Western culture suffers from a historical narrative of self-hatred.

Hey tumeric, let me start by saying that it wasn't my intention to discuss this issue on a global scale, I merely wanted to refute your comparison with Islamic and Chinese culture because I think those comparisons were not entirely accurate. With regard to the Charlie Hebdo example I gave in my previous post, I was not trying to argue that people were questioning the magazine's free speech rights. I was trying to illustrate the double standards that the Western media use when it comes to public criticism. I argued in my previous post that criticism of Islam was not accepted, whereas criticism of Catholicism generally is. However, I admit that I failed to give you a concrete example. To give you an impression of what I mean you can read this article: http://www.independent.co.uk... What is interesting here is that the author, Guilaine Kinouani, claims that Charlie Hebdo is responsible for the radicalization of Muslims in France. However, she fails to observe that another religious group (Christians) suffer the same kind of insults, yet a headline saying 'Charlie Hebdo said something so Christianophobic this week that I believe it will fuel terrorism' is simply unthinkable. Kinouani then continues by arguing that the biggest problem of French culture is that it is too French. In other words, the identity of ethnic minorities is more important than the culture of the host country. This tied in with your argument that we have changed our culture on the basis of ideals, rather than on the basis of a continuous tradition. My question, however, is how sustainable are these ideals when the very culture they have grown out of (that is European Judeo-Christian culture) is viewed within a narrative of self-hatred? Kinouani claims that French culture is racist, but I would argue that French culture is no more racist than Kenyan or Argentinean culture. In fact, I think that nowhere on the planet do minorities enjoy so many rights (even privileges) as in the West. History can only function within a narrative representation, in other words, in a story. The article of Kinouani is a story, albeit an erroneous one in my opinion. But again I would like to point out the role of the ideas of the Enlightenment in the reinterpretation of historical events. For centuries the conquest of Jerusalem during the Crusades had been portrayed in Western history as one of its greatest achievements. This changed radically during the age of the Enlightenment. A good example of this is The Talisman (1825), a famous book by Sir Walter Scott. In this story the Muslim sultan Saladin is portrayed as a type of liberal European gentleman while the crusaders are presented as intemperate and childish, crudely assailing a more sophisticated and civilized Muslim society. With this example I am not trying to say that the Crusaders were actually the good guys, I am merely trying to illustrate how the European intellectual elite changed the narrative of their own history according to the new-found ideals of the Enlightenment which were, from quite early on, very anti-Christian. I would argue that after the Second World War, under the influence of the so-called 'New Left' and the Frankfurt School, this kind of historical narrative, now inspired by Marxist rethoric, got even more hostile.