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

And I'm heartened to see that more and more people are daring to say what previously seemed unthinkable (though not on ILX of course) - that the only possible solution to the quandry we've unwittingly found ourselves in is the outright proscription of Islam in the West.

gypsy mothra and nabisco, I think you guys are officially too good for this thread.

Anyone care to argue the case, which seems pretty central to me, that Mohammed *wasn't* a cold-blooded killer?

true to a degree, but i think, almost uniformly on the thread, people seem to suggest that the reaction has been predictable, histrionic and depressing. the main topic of the thread is still, the cartoons themselves, which is a more divisive issue.

there are points to made me about the reaction, and yes, incitement, racial hatred etc, what is the correct response. although, interestingly, in a way, we're seeing the flipside of some recent legislation that says its occur to criticise muslims (as not a racial group), but not jews or sikhs. ie, if it ok to attack muslims,...its ok to attack non-muslims (as not a racial group EITHER!)

theres a whole other thread on this, but, again, sometimes stuff like this is a double edge sword, we're here talking about freedom of speech and how we love it so, and things like the muslim protests are a test of that! sometimes i think our tolerance of such things actually adds fuel to the fire

i dont really think anyone is saying the protests arent histrionic and ott, its sort of a given

This issue really bugs me so aplogies for what is a long post.

ideas of proscribing islam from the west are generally untenable and unwanted for many of the reasons already gone into and as a way of thinking it locks the relationship as a problem. some people are cool some are not, till you get to know them you simply can not say. yet this leaves me wondering, what is actually to be done about the demonstrations in europe where you have people both determined to live in the west as well as determined to prophecy its destruction? What can be done?

it doesn't seem that anyone on this board objects to the right to go to regents park and make yourself heard, it's the nature of the slogans that worries people. Promising a repeat of 7/7 is not the way to open up a dialogue, which i assume is why extremists use it because they don't want a dialogue. (If i'm understanding correctly this same accusation is the one that's being made against the danish newspaper.)what the cartoons have provided is an oppurtunity for those that want to say it's 'us' vs. 'them' to further sow dissension, an oppurtunity that all interested parties have seized upon.

the difference is the position from which you do this. casual bigotry is different when you're the majority singing 2 world wars and one world cup to when you're a minority. i could well cop it off either group but at the moment the jihadists are a more pressing concern.

they are a clear minority who want no positive relationship with the country that they're living in. they've gotten to know the ways and have decided that we are definetley not cool. they don't even want a good relationship with other muslims who don't adhere to their beliefs. they will not give up any fundamentals and as such won't relate to the society around them: every relationship demands compromise and they will not. they cannot. they cannot compromise their beliefs to allow them an easy relationship with western culture and stay true to their religion. this is a problem.

so to make a clear distinction between muslims and jihadists, should a society invest any time and money into attempting to soothe jihadists that seem determined to attack it? should they simply ignore their complaints? especially when they will/can not at least lean in a bit to another way of living.

My answer is 'no' because i don't think either is a real possibility. i hope i'm wrong on that because the other alternative seems to me just as tricky: how do you combat the danger that these people pose without persecuting muslims who have found a way to stay true to a culture at times at odds with their religion?

well you could leave it to the powers that be, but most institutions don't seem to be doing a particularly good job at that, be it internationally or nationally or locally. such interventions also come across as attacks from on high even when they're not meant to be. surely it is up to us to open up conversations instead of looking for others to improve relationships for us. had the readership of this danish newspaper been more responsible back in september and written in in protest then none of this would be happening. a relationship spanning millions as the one between the west and islam already does works at points between people as individuals getting along, falling in love/out etc.

so playing catch up as i am where are the prominent islamic voices that aren't jihadists, where are the eloquent muslims? they could never outstrip chantelle and preston in a ratings war but does the responsibility then not fall onto us to ensure that such voices can be heard? and i mean more than on a messageboard.

it's not that i think we have reached a crisis and that throwing up our hands will damn us all, but apart from the bigots a lot of people seem to be arguing for good things. these cartoons could be an oppurtunity.

oh and i'm a first time poster trying not to troll, so if i've offended anyone or spent most of this attacking strawmen then my apologies, but like i said this issue really bugs me...

what i mean is, 'our' tolerance adds fuel to extremists fire, and is not a reason for ending this tolerance

hi optimus!

and that cameraman who filmed the injured iraqi insurgent being executed -- certainly there wz plenty of blog-comment yak in the US abt how they hoped next time out the US army wd frag him "by mistake haha" etc etc -- is this different? again, i don't take blog-comment threats very seriously (beered-up blowhards venting easy frustration) but maybe this is just complacency on my part :(

which is scarier –- more chilling in its effects -- to a professional writer or cartoonist? the open threat of the occasional mob in the street or the daily emailed threat of the anonymous and hidden lone-nut obsessive internet stalker? esp.when there seem to be lots of the internet stalker, and more by the day?

