It is essential when it comes to defending the underlying foundation of your ideals and ways of life. As Osmium pointed out:

"If they become more hostile, then they will have to be dealt with. Social unrest will ensue; people will get hurt. However, if we allow Islam to become superior to western values, any expression of dissent from Islam may fall prey to such bully tactics."

That is what I am agreeing with, here.

Well, there's nothing more I can say about this. I still believe what the Danes plan on doing is wrong, but there's nothing I can do to stop it. Hopefully no one will get hurt.

You misread my post:



For the record, I think such an act would be rude and inflammatory, and would advise people who hold me in any kind of regard against it.



I don't quite understand this argument. Do you think that these Danish cartoonists aren't freely expressing their views, but merely their cowardice, because they didn't run straight into a Muslim mob and flash the cartoons there? Good sense and pragmatism are important things to take note of when expressing unpopular views. But it hardly follows from this that the government should step in and silence these views.



I think most people in the west hold the freedom of expression in high esteem. You do not appear to be among these people.



I think a slippery slope of anti-Islamic sentiment of any sort being slowly culled from the population through self-censorship due to fear from Islamic mobs to be a considerably worse fate than even the worst of riots.

I've not even read the thread through but I'll say this:

Freedom of expression has been a staple of our society for a long time. Open expression and outpouring of ideas has done more good than censorship in favour of what is sensitive or 'right'.

Yes it's true that the reprinting of the cartoons will aggravate things more, but as far as it's an expression of how we do things around here I'm all the more for it. I think censorship in the name of not wanting to offend is somewhat self-defeating in the long-run.

Political correctness is a Marxist tool to me, it creates a homogenisation of 'acceptable' viewpoints, thus pushing a certain agenda.

Just my two cents.

I find myself a bit in the middle: Yes, it's those artists' and publishers' good right to have the cartoons published, even if they are incredibly stupid and offensive. However, they are hugely bigoted morons for doing so, it is the right of every muslim in the world to be pissed off about the cartoons and to voice their complaints about being insulted in the streets, and while it's wrong if some of them get violent about it, the makers of the cartoon really had it coming. Freedom of speech doesn't mean noone is allowed to be pissed off about what you say.

Printing the cartoons in the first place was stupid enough. Printing them again is so mind-numbingly idiotic that it gives me an urge to slam my head into a brick wall. Yes, it is their right to do it. No, that doesn't make it any less stupid.

We agree on many specific things, it's the broader causes that we tend to argue over. Anyway I didn't think my discussions with her have been all that quarrelsome. Or at least not quarrelsome enough to constitute some sort of "special history." Resident_Hazard, einvolk and definitely droneriot have gone at it with her far more heatedly than I have. We actually seem to get along quite well in the M-A chatroom.




I completely agree with you. We don't belong there. Israel must fend for itself, as must the various petro-monarchies and dictatorships. Unfortunately the one foreseeable chance that we have for that happening, the election of Ron Paul, is rapidly slipping away. The slaughter of Arabs in the Middle East, the sacrifice of American lives and the squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars is absolutely disgusting and has to end.




Well according to the Danish Government, the second largest group of foreigners in Denmark are Iraqis. Using the blanket term "Arabs" was a bit misleading and a mistake, but it wasn't without some justification.




Obviously you're not, but with regards to non-Whites living in Europe? You're all equally unwelcome, certainly.




Sorry I didn't recall exactly which corner of the Middle East you hailed from. It was a rhetorical, sarcastic, question anyhow. Still it does raise an interesting question: if your justification for the flood of Arabic and Persian immigrants into the West rests on the idea that we ruined the region and "forced them to move" what are you doing in Canada? By your own account Iran is a lovely place. Perhaps you would be better off following in your uncle's footsteps and complaining about our "racism" from there. How exactly did you wind up in our, slightly mislabeled, Great White North?




So non-Europeans have no place in Europe and Europeans have no place in the Middle East? You sound like a bit of a "racist douche" yourself since that's really the crux of what I'm getting at. I'm not advocating any sort of "White Supremacy" - I just think the World would be a better place if we kept to our own. With any luck these demonstrations will convince the Danes to adopt this mentality.

Israelis allegedly mistreating their neighbours are not doing it because those neighbours offended their sensibilities. This a complete non-sequitur and you know it.
And yes, one of those picture had a bomb, and could be considered offensive. The point of freedom of speech, however, is to defend ALL speech, not just harmless speech.


