I don't think we have any discussion about the Danish Muhammad cartoons....

http://image.com.com/tv/images/video/south_super_medvid.jpg

Some people *really* need to get over themselves.

The argument being made here is ever-so-slightly slippery, you know; it's not as if there aren't types of images that would provoke similar ire in pockets of the western world. The trick here is that the cartoons are being used to point up how many Muslims don't fit in to systems of thought in the west, but they're doing it underhandedly: they're provoking frothy-mouth outrage over what will look to westerners like the most innocuous thing in the world. But the difference isn't just between mouth-frothing and western calm; it's a massive cultural difference in terms of what makes an image offensive, and our comfortable blindness to that difference.

And the equivalent wouldn't even have to be, say, a New York Times illustration of Jesus fucking a baby -- remember back around 2002, when handmade rugs showed up in Afghanistan depicting the WTC falling and American planes bombing the mountains? Innucuous, historical stuff, that, a perfectly truthful depiction of events that actually happened -- but some people seemed rather offended. And that's a couple rug-weavers and a transient event -- not a major newspaper and a major religion.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6337/2188/1600/kw.2.jpg

Oh, the irony.

If the point of the boycott is to force the Danish government and people to rescind freedom of the press, then that end must be resisted vigorously. Generally speaking, the antidote to misguided, harmful or ignorant free speech is a strong dose of more thoughtful and informed free speech. It is far better to convince the Danes that the cartoonist was a crass bigot peddling ignorance and hate than to convert him and his employers into champions of freedom by appeaqring to attack those freedoms.

Kinds of gives a whole new meaning to "Let the little ones come unto me".

A, though the provocateur, is in the right.

This seems to be to be such a necessary, shared assumption of liberal secular society than any parsing or yeah-buts strike me as absurd.

Finnish is part of Finno-Ugrian group along with Hungarian and Estonian, though its true origin are still unknown.

Danish is part North Germanic languages that also include Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese.

In other words, they are two entirely separate languages with no formal similarities whatsoever.

How different is this from The Last Temptation of Christ, for those few of you who were old enough to remember that controversy?

But in both cases I just don't see why the non-religious should be held to the taboos of the religious. People's right to believe what they want should be respected by the law, but not the particular content of those beliefs.

It is time for such stale, regressive beliefs to be aired-out, ridiculed, and confronted for what they are: openly hostile and incompatible to quintessential Western values.

Er, do you think the whole world should succumb to Western values? There are lots of different reformist groups in the Muslim world that speak of tolerance and equality from a Islamic point of view. I think it's possible for reform and peaceful co-existence to take place without assuming everyone should adopt the so-called Western values (which have also be proven hypocritical time after time).

(a.k.a. the French surrender)

Anyway. What I was going to say is apparently nonsense, so I won't.

OTM.

I, for one, am offended by people being stoned to death for being gay or having sex, and am especially ofended by people blowing up Tube trains because their religion is so fucking great.

However, because I'm a sane, rational person, I don't feel the need to start burning copies of the Koran in the street and calling for a boycott of all muslim-owned businesses.

These muppets should grow up.

Which surely prompts the question where in blue blazes would you find a portrait of the Danish prime minister in the Gaza Strip? And in sufficient quantities to satisfy a baying mob into the bargain?

The guys I saw on C4 news a couple of days ago burnings flags were, I'm sure, burning the Norwegian flag, which says plenty about the mindsets involved. They'll move onto Swiss ones soon.

http://thebigstory.org/bigstoryimages/off-osamabert.jpg

Doesn't really fit in with the topic, but always makes me laugh.

Not so strange, really. A fundamentalist Christian paper in Norway saw fit to reproduce the JP drawings shortly before this really took off.

http://zurueckgeschossen.blogspot.com/2006/02/jordanian-newspaper-publishes-jyllands.html

That takes some guts, and the editorial (as translated) is spot on.

Rather loaded language, but I do think that tolerance, pluralism, limited government, and separation of church and state, whether they are 'Western' values or not, are worth defending universally. Let's be quite clear here. if you take the words of the Torah, the Bible, or the Koran at face value a lot of people are going to be denied the basic rights Westerners, among others, have been fighting centuires to obtain. Without in any way denying the misdeeds of the West, the language of victimization often used by Muslims, one that decries the use of the word crusade but fails to have any compunction about complaining about Jews visiting the Temple Mount or fails to note that before the Crusaders invaded Palestine, the Muslims did, falls on deaf ears when it come to me personally. Omar may have been a great guy but nobody invited him to take over Jerusalem. Nobody invited Islam to conquer Persia, or Egypt, or Spain, or Turkey, or the Balkans. There is a strain of Muslim argument that seems to want to have it both ways. They use arguments derived from the Enlightenment to attack liberal societies but they have no intention whatsoever of letting women get the vote (not to mention, in some cases, drive or leave the house unescorted) or allowing people free access to information or the right to express themselves. They feel that God is on their side and anything they can do to win the argument is legitimate. I can be a fundamentalist too about certain values and, regardless of how insolent, provocative and stupid the cartoons may have been, I will, to paraphrase Voltaire, defend to the death the newspaper's right to publish them.

"Another armed Fatah group, called the Abu el-Reesh Brigades, said citizens of Norway, Denmark, France and Germany in Gaza "will be in danger" if their governments do not apologise within 10 hours."

That's the gratitude you get for giving these fuckers billions of dollars in aid.

