respect

So some of the tourists who stripped on Mt Kinabalu have been arrested by the Malaysian police. The locals believe that the act was disrespectful to the mountain, which they consider sacred, and many of them think that the earthquake happened as a consequence of that sacrilege.
.
Of course, educated people everywhere are laughing at the Sabahans, mocking their beliefs as out-of-date. i wish they would stop.
.
i mean, look, i believe in plate tectonics as much as the average educated person does. For crying out loud i was a geography geek back in school. But that doesn't mean i think that it's OK to make fun of other people's cultural and religious beliefs and customs. Whatever happened to good ol' old-fashioned respect and good manners? Etiquette? Civilised behaviour?
.
i think there's a certain arrogance -- ok, let me be frank, not just a certain arrogance, but a great deal of arrogance, behind what these tourists did. A great deal of extremely ugly arrogance. It's the same arrogance that led those cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo to draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, in the name of 'free speech', knowing as they did that this is considered taboo in Islam. It's an arrogance that the world can very very very well do without.
.
To be honest, i think those tourists deserve to be arrested.
.
i find it quite amazingly hypocritical that the same people who cry foul over things like Nobel-prizewinning-scientist Tim Hunt's allegedly misogynistic comments at a conference in South Korea, can fail to see that essentially, what those tourists did is really not that very different. Which is, to trample on the dearly-held beliefs of a particular group of people -- in the case of Tim Hunt, feminists in general and female scientists in particular; and in the case of those tourists, native Sabahans. If they can feel offended at Tim Hunt being politically incorrect about something that they (essentially) hold sacred (i.e., gender equality), they should be able to understand the offence felt by the Sahahans when something similar is done to them.
.
BAH HUMBUG.
.
.