> It's their culture, their country, do we have a moral right to say country barbaric for their cultural norms they accepted for hundreds of years?
Yes, who am I to say that throwing a virgin into a volcano to please the fire god is barbaric? They've done it for hundreds of years!
You know what's barbaric? Abolitionism! Slavery has been part of our society for hundreds of years, and that fellow Wilberforce thinks he can just overturn our norms by an act of parliament?
If you dig below the surface a little bit,most countries are barbaric, and not just by culturally relative things. Just one of many examples, the US openly tortures innocent individuals, persecutes journalists, and has started more wars in the last century than any other country. That's pretty warlike and barbaric, but if the entire world decided to boycott and sanction the US, Americans would throw a tantrum and rant about being the beacon of democracy and all good things.
But we are free to point out that the US has a bunch of people in jail for minor crimes, they still has the death penalty, lacks abortion availability in many places, bullies other countries, and so on.
We don't keep our mouths shut about that just because it's a foreign culture.
My country was incredibly barbaric just 80 years ago. We changed our norms and are much better now, but still lots of room for improvement.
Countries can change. I see no reason for not calling them out for their (apparent) barbarisms as long as I am willing to be called out myself. This is the only way that we can improve this world for all of us.
"possessing or characteristic of a cultural level more complex than primitive culture but less sophisticated than advanced civilization"
This is barbaric: Flogging -> "Flogging is employed as a punishment for alcohol consumption or illicit sexual relations"
stoning -> "As of 2014, certain provisions of the Qatari Criminal Code allows punishments such as flogging and stoning to be imposed as criminal sanctions."
> US
They are (were?) friends: "In 2003, Qatar served as the US Central Command headquarters and one of the main launching sites of the invasion of Iraq."
> This is barbaric: Flogging -> "Flogging is employed as a punishment for alcohol consumption or illicit sexual relations"
I think it is a lot less barbaric than imprisoning people for smoking weed, for years, or have them appear on a sex offender list, massively limiting their freedom, for arguably small-scale things, like public urination.
Homeless people dying on the streets shooting up drugs would be a good place for human rights to start, but NIMBY's cultural norms are very inclusive of this for some reason.
Also male genital mutilation at birth is such a nice cultural norm.
Its wrong to jail people for having consensual sex. You can say its a cultural element, but it doesnt make it right. We have every right to criticize a culture/country/religion that allows things we find reprehensible. Trying to force that to change would be wrong, but events like this allow people to pretend like its fine. But its not, and thats why people are upset.
The term barbaric is used to describe someone's * opinion * of another person/culture/group of people. Anyone is free to describe anyone else's culture as barbaric, that's their opinion.