The main objection seems not to be to the content, but that the cartoons depict Muhammad. And once again, why should non-Muslims be obligated to follow Muslim taboos? To be polite, I guess, but why should political cartoonists be polite? Might as well put "The Family Circus" or "Love Is.." on the editorial page. (But even then the religious nutjobs would object to the naked children in "Love is..." and mommy's tight sweaters in "The Family Circus".)

This issue isn't whether people have a right to not be offended -- it's that they have a right to be offended, for good reasons or bad. (That's not even a granted "right," it's just a basic human ability; stopping people from doing it involves the same processes as stopping them from breathing.)

ok, so it *is* an issue of having a right not to be offended. people have an ability to be offended -- copy that. people have a right not to be -- up for debate.

The argument being made here is ever-so-slightly slippery, you know; it's not as if there aren't types of images that would provoke similar ire in pockets of the western world. The trick here is that the cartoons are being used to point up how many Muslims don't fit in to systems of thought in the west, but they're doing it underhandedly: they're provoking frothy-mouth outrage over what will look to westerners like the most innocuous thing in the world. But the difference isn't just between mouth-frothing and western calm; it's a massive cultural difference in terms of what makes an image offensive, and our comfortable blindness to that difference.

i don't think anyone is going into this blind; they're assrerting thw value of free speech against religious dogma.

And the equivalent wouldn't even have to be, say, a New York Times illustration of Jesus fucking a baby -- remember back around 2002, when handmade rugs showed up in Afghanistan depicting the WTC falling and American planes bombing the mountains? Innucuous, historical stuff, that, a perfectly truthful depiction of events that actually happened -- but some people seemed rather offended. And that's a couple rug-weavers and a transient event -- not a major newspaper and a major religion.

-- nabisco (--...), February 1st, 2006.

they may have seemed 'rather offended' but i'm guessing that fewer death threats were made.

British jihad group: "Mohammed silenced his critics by having them brutally murdered. Surely we should follow his example."

I don't really see how refraining from publishing caricatures whose sole purpose was to be offensive to Muslims is appeasement.

in other words, are there large numbers of people who think these cartoons aren't innocent? and, if so, what effect is a collective response of 'its just a fucking cartoon' going to have? a) a positive one of, yea ok maybe, or b) a negative one of, these people don't listen to us at all

-- Filey Camp, Wednesday, February 13, 2008 5:14 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Link

the first question is the main one, really; i don't think the insane flag-burners represent a large number of people, and i have about as much respect for their views as, say, the christians protesting the bbc over 'jerry springer: the opera'. i don't think they should be taken more seriously than that -- and at least the christians weren't advocating violence.

it's pretty obvious that the cartoons were offensive; but i don't see who's interests are served by taking the protestors seriously, because, really, there have been bigger things to protest about in the last few years, for muslims and non-muslims, than these cartoons. it'd be hypocritical to say otherwise.

yes, agreed. to be honest i don't really know how many people they represent (or even, really, what represent actually means in this context). there have been some pretty high percentages of muslims reported as thinking certain violent responses have been 'justified' - but this by itself doesn't really mean anything. my gut feeling is that the flag-burners are to majority opinion, as are the BNP to 'there's too many'. do the former represent the latter? no. but....?

of course there are bigger things to protest! they're never protested though!

well, yeah, there have been kind of disturbing uk polls of muslim opinion on the level of 'justification' for 7/7 and similar themes, on channel 4 iirc. i try not to think about it too much tbh because it's very depressing, and it's nicer to think the crazies are widely reviled.

but that's just the point, the difference between taking great offence, and advotating violence, which is the same difference between the bnp and a lot of mail readers -- although i would guess in the current climate the bnp's views on immigration would be a lot more mainstream even than the mail.

but again the issue of printing a cartoon is both more trivial and more simple than the unplanned, unfunded migration into the uk of 100s of 1,000s of people in a few years.

here have been some pretty high percentages of muslims reported as thinking certain violent responses have been 'justified'

"Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Iraq?"

Favor 34
Oppose 64
Unsure 2

2/1-3/08

Please to see your reports good sir

of course there are bigger things to protest! they're never protested though!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6333251.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4394915.stm
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/09/news/iraq.php
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2980102.stm

What the fuck dude

oh, no, you get me wrong, though i can see why as i was vague. i didnt mean that muslims don't protest against other things!

my non-protesting thing was really just talking about the apathy in the uk, and wasn't really anything to do with religion but more to do with capitalism, but thats a bugbear of mine not necessarily related

yea im sure you can find many polls to back up stuff like that (tho im amazed anyone is still backing wars in the middle east in this day and age!), in my post you'll see i was pretty ambivalent about polls and wasn't trying to make a point that 'muslims think a certain way', more that i dont really know to what extent, because of the way reporting goes on in the UK

"there have been some pretty high percentages of muslims reported as thinking certain violent responses have been 'justified'"

"Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Iraq?"

Favor 34
Oppose 64
Unsure 2

2/1-3/08

-- Gavin, Thursday, 14 February 2008 00:19 (8 hours ago) Link

um gavin what the fuck? are you saying opposition to the war justifies violence on -- yep -- innocent people in the uk?

i think the protests we were talking about, and the flag-burners, were the ones in the UK. those were the ones i had in mind anyway.

me also

.

There's a dedicated thread for this now and given we don't actually know anything yet about the gunmen or their motivations then I think that might be more appropriate.

Charlie Hebdo: Gun attack on French magazine kills 11

lol

cool tht u can find the humour in this bro