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Originally Posted by jonathan lall
I don't want to turn this into an essay, but let's not get ahead of ourselves; European policy tends to hold a religiously detached stance in many areas. This "hypocritical" behaviour is the result of a few people and for the most part, not of the governments. We should also note that moral high ground is a relative thing. Take Bush's stance on stem cell research (a very conservative allowance) for example. While most nonreligious people would agree that research is a neccessary step, it's certainly not a moral stance. Of course, the Kyoto Protocol is only partially helpful, and isn't an environmental policy that directly helps urbanites, and also France's position on Iraq probably has a lot to do with TotalFinalElf.
In other words, the Europe generalizations you're making are pretty unwarranted, I would say.
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Yeah, I kind of realized that I was half trolling in that last comment in my post. Not to say I don't believe what I said, but it's kind of stupid of me to make such a far-reaching statement and only touch on so little evidence.
I don't really understand the distinction between a country's actions and an individual's actions that people often bring up. I think we can relatively safely say that the French government's actions are the result of the people's wishes. So, when does something start to reflect on a country? When its voted into law? When a majority of the population believes it? Regardless, here is some data on anti-semitism in France:
http://haganah.us/hmedia/euasr-12.html (it's on a Jewish website, but most of the data is gathered from neutral sources. Why woud Jews want to pick out some country, anyway?)