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http://www.tnr.com/article/the-read/799 ... m-festival

From the left-liberal "New Republic". Their movie reviewer got a wake up call when a mainly Arab audience applauded after a scene of two rebellious and disobedient women being stoned to death.

I've excerpted the most important part:

That last line - I had forgotten that there is also a different reality here - really speaks to the issue I often have in communicating about the gulf of differences between the West and the Islamic world.

That is that so many Westerners arrogantly assume that the rest of the people in the world are just like they are. But they aren't.

To some people, as this reporter found out, stoning disobedient women is a thing worth applauding.

Now, of course, some of you may lurch into denial and say this is a function of poor education or perhaps trot out a class warfare screed when, in fact, the crowd attending a film festival in the Arab world will represent upper-income, educated, and liberal Arabs.

Poor people don't attend film screenings. Neither do religious fundamentalists.

The thing that is most surprising to me in this lady's article is her epiphany that the Arabs around her are not just like she is. They literally did not see the same things she saw in watching that film.

That's the point I'd like to drive home here.

   

You're just building strawmen here, Bart. You'd have to be a numbnuts not to have some sense of how different the valued in most Islamic countries are. A liberal might think that those values aren't that deep, and when people immigrate here they'll leave them behind. And for many, that's actually true. Just read a piece in the paper about kids of immigrants losing their religion, becoming very secular in their outlook.

   

I didn't write the article, numbnuts.

   

No, you wrote this: As he says himself, he forgot the reality because he had been seduced by the glitz and the moderate side of Morroco. He forgot ie it's something he already knew but was lulled into forgetting because of this glitzy event. You're making it more than it is, that he and all those terrible liberals have no idea of different values there.

   

"so many Westerners" does not equal "so many liberals". But I used a liberal as an example here to try to diffuse liberal antipathy to the proposition.

Case in point: you.

   

You do realize that liberal doesn't carry the same negative charge in Canada as it does in the US, right?

So you're saying I don't get how different values are in many Muslim countries from those in Canada?

   

Based on my past experience with you, no. You're rather quick to defend things you've never experienced.

   

I have experienced them. When I've defended Muslims, it was ones living over here, and to say that tarring them all as jihadists or cultural crazies isn't going to do anybody any good. Most of them do manage to integrate pretty well over here. I don't want to import huge numbers of them at one time, just as with any other culture, so that there is more pressure on them to integrated, they're less likely to clump up together. And, the ones that can't should be sent back toute suite. But show me where I've sung the praises of a liberal (see, it's a good word) Muslim regime? I mean I would if I thought there were such a thing.

   

i hear your point. ..good posting, btw.. i agree with you in terms of what you call 'western arrogance': automatically offering up apologies because it's easy and looks nicer than asking questions. a lot of people are very quick to dismiss any criticism of everyday muslim life because they prefer to keep their storefronts friendly and politically correct. i think it's more correct to contemplate the realities of a culture instead of rolling eyes everytime the words 'muslim' or 'islam' come up.

   

I'm going to enter my movie next year: "I'm Here, I'm Queer and I'm Mohammed."

   

Claim the author is a Muslim. That really makes them mad.

   

Let me know when you're screening it.

   

Unfortunately we read about the kids being schooled and raised in a Western culture and then becoming radicals...who blow up buses, trains and subways.

   

That's true. What do you think the ratio is, one to the other?

   

no idea, but even one radical(foreign born or domestic) in our midst willing to kill us, because of our freedoms, is one too many.

   

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