Hold on a minute, you're going into way too many directions at once, and most of them (if not all) are going off-topic, and are once again misrepresentations of my positions.
a) You don't want people to say that "all arabs/muslims/brown people are the same"? Then stop seeing "the West" as some sort of homogenized mass with a single agenda. The politicians responsible for the clusterfuck in the Middle East have nothing to do with the cartoonists and journalists who produced the cartoons. Their freedom of expression should not be stifled just because someone, somewhere, might be offended.
b) The USA HAD to react to 9/11, and while the collateral damage in Afghanistan is very sad, and the whole thing was poorly managed from the start, the Talibans did openly support Al-Qaeda and brought this upon the country. They couldn't stand back and do nothing, and if the leaders of a country openly supported the terrorists and refuse to cooperate in their capture, they will get what's coming to them. For the suffering of the Afghanis caught in this, I blame the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, not the US. But this is in a general sense - if the US military made a mistake that caused the deaths of innocent in their operations, they are responsible for those mistakes. Anyway, another irrelevant tangent, but since you're alleging that I somehow in favour of exterminating masses of people, I figured I could at least defend myself a bit.
b) What I am justifying is freedom of expression, not wars. The wars have their reasons for happening, most of them bad (anything involving Iraq), but I resent your insinuations that I support killing all the Muslims. Address the points that are made, not those you make up in your head.


I didn't mean a "victim" as in the Muslims, I'm talking about this debate. Must you be so obtuse?
What do conspiracy theories have to do with this again? You have nothing to talk about so you drag up old debates or what?


You may not use direct insults, but your strawmen and constant misrepresentations of what I (and others, you do it constantly in the whole thread) say is far more insulting to my intelligence (not to mention far more annoying) than any "bitch" or "idiot" could be. As for the "boy", it has nothing to do with age - Thorgrim is younger than me (as far as I know), but I don't call him "boy" because he doesn't act like one.


There's an old saying that goes something along the lines of, "those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither".
Others have already addressed the freedom of speech issue better than I could, so refer to them.


Correct. You are not allowed to incite people to a riot or other forms of violence, you are not allowed to disrupt the public order such as crying "fire" in a crowded theater (unless there IS a fire, obviously), you are not allowed to slander people.
Those are the limits. Offending people is not one of them.


I am pretty sure that's covered by freedom of speech. Thankfully.


Incorrect. Producing those cartoons would be justified because they fall within the freedom of speech, not because some people think American blacks are annoying.


Now that's just silly.



As others said, it's a matter of principle.


Just like "the West" is all guilty, correct?


You appear to have missed the point of his ironical question. Earlier you said that Muslims were forced out of their countries because of what "The West" had done to them. BeforeGod is simply highlighting the ludicrousness of the assertion. A small minority of immigrants are refugees, but the rest are not.

I have looked at some of the posts in thread and felt I had a few things to add to the discussion.
First off, yes I do believe that from the freedom-of-speech perspective, that the newspapers had every right to publish the cartoons and the violence that entailed the event was wholly unwarranted and unacceptable.

The more important question would be to ask if the the whole decision was in poor taste and offended public sensibility. And that is for the readers to decide and respond accordingly but even if some group/organization is strongly opposed to it there are ways and means to protest the incident that is not only more peaceful but which can help in getting the point across better to those who argue in favor of the publication.

Despite not having the same magnitude of impact and belonging to a different context , I'd still like to draw comparisons of this event to Michael Richards' racial tirade against blacks during stand-up comedy. In that case, clearly everyone was offended and it was universally condemned and as a result his career was in jeapardy. There was no legal action taken in that case nor was Michael assaulted randomly by blacks. And there was no need for either, The public had shown their outrage and it caused sufficient damage to the comedian. Now, coming back to the Danish cartoons, if the public had felt a similar outrage then it would have led to severe criticism of the newspaper and its editorial team resulting in many stopping subscription to it. But since that did not happen goes to show that there was a considerable fraction of people who found the newspaper policy acceptable. And that
is it - the ultimate decision in such matters as causing "offence" is left to the public to decide. And that decision to be respected by the Muslims living in the West. Because they ought to conform to the other cherished Western ideal, democracy.

O

Here's a rational response to the conflict...

I'm sorry, but if you have a children's program advocating cannibalism as a solution to the "problem" of a few cartoons insulting your religion, I think the West had better be prepared for a long, drawn-out fight with Islam.

As I have said in the past, Islam's problem is that as a religion, it's a teenager (in centuries). Remember what Christianity was doing when it was around 1500 years old? Know what an auto da fe is? Remember the Reconquista? Does anyone expect... the Spanish Inquisition?

The problem is that with present technology at the level it is at, we just can't afford to coexist with such a violent ideology. Imagine what the Vatican could have done with Kalashnikovs, car bombs, TacNukes (to say nothing of the larger-yield thermonuclear devices) when it was in its thrashing snitfit against the "infidel"... The world is just too small to be able to tolerate people willing to kill over a perceived insult.

HEY !!! wtf guys ??!! HAHAHA
i'm a muslim, please have some respect and dont generalize shitty talk. ur opinion's much respected and heard but i dont think any of that crap applies on me.. or any of my muslim friends.. we're as "cool" as u atheists, satanists, ...etc
come on ! haha

Please. Just stop.

I can't even begin to understand how this was allowed to be posted in the symposium. What were you thinking?
I really doubt people on here are pro-'death of muslims', and I highly doubt the entire place is atheists, let alone satanists.

x 10^inf

We aren't the people you need to be convincing. If you are who you say you are, you need to be speaking out on behalf of a moderate view of Islam, preferably while using correct spelling, grammar, and capitalization if you'd like to be taken seriously.