as a quasi-journalist myself, my kneejerk to "it's offensive!!" is certainly "but some people deserve to be offended!!" -- but i also admire nabisco's mournful-hopeful concept of a space for civility wide enough to contain a plurality of the world's foax, who can agree (albeit fairly testily) to differ with one another, and contain and control their respective crazies -- i think these semi-polarised spaces are worth fighting for

this is still a kind of self-censorship, albeit in the other direction -- and maybe it's actually harder for an honest writer to fight against, bcz it's so tied up with the toughness necessary to resist just giving up and going with the flow

They're too busy trying to finish the complete works of shakespeare.

Seriously though, nuff respect to the thread - what everyone else has said about the way in which their mind has changed.

The key absence here (here as in 'the issue', not this thread) is politics, as opposed to political theory. There's too much either / or going on; I expect some lazy hack has said that 'this is a referendum on pluralism and multiculturalism' as if the poles being represented, of free speech, and theocracy, were already settled, and really, we needed to get the gloves off, and get into a right old ding-dong to the death (pace Huntingdon) to see who wins.

That's not the case though. As many have argued, and as this thread shows, positions change. The vital space to be preserved - and this is the true high ground of liberalism, not offending people like a tit - is the space where this debate happens and makes a difference. In that context, the Danish papers have done us a disservice. By being so cack-handed, by being so inflammatory, they have set this debate up in a way to close that space down. I suspect they've done it for the usual reasons these things happen - circulation, a dollop of editorial stupidity (hello every other paper printing them) and a vague right-wing agenda which looks at potential multicultural conflict and says 'bring it on' or at the very least 'we told this would happen if we let them come here'.

To continue Nabsico's line upthread, there is a group of non-muslim's who are seeing this as the start of the culture wars of religion and race, and the rest who aren't enamoured by the paper's actions, but are deeply unenamoured by the response of some in the Muslim community. It's easy to get angry, as I did when I saw the text of some of the banners at the London demo on Friday, but the initial anger has to be replaced by a proper assessment of how to do this politically.

Against that backdrop, the only proper line is to call the paper and its ilk utter idiots and best, provocateurs at worst, matched in both those stakes by the islamic demonstrators talking about more 7/7s and killing apostates. The free, liberal and tolerant society won't get built by caving into theocrats, but nor will it be strengthened if the people we need to believe in it see it as a charter for latent anti-immigrant race-war to be given full vent.

Gary Younge had it right, I thought, in yesterday's Guardian. Just because someone has the right to free speech doesn't mean that their exercising of it is worth defending. They may have been entitled to do what they did, but their broke a bigger rule of liberal democracy, and especially of progressives, which was to be uttrely cackhanded and inflammatory in their politics.

I think that's probably at least partly because we all take it for granted that none of us support such speech. Also most of us (none of us on this thread?) are Muslims, so there's no sense of "look, this is what our group is out there doing," whereas the issue of how, as the western secularists we mostly are, to regulate our speech in regard to Islam is less agreed on.

(Just for the record, I'd like to be clear that I don't agree with those calling for Muslims to be prevented from immigrating to western countries, or for the to be deported! I do think that there is something particularly problematic about Islam, because of the way Islamic societies and western societies have diverged over several hundred years, and also because of Islam's combination of a theocratic model (a la ancient Israel) with a missionary thrust akin to Christianity's. I think it matters that neither Jesus nor Paul call for Christians to go out and take up arms in order to create a Christian theocracy. It's true that there are Christians who espouse some sort of theocratic model, but imo it requires a lot of interpretive gymnastics to get to that point.)

One answer: Tariq Ramadan, the academic the U.S. State Department thinks is too dangerous to be allowed to teach in America:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/05/opinion/edramadan.php

(And I realize full well that his position on this is basically Nabisco's.)

but the thing is, i don't personally see those principles as equivalent. free speech and expression -- especially about religion and politics -- is utterly crucial to me. someone's particular religious restrictions on depiction of their holy men, i'm sorry, i'm not going to go out of my way to offend them, but i fundamentally find those kind of religious restrictions kind of dumb at best, and prone to being used for all kinds of anti-liberal purposes -- as very much seems to be the case with a lot of these protests. there's a lot of muddled talk about respect on this thread, and i wish there was more clarity about what people are really asking to be respected. like i said above, there are a lot of things about fundamentalist islam that i very much do not respect, because i think they are antithetical to liberal pluralism, and i reserve the right to say so, and loudly. maybe not in the manner of these cartoons, but still.

so, ok, the prohibition on idolatry is not itself antithetical to liberal democracy. unless, of course, you try to enforce it outside the bounds of the community of believers.

looking at it from one angle it's a question of conflict of laws, in which case I can't see how in any sense Sharia is to prevail over Danish/European law.

