in violence, and thus it's the victims' fault when their peaceful act of religious protest is met with murder.
Well, people in other countries and religions are not children, and they are not insane. They are responsible for their own personal words and actions like everyone else, and the basic standards of moral behavior are not different for anyone with the slightest hint of a conscience. Decency is not relative. It's either there or it isn't, in a given individual heart.
A person who ends a life because someone offended them is an evil piece of shit with no place in human society that doesn't involve barbed wire and steel toilets. And a person who makes excuses for them, echoing their monstrous rhetoric and rationalizations, is a vile coward with no moral compass and the lowest possible opinion of human beings. An opinion no doubt formed by looking in the mirror, then inverted and superimposed on some foreign fetish object.
That's not liberalism - it's not even of the Left. It's the political version of a rape fantasy bought at the cost of other people's lives. It is the lowest, the absolute lowest right-wing perversion that has ever flimsily masqueraded as a progressive viewpoint.