Unethical Behavior Toward The West

It is unfair to ascribe lack of ethics or morality to any group based on the actions of some individuals. That said, there are some interesting examples of non-Western practices on display this week:

Scientist on French terror charge

Cern's particle collider aims to recreate conditions of the Big Bang

Anti-terrorism magistrates in Paris have filed preliminary charges against a French physicist arrested last week on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda.

The 32-year-old man of Algerian descent works at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), Europe's main centre for studying particle physics.

He was one of two brothers detained in the town of Vienne on Thursday.

Officials said he had been in contact with people linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and planned attacks.

The researcher had been working on an experiment at the Cern laboratory which houses the giant Large Hadron Collider, designed to recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang. It is located on the Swiss-French border.

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Ex-Ford employee held in data theft

Engineer charged with copying proprietary documents and trying to sell them in China

Bryce G. Hoffman / The Detroit News

The Justice Department charged a former Ford Motor Co. engineer with stealing company secrets and trying to peddle them to Chinese competitors.

Chinese-born Xiang Dong Yu -- also known as Mike Yu -- was arrested Wednesday at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport when he tried to re-enter the country from China. The 47-year-old is charged with five counts of theft of trade secrets, attempted theft of trade secrets and unauthorized access to a protected computer.

According to a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday, Yu was a product engineer for Ford from 1997 to 2007 and had access to Ford trade secrets. Law enforcement officials say that, just prior to leaving the Dearborn automaker, Yu copied thousands of confidential documents, including what they described as "sensitive Ford design documents" and "system design specification documents."

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Despite the more "progressive" view that it is unreasonable to claim one culture is superior to another, it is reasonable to claim that certain cultural traits may be more destructive than others. For example, the Islamic religion and culture officially see non-Muslims as religiously, morally, and culturally inferior, so it should not be surprising that progeny of that culture act in a manner that disregards morality and ethics in their dealings with those outside their culture.