Of course there are moral questions too, but the morals in question should be those of a Western democracy.

i think people are to some degree confusing the details of the case -- would i run this cartoon? would i personally be offended by it? -- with the underlying principles. the principles are what i care about. the details are worth debating, but only in a context where the principles are first accepted. on this thread, i think that's the case -- no one, as far as i can tell, is suggesting that the newspaper should not have been allowed to run the cartoons. but this debate is happening in a much bigger world than this thread, and in the bigger world, the underlying principle of free speech -- including the freedom to mock religious beliefs -- is not taken as a universal given.

so, i can agree with nabisco that among the global minority of people who accept that principle as a given, it is best for all kinds of reasons to exercise that right wisely and with some sensitivity. but this issue is not only being debated among people who accept that as a given. and the people who don't accept it are the ones who worry me -- in the u.s., in the vatican, in damascus, wherever.

(the following links are in Dutch, sorry)

The (Belgian) Arab-European League published antisemitic cartoons on their website, citing their right to free speech (story in Dutch).

The result was an immediate complaint by the Israeli Center for Documentation And Information. (one of the cartoons had a revisionist flavour. That and antisemitism are punishable offences here.)

I have no further opinion on this, I'm just pointing it out.

why should religious groups be protected above other groups?

Right, and it's not encouraging that in many predominantly Muslim countries non-Muslims can't even proselytize and apostasy is a punishable crime (at least on the books, whether or not its actually enforced).

x-post:

rockist - getting away from religion specifically, the british papers don't have any problem with putting pictures/cartoons/articles in their papers which offend certain groups.
why should religious groups be protected above other groups?

I don't think they should simply on the basis of being religious.

See, I think actually that's a frustrating thing about all this. If this were a local newspaper, I would be able to gauge (sp?) how it fit into the overall policy, community standards, etc. In this case I have to trust various descriptions of what this Danish newspaper is like, what newspapers there are like in general, etc.

I notice you don't link to any examples of moderation in the muslim/arab press -- only bullshit to fuel your pro-zionist, one world NWO agenda.

Muslim scholar slams mission attacks, urges boycott
Sun Feb 5, 2006 3:26 PM ET

DUBAI (Reuters) - Prominent Muslim scholar Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi condemned on Sunday the torching of Danish and Norwegian embassies in Arab capitals by Muslims angry over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar, told Arabic television Al Jazeera that Muslims should instead channel their fury by boycotting goods of countries who published the drawings in their newspapers.

"We call on Muslims to show their fury in a logical an controlled manner," Qaradawi said.

"We didn't ask people to burn embassies as some have done in Damascus and Beirut. We asked people to boycott products ... We don't sanction destruction and torching because this is not in line with morality or Muslim behavior," he said, referring to calls to boycott he made during Friday's sermon in Qatar.

Thousands of angry Muslim protesters torched the Danish consulate in Beirut on Sunday a day after Syrians set fire to the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus, damaged the Swedish embassy and tried to storm the French mission.

Qaradawi also called for international action over the cartoons -- one which depicted Prophet Mohammad with a turban shaped like a bomb -- which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and were reprinted in other European countries.

"I call on Arab and Islamic governments to ask the United Nations to issue a law forbidding insults to all religions."

Newspapers have insisted on their right to print the cartoons on the grounds of freedom of speech. Muslims believe depictions of the Prophet Mohammad are blasphemous.

"Freedom comes with responsibilities. Only God has absolute freedom," Qaradawi he said.

He is an outspoken Egyptian Sunni Muslim cleric who frequently appears on a weekly religious programme on Al Jazeera television which has a wide viewership in the Arab world.

You are joking, right? Or did someone scrape you off the bottom of a Lyndon Larouche table at a campus activities fair?

and they are also logical because they would be in reaction not to the printing of the cartoons, but to govt inactivity in banning them. whether anyones agrees with this or not, is kind of irrelevant, sanctions and boycotts are entirely valid responses

I do, but that's another thread, or another bunch of threads, and I don't actually feel like fighting that on this one.

x-post:

I think I've seen these photos on BBC, Reuters, etc. so pretty valid. I can't promise that, since I haven't been keeping track of every page I've checked out, obviously.

i dont believe the danish producers deserve to be hurt either, but, that doesnt change the fact that it is logical

(Apologies for the jingoistic site source.)

i dont agree with this, but i still think its logical!

That, of course, goes for both parties, here.