Letters | As France burns, Western nations should shed their moral superiority
- Readers discuss the French riots, and why global religious leaders must unite
While there may be nuanced causes, the underlying theme is oppression. In France, there seems to be a group of people who believe that they are subject to systemic humiliation and injustice.
It is amid this long-standing dissatisfaction that the death of Nahel has ignited unrest.
There is an assumption that the West leads the world in elevating human lives. The West itself is not shy to proclaim this.
A person who lives in Asia, South America or Africa will not easily tell someone in another part of the world how to live their life, but the West has no such inhibitions. As a common practice, the West measures the norms of other nations against its own standards, and if it finds them incompatible with its own, it will with utmost confidence declare those norms unfit for humanity.
Presumably, Western nations do so because they believe that out of all the nations in the world, they know best about what it means to be good and right.