QOTD

UPDATED below

Pamela Bone in The Australian:

To many it is shockingly impolite to suggest that some countries -- Western liberal democracies, for example -- are better than countries that still operate under rules more appropriate to 7th-century century Arabia. Well, sorry, but if by better we mean more conducive to human happiness and human wellbeing, they are.

A society in which young, lightly clothed women and men can sit together at street cafes and discuss the sins of their government is better than a society in which they can be arrested for doing the same; a free and liberal society is better than a society that stones women for having sex outside of marriage and jails gays for existing.

Moreover, you do not help the reformers in socially backward Islamic societies by politely saying, "Well, look at us, we're just as bad, perhaps even worse." We are bad, all right, but we are not just as bad.

Actually, I think the West is pretty good. Especially by comparison to Islamic nations, a point Christina Hoff Sommers makes responding to a letter in the current Weekly Standard (subscription only, alas):

Taina Bien-Aimé argues that because rape and other forms of violence against women exist in all countries, including the United States, there is no point to comparing violence between American and other Western societies and Muslim societies. She evidently sees no difference between societies where such violence may be common, socially sanctioned, and even ceremonial and those where it is exceptional, the occasion of widespread revulsion, and severely punished. In these and many other respects, the condition of women in America is fundamentally different from that of women in countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, and Iran. Muslim women are not averting their eyes from these differences: They are emphasizing them, making them central to their campaigns for political and social reform. It is a pity that many American feminists are too confused or self-absorbed to help.

MORE:

From Andrew Roberts' magisterial History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 at 438-39 (2007):

Although the ill-treatment of the Black American has long been held to represent an indelible blot on the escutcheon of the English-speaking peoples, the way in which it was ended goes some way towards counter-balancing this. For in retrospect it is fascinating just how well embedded the civil rights movement was in the established politics of the English-speaking peoples' tradition of protest. . . [Dr. Martin Luther] King's movement -- as opposed to that of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam -- drew its primary inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns against the British Empire in India, which in turn looked to the British experience of Great War conscientious objection and the struggle for female suffrage. Facing almost any other opponent in the 1930s, Gandhi's movement would have suffered far worse privations and oppression than they received from the 'boyish tyranny' of the imperial British. 'Shoot Gandhi," was Adolf Hitler's advice to the former Viceroy of India, Lord Halifax, in 1937, 'and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot two hundred and so on until order is established.' A glance at what Stalin was doing to various Soviet ethnic minorities at the time, or the way the Japanese were behaving in Manchuria and the Italians in Abyssinia, shows how important it was for Gandhi that he was faced by the English-speaking peoples, who were governed by the customs of law, decency and fair play.

(via Normblog)