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

So, Iran is trying to make a point about "freedom of expression" by ... er, demonstrating their govt's stranglehold on the total content of all Iranian media. The mind boggles.

I don't think it falls under hate speech and even if it did I think "hate speech" should be legal. Anything excepts direct threats are "okay" with me.

Frankly, I hope any preacher in Western countries spouting this sort of shit (by which I mean incitement to violence) is thrown in jail. And I'd gladly support the same treatment for any Christian preacher telling people to bomb abortion clinics (though I don't know of specific overt examples.)

xpost

That's for sure.

of course. but, to keep circling back to a tiresome point, i think it's an oversimplification to say that what the newspaper did was an act of hate. the context, which is clear but still somehow keeps getting steamrollered in a lot of the discussion, is much more complicated than that. i know it simplifies the discussion if we just make the newspaper the voice of intolerant european xenophobia, but even if that voice was one of the things that came through in those cartoons, it wasn't the only thing and wasn't, as far as i can tell (from a distance, obviously) the primary motivation.

If Iran had "challenged" Europe with some other sensitive issue that pushed the envelope of decency (one that wouldn't involve law-breaking), then we might have learned something about what a free media is or isn't willing to publish.

not really, though. the point isn't what any individual newspaper will or won't publish, it's the reasons they will or won't publish things.

I think the cartoon was stupid. I don't think they should have printed it, and I think it was also stupid of the other papers to reprint it -- sort of thumbing-one's-nose-as-free-expression. But I'd say judging from the disproportional reaction, that's pretty moot at this point.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailheadlines.asp?fileid=20060207.A05&irec=4

along the same lines, the indonesian article you linked is interesting and makes some good points, but this bit bothers me:

Embarrassingly, it was European diplomats who had to remind the press of journalistic ethics, which basically state that publication of offensive material is to be avoided.

that's not what journalism ethics states. nothing of the kind. and it's certainly not what "freedom of the press" means. and i'm sorry for going on about the journalism aspect of this, but i guess it's the perspective i feel most the instinctive affinity for.

It's doesn't even go so far as hatemail usually. This is a crucial point too many people seem to miss in this thread. My mom thought The Life of Brian was blasphemy and she would probably have it removed from video stores if she could. That being said, not she or anyone else in America or the Western world threatened to kill anybody over that movie or ever rioted. Enough of this, "B-b-but we have soccer moms in America who don't like Jesus being mocked!" relativist bullshit. Those soccer moms don't put on Raw Power and light cars on fire, do they? Most of them just write letters if they do anything at all.

That being said, some people thought that none of these cartoons were funny. I agreed until I found this...

http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/917/muslim7nc.jpg

Then a load of arguing ninnies, so I switched over for Little Britain.

SOME OF US JUST FIND THAT (A) DEPRESSING ENOUGH THAT WE DON'T GET BONERS EVERY TIME WE POINT IT OUT, PLUS (B) SO TOTALLY OBVIOUS THAT THERE ARE MAYBE MORE COMPLICATED AND INTERESTING ASPECTS OF THIS TO TALK ABOUT

Note to morons: Hitler wasn't exactly keen on muslims either, you know.

i think the idea is to expose the 'they're only images! cartoons cant hurt anyone" defence as a bit disingenous

although the idea may also be to consolidate position, the right often do well in situations like this, a little fuel on the fire always does wonders for the right, in any country

i'm just sick of the term 'the Muslim world' in all the reports and debates. there is only one world and everyone is in it.

But it was a furore about some Islami cariactures that involved people with faces covered, firing guns, burning Danish flags etc....

Just because you've been on holiday.

He should really have his own column in the Evening Standard

Along with well-known right-wing radicals Yasmin Alibia (sp?) Brown and Francis Wheen?

One rule for him and another for the 8NP?

I have to say that the difference in reactions just demonstrates how different political culture and, dare I say it, sophistication, is between the West and the Muslim world (on average). Weren't these kinds of reactions predictable? Certainly for the French et al, who decided to jump on the bandwagon later.

The interesting discussion is the one about how some Muslims see the way Western countries interact with their part of the world on a par with the way the Nazis treated the Jews. I'm not saying I find the comparison fair, but more people should think seriously about how and why people in the Middle East think that way.

"According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the Nazi Germany SS helped finance al-Husseini's efforts in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann actually visited Palestine and met with al-Husseini at that time and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin.

In 1940, al-Husseini requested the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right:

... to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy.

While in Baghdad, Syria, al-Husseini aided the pro-Nazi revolt of 1941. He then spent the rest of World War II as Hitler's special guest in Berlin, advocating the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts back to the Middle East and recruiting Balkan Muslims for infamous SS "mountain divisions" that tried to wipe out Jewish communities throughout the region.

At the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny (subsequently executed as a war criminal) testified:

The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. ... He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.

With the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Mufti moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero. After the war al-Husseini was indicted by Yugoslavia for war crimes, but escaped prosecution. The Mufti was never tried because the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if the hero of Arab nationalism was treated as a war criminal.

Haj Amin al-Husseini eventually died in exile in 1974. He never returned to Jerusalem after his 1937 departure. His place as leader of the radical, nationalist Palestinian Arabs was taken by his nephew Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini, better known as Yasser Arafat. In August 2002, Arafat gave an interview in which he referred to "our hero al-Husseini" as a symbol of Palestinian Arab resistance.

"The Danish government says it does not control what is in the country's newspapers and that courts will determine whether the newspaper that originally published the cartoons is guilty of blasphemy."

Is that sloppy reporting or does Denmark really have a law against blasphemy?