I agree it fuels hatred , it allows people to neatly categorise and place those who are different all in the ' one basket ' and thus demonise the lot by implication.

Of course to make it more palatable such terms as ' telling it like it is ' are given more credence than they really deserve .

It's a means to avoid looking at yourself and what could be issues on the side that you are on. When you spend more time blaming others for issues you are wasting time finding ways to fix the them. It also perpetuates hate, mistrust and suspicion which warps any potential hope for people to work together.

I always defend free speech, and in this case I will defend the right of any of you to point at a culture and blame it. But because I defend free speech I can still acknowledge it does do harm (feelings, misinformation, violence), and the rest of us do have a right to criticize those who resort to it.

In your cultural finger pointing debate what are you asking? It's really unclear.

Think of how anti-american extremism has come to be such a problem... Instead of keeping focus on specific people in america who IN SPITE OF the basic goodness of our culture, do terrible things. They blame the intrinsic nature of our culture and spread the idea that as a whole we are fundamentally a beligerent violence prone society. Conversely we americans have our own problem with demagogues doing the same thing. It's a vicious cycle that begets increasing levels of violent extremism. It's what I call cultural fingerpointing and we have our share of morons here in the US who try to present it as a morally courageous defense of free speech ala Being brave enough to "name the enemy".

It fuels the anti this anti that sentiment which is obviously harmful.It also can lead to racism and hate crimes at its worst.