This is what is often called a “teachable moment.” You discover that a news source you’ve admired for its ethical and moral clarity — especially its tolerance for all living and breathing creatures (so long as they aren’t human fetuses) — is willing to change its stripes in order to make a buck, just like the much-despised capitalists the publication has railed at so often.
From the Independent:
The Huffington Post has caused outrage among those readers who considered it a liberal left website by launching an Arabic edition which has promptly criticised gays, atheists and the practice of taking selfies.
Days after going live, the site has already published a series of vitriolic outbursts including a piece by an Egyptian contributor on Saturday complaining that atheists were being allowed on Egyptian television and that the Government permitted “a press conference for gays in the heart of Cairo”.
In another article for the site, an Algerian columnist, [sic] authored what was intended as “an open letter to all the Islamic Ummah’s youth”, condemned the selfie as symptom of “the diseases and the viruses of the Western world”.
The blog, the author claimed, was designed as “call to stop adopting such sick behaviours that come to destroy our traditions and the basics of human cultural identity.”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the website’s eponymous founder, Arianna Huffington, sold the site to AOL in 2011 — a deal that netted her $21 million — she gave her word that the Huffington Post Arabi would echo the values of the American edition, providing a platform for those speaking out in support of social and political freedom.
To add insult to injury, it was the rival BuzzFeed that ratted Huffington out, by translating the content from Arabic.
This whole charade, meantime, stems from what J.E. Dyer aptly referred to earlier this week as the “hierarchy of victimhood,” a conundrum that liberals create for themselves by awarding protected class status to groups with radically different social outlooks.
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