The fundamental issue is that you've got people in place A who have different moral values and rules than people in place B, The folks in place B worry their values will be destroyed by access to the media from place A.

In this example the folks in strict Islamic nations are upset over a film which mocks the key figure in their religion. In the US devout Christians had much the same sort of anger over films that portrayed inter-racial marriage (and the implied intimacy). A few of the radical Christian clerics exhort their followers to violence in defense of their Christian beliefs under fire by their perception of an increasingly amoral society.

Has nothing to do with democracy, middle ages, or religion and everything to do with what are, and what are not, those so called inalienable rights that the insurgents talked about their independence manifesto. Driving a consensus on this issue is Hard Problem(tm) which the UN and others have been working on pretty much from the start.

The big difference being that this is always followed by official condemnation.

Where are the muslim moderates at times like these? The community leaders to come out and say, "calm down everybody, this is not what our religion is about". Absent as ever. As much as the moderate muslims may deny it, their silence speaks pages at times like these.

I even see it in westernized muslim friends of mine, who just sheepishly grin and say "but it's mohammed, our religion says we shouldn't disrespect him".

Here you go: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/09/12/arab-world-outrage-...

There is a rather large gulf between "absent" and "absent in the Western media."

The reason why I've conflated them is because democracy is almost always a prerequisite for tolerance. Sure, it's possible for a non-democratic country to be tolerant, but that is a rare abnormality.

Moreover, the reason why I put the word "democratization" in scare quotes in my previous post is because I was also using it with the underlying meaning that exists in America - "to transplant our culture/values into another country".

But your second comment is scary indeed. "transplanting our culture/values", especially when it comes to US culture and values, is an offensive thing to a lot of people in the world. The US State department pushes exactly one 'value' (and no 'culture') which is that the people who are governed have the right of electing the government they want. Period. There aren't any constraints put on the kind of government the people pick, be it heavily church influenced, strict representation, constitutional representation, etc.

This is the official policy, but everyone knows it's bullshit. Using post WW2 changes as an example, we quickly forgive countries that Americanize (such as Japan), while we quickly forget allies who veer off on their path (such as Russia). We overthrow democratic governments who oppose us and bring back monarchs who are on our side (such as in Iran), while we prop up oppressive monarchs who support us (such as in Saudi Arabia).

And I recognize the fact that it's offensive to transplant our culture/values, which is why I think it's best to just try to bring those people who already agree with our culture and values to America. Let the extremists kill one another - we just need to get the bystanders out of the way.

I am old enough to remember the 1960s, and accounts from people who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1960s, and I would like to see more evidence for this extraordinary claim. Until I see the evidence you kindly provide, I will be hard put to believe that "modern, progressive" is as appropriate a designation for Afghanistan at any time in the last 500 years as it has been for, say, Denmark all that while.

AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the first reply from new user gongador linking to a photo essay I remember seeing not too long ago. I had that photo essay in mind as I described "Afghanistan was a modern, progressive country in the 1960s" as an extraordinary claim, as I think the photo essay shows by concentrating its description of Afghanistan only on the largest urban center of the country, rather than the rural countryside seen by other travelers. The majority of the population of Afghanistan have never lived in Kabul, and illiteracy has always been high there, especially among girls and women.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a...

I have no knowledge of what life in Afghanistan was like in the 1960s, I just remembered reading this essay and looking at the photos some time ago.

If I recall history lessons from school correctly, customs and habits formed by a country's elite (most often in the country's capital) tend to spread and be mimicked around said country. I wonder what life in rural Afghanistan would have been like today had not the USSR and the USA got involved.

EDIT: Sigh, this should have been an edit in my previous comment of course.

Go read some books then. That they had religion and that they didn't had rock n' roll and modern luxuries didn't mean they were not a progressive, tolerant country compared to what it has become today.

It's not about literacy and poor living in villages either. It's about living in a tolerant go-about-your business place and a civil-war/starvation/religious nuts running the show place.

As was Iran. But they didn't get there because of Western intervention back then, and there's no reason to think that it would work now.

/s

There was recently that one where some white supremicist stormed a sikh temple and shot people. That's just the most recent one in my memory, wasn't that a few weeks ago.

1. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/bush-obama-war-on-t...

In a mostly illiterate society I suspect the entire way of thinking behind things like honor killings has a shakier foundation than we would suspect.

If over the period of turning from a 10 year old into a 13 year old, or from 13 to 16 the Taliban were a joke, you would notice, and when the American troops were gone you would still remember that they were not cool.

The cause is lost because a decade of little boys growing up think that fighting against occupiers is cooler, and whatever the leaders of those groups say must hold some weight.

If instead they learned to read, so that they had access to enough thinking to realize how small their elders' minds were, or if they learned math which is uncontroversial, but champions thinking over authority, they would have the foundation to overturn a tradition of validating cruelty and intolerance.

Little kids are perceptive, and a few years of seeing intolerant elders and militants as losers, even if only for a small portion of their youth, may have made an immeasurable difference.