The other night, I got into a fairly heated chatroom debate about this article on digg. Everyone agreed that it was a horrific story and felt bad for the girl. So, what was the argument about? Culture.

It started to get heated when one person began deriding all of Islam and Middle Eastern culture. Defenders stepped up to play their roles in a conversation that’s been had a million times since 2001. I was fairly uninterested, but watched the conversation scroll, curious to see if someone would say something new or different.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, I, unexpectedly, blew a gasket when someone said this of Saudi Arabia: “Their culture may seem backwards and strange to you, but ours seems just as foreign and wrong to them. It’s just a different perspective.” Several people agreed.

“Yeah, a fucked up and wrong perspective. So it is different in that way, to be sure. >.<” Those were my first words in the discussion.

I’m all about diversity and respecting different cultures. That doesn’t mean all cultures though. Some things in this world just don’t deserve respect. Things like zina’, hudud & sharia do not deserve respect. These things are some of the major elements of Saudi culture, so it, too, does not deserve respect.

I’m not lumping all Middle Eastern or Islamic cultures into one pile. This is about the Saudis and Wahhabism.

I’m also not proclaiming that American and/or Western culture is perfect. It’s not. It is, however, better than Saudi culture. It may not be politically correct to say so, but it’s true.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 6:11 pm and is filed under misc, rants, thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.