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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (46469)	5/23/2004 12:23:53 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

Mary, I suppose I'm not making my point clearly enough. The hypotheticals were simply made to suggest to you that there is a very disparate treatment given by the media to our abuses as compared to those done by Arabs upon Arabs. I assume you don't disagree. I frankly think it is an irrefutable fact. The question to me is not whether we should be appalled about abuses we commit (we should be and are) but why is it that Arab-upon-Arab abuse is given a media pass despite the fact that its scope and brutality absolutely exceeds ours by several orders of magnitude. Plus, they have no legal mechanisms in place to deal with such abuses whereas we are witnessing ours at work. Is this fair? Is this right? I don't think so. Why shouldn't we tell our Arab critics to look at their societies' records as part of their criticism of what we have done, and suggest to them that their societes' don't fare too well in comparison. I see no reason why we can't do so, in fact I think we need to aggressively point out the distinctions so as to convincingly win the argument concerning the virtues of democracy. The Abu Ghraib episode in this sense has given us an opportunity to let them see, in a very real, very concrete way, how democracies work and how what we do is superior to their dysfunctional way of dealing with similar issues. But first we have to try to set aside media bias, otherwise all we (and they) will hear is how awful we are while nothing is said concerning their own systemic failures.