Eurpoean 'Tolerance'...

Europeans love to lecture to the United States about 'tolerance' toward others' viewpoints- especially viewpoints from enemies of the United States. However, it appears that they are not very good at practisiing what they preach.

According to Breitbart.com, Arnold Schwarzenegger's hometown, the Austrian city of Graz has acquiesced to Schwarzenegger's wishes and has removed his name from a soccer stadium named in his honor. The city has also eliminated any reference to him on the city website, again in response to a request from Schwarzenegger.

This comes after many of the town's inhabitants savagely attacked Schwarzenegger for refusing to spare the life of Stanley 'Tookie' Williams, a convicted multiple murderer and the founder of the Los Angeles-area Crips street gang. The opposition to this richly-deserved execution had begun a movement to strip Scwarzenegger's name from the stadium, and the Governor chose to remove the temptation by writing to the city and formally severing ties. This included sending back an ornate ring the city had given him, as well as requesting the removal of his name from the stadium. Schwarzeneger's rationnale was simple- removing his name aand completely severing public ties with Graz would draw the fire of the anti-death penalty zealots, and would not place the elected officials of Graz (who mostly supported retaining Schwarzenegger's name on the stadium) in a difficult position. In my opinion, this was the only thing for the governor to do- he is a US citizen, who is currently serving the people of California.

A little perspective here. Many of the news articles (including the one linked above) that I have read on this subject speak at great length about how the inhabitants of Graz view the death penalty as 'barbaric'. Some even mentions that Graz' offical slogan is 'City of Human Rights'. No mention if that includes the rights Williams took from his victims by murdering them. However, in all of this outrage, there is one point that the media apparently missed. Europeans are entitled to their view. However, in poll after poll, a sizable majority of citizens of the United States of America in general and the State of California in particular approve of the death penalty. Especially for convicted and unrepentant multiple murderers such as 'Tookie' Williams undoubtedly was. Therefore, since the citizens of the United States (and especially the citizens of California) approve of the death penalty, it is meet for their elected officials, of whom Governor Schwarzenegger is one, to follow their constituents' directives- not the uninformed and rather naive fantasies of the citizenry of a foreign country.

The entire affair makes the Austrians look both petty and intolerant in my opinion, as they are quite ready to preach tolerance and understanding for the views of those trying to kill us all (including them), yet they are not willing to show the same tolerance or understanding to the views and opinions of the citizens of the United States- and yet they attempt to claim the moral high ground. This sort of moral hypocrisy (the Kyoto treaty is another shining example) is one of the reasons that fewer and fewer Americans (except a large percentage of the Democratic Party and their stooges in the MSM) pay much attention to what most of Europe has to say. In fact, I regret that Europe is rapidly growing irrelevant- and if they don't stop wasting their time in hypocritical moralizing to the one country that has kept them safe from totalitarianism thus far in the Twentieth Century and start waking up to the Islamist threat within their borders, they will be worse than irrelevant.