In the wake of the Paris attacks, the Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio declared that the reason ISIS targets the West is “because we have freedom of speech, because we have diversity in our religious beliefs … because we’re a tolerant society.” Yet only weeks earlier, ISIS had downed a Russian airliner over the Sinai, thus targeting the distinctly intolerant regime of Vladimir Putin.
Lord Jesus, but people are stupid. Putin’s regime surely looks intolerant to an American but how intolerant does it look to members of ISIS? Has anybody seen Russian women? They are very much unburqaed, to put it mildly. Russia is a deeply atheist society with extremely loose morals and social permissiveness of rare proportions.
The whole story with the Russian airplane that crashed over Sinai is fishy in the extreme, and the rumors of Russia’s dislike of ISIS are quite baseless. Up to the quoted part, the article was making an interesting argument and I was following it with curiosity. But if an author is capable of this kind of blooper, he can’t be trusted to say anything very valuable.
The most crucial part of writing about foreign affairs is to accept that people, countries, cultures, civilizations are different and deserve to be understood on their own terms and approached in all their complex richness.
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