Which side are you on?

If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.

--a quote Bennet Cerf once reported as Clemenceau's response to a visitor's alarm about his son being a communist

and,

I just don't understand why we're so harsh on Cuba when there are plenty of other injustices going on around the world that we casually ignore, perhaps you could enlighten me.
--Stephanie Scott in defense of her Dad in response to my post Abajo Fidel

My enlightenment is too quote this: from Nick Cohen; on the great devide that today confronts Liberalism. Cohen was writing about the Iranian dissident: Maryam Naimze,

Namazie is on the right side of the great intellectual struggle of our time between incompatible versions of liberalism. One follows the fine and necessary principle of tolerance, but ends up having to tolerate the oppression of women, say, or gays in foreign cultures while opposing misogyny and homophobia in its own. (Or 'liberalism for the liberals and cannibalism for the cannibals!' as philosopher Martin Hollis elegantly described the hypocrisy of the manoeuvre.) The alternative is to support universal human rights and believe that if the oppression of women is wrong, it is wrong everywhere.

The gulf between the two is unbridgeable. Although the argument is rarely put as baldly as I made it above, you can see it breaking out everywhere across the liberal-left. Trade union leaders stormed out of the anti-war movement when they discovered its leadership had nothing to say about the trade unionists who were demanding workers' rights in Iraq and being tortured and murdered by the 'insurgents' for their presumption.

Former supporters of Ken Livingstone reacted first with bewilderment and then steady contempt when he betrayed Arab liberals and embraced the Islamic religious right. The government's plans to ban the incitement of religious hatred have created an opposition which spans left and right and whose members have found they have more in common with each other than with people on 'their side'.

As Namazie knows, the dispute can't stay in the background for much longer. There's an almighty smash-up coming and not before time.

That's the question we must decide and in today's world of WMDs there is little time for the youthful dalliance with the far left Clemanceau would have granted you.

Oppression and tyranny must be stood up too. None to be casually ignored.

Progressive can't stand it, but these are the most progressive words I've heard spoken by a US President in my 52 years,

America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.
--from Bush's Second Inaugural