Moral High Ground is Earned, Not Deserved

Keep reading on Facebook about how much more sophisticated we are than those lowbrow Muslims who can't take a joke and get all violent any time someone makes an intentionally offensive cartoon or movie which is only designed to incite violence.  And first off, having seen many of these cartoons and read descriptions of the movie, I find it a bit tough to claim any kind of cultural high ground by the folks trying to incite this violence.  I'm sorry, but a cartoon of Mohammed with a boner raping a young girl is *not* highbrow entertainment.

But the worst part is that these are designed to enrage people who want an excuse to be enraged, and is part of an endless cycle intended to end in violence by those on both sides.  And all this noise is just their way of dragging the rest of us in, to say "See look, these people are animals who hate us and we have no other choice."  And so they try to arrange things so we have no other choice than to fight each other, even though the extremists on both sides have far more in similar to each other than they do with the rest of us.  And that includes welling meaning people on Facebook who insist that we've gone through more of a "cultural evolution" than they have, because their extremists get angrier than ours do.

Here was my reply:


The people doing the violence are part of a political movement, not a religious movement. Religion is the excuse. The goal is political. And once again, the vast majority of Muslims aren't killing anyone, while the ones doing the killing would like nothing more than for us to overreact and do things that encourage the non-violent ones to get violent. Just like the anti-Muslim people here want them to overreact and do things that encourage non-violent Americans to get violent.

And our goal needs to be to stop the extremists on both sides from achieving their goal of all-out war. Sure, our guys are only hyping the anti-Muslim stuff that pisses off the violent Muslims and offends the non-violent as well. But when our end result is to rain missiles on their homes and kill innocent men, women, and children; I don't see how this makes us the good guys.

Because frankly, I don't give a damn why someone's trying to kill me, and while our cultural evolution might be more advanced, that didn't help us too much at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or the other places where we humiliated and tortured people. Anyone who gets their kicks at the idea of waterboarding doesn't seem so advanced to me. So how about we get off our high-horse and acknowledge that there's more to all this than intentionally rude cartoons and movies that are designed to incite violence.