Everyone here knows that not all Muslims are terrorists. I'm married to one; last time I checked she has a a lot more thongs in her wardrobe than suicide belts. However, moderate Islam's deafening silence on the issue of terror and radicalism is beginning to sound an awful lot like complicity.

Did you check in the other drawers? I don't think I have ever opened my girlfriend's jean drawer. Shes smart, she knows that's the only drawer you look in.

On the subject at hand. I completely agree with this:



No one person has the right to tell another person what they can or can't do. It is each and every person's decision to say, think, believe, love or hate whatever they want regardless of how true/false/credible/idiotic it is.

Seconded.

Actually muslims are probably the most historically peaceful(behind buddhist), for hundreds of years they were the smartest and inventive religion. Then the europeans screwed it up with the crusades, and we only made it worse when we separated them after WW1.

Because you know the crusades were totally not defensive wars, lashing back against four centuries of war in which Muslims captured two-thirds of the old Christian world.

Historically, yes, within the last few hundred years, the Muslims have not been terribly expansionistic (though a lot of people in N. India would beg to differ). Christianity, too, experienced a bit of a lull in expansionism/aggression, after the Crusades but before the Reconquista, etc.(mostly due to Christians in Europe spending so much time fighting each other), but I'm talking about a pattern. Even Judaism went through its period of zealotry (around year 0)--my point is that religions often seem to go batshit around the 1500 mark, and Islam is no exception.

And if you think that Buddhists are/were historically "peaceful" please look up Ashoka, and what the penalty for entering Tibet without permission traditionally was under the Dalai Lamas. Here's a hint: it rhymes with "retreading." Also bear in mind that Sri Lanka, currently brutally suppressing an uprising by the Hindu Tamils in the north, is a Buddhist country.

Also, as TheCount rightly points out, Islam spent its first two or three centuries in an astonishing bloodletting of expansionism.

As to what the count says: Yes Christians were trying to retake(some of) their land during the crusades, but a lot of the people in muslim territories were not muslim. That is because the Quran actually bans forceful conversion. The reason why the muslim empires flourished was because they were lenient towards those that they conquered. Most of the people killed in those 200-300 years were in wars among muslim upper classes so the general public of the empires didn't have to deal with much(yes they were occasionally killed) bloodshed.


Also you don't see the Buddhist government cracking down on the Hindus because Buddha says it(unlike most religions, where *insert religious icon/symbol/god/prophet* told us too). It's just hunger for power.

The crusades were entirely in response to Muslim aggression.

Muslims had ravaged all of Asia minor and all of the Byzantine Empire except Greece was doing the durka durka Muhammad jihad jig. Understandably the Byzantine emperor sent a request for military aid to the west, Which led to Council of Clermont and in turn led to the first crusade.

I just hate how so many people try to write it off that the Muslims were these free loving folks who danced around happily and were suddenly oppressed by these evil Christian Europeans who came only to rape and pillage.

They waited for Islam to spread its disease over two thirds of the old Christian world, I think the crusades were a reasonable and just response.

Flashy, I notice you didn't even dare touch Ashoka or old Tibet under the Dalai Lamas (not that I don't completely support Tibet doing whatever it wishes) in disagreeing with me.

I sort of agree with your point, but I must say the Sri Lankans do make a lot of it about religious identity.

Yes someone called me Flashy. Ashoka changed religion after he slaughtered his opponents. Tibet, well, you have me there.

The character you've named yourself after is often called that. No offense intended. As for Ashoka, that's absolutely true; I'd forgotten that detail--how convenient for him.

I'm well aware of the character, I was just waiting for someone to call me that.

Thank you!

I don't have anything against religion/traditions as long as they keep extremism to themselves. Immigrants from whatever-muslim-region come here to our country because they had a shitty life from where they came from. I can see no other reason than that. The oppotunitites here are way better than the shithole they come from. I know Denmark is probably one of the hardest places to get in to, but the ones we have here are treatet with a nice place to live, money from the government, free education and so on. They show it back to us by burning and damaging both governament and private property allround the country. Because they are bored are some of the excuses, some other is about the cartoons. They want respect they say. But how should we ever respect them when they show us nothing but medieval attitude towards the country that gave them shelter?! Offcourse not every muslim are like this - I know some muslims who are embarressed about this behaviour from their own society.
For fucks sake - we here pay for the shit they damage through taxes that could be spent way better on the elders, children or police!
Saw that the fucking shithole piece of shit Sudan condemned Denmark and thir president just ordered a boycut on danish goods. This is the same country we helped economical and were about to erase a dept of 2 billion danish kroners (about 200 million £)!

Score one for literacy!

As if Sudan buys many Danish goods, I mean Denmark could go broke from Sudan boycotting Denmark.

The point is, Sudan boycotting goods doesn't matter.

Sudan is spending so much on the mass quantities of Chinese weapons they need to fight unarmed women and children that I seriously doubt much of their GDP is going to Havarti and herring. I have to concur: Denmark, I think you can weather the Sudanese economic boycott without having to fear fiscal collapse.

As our Minister of Foreign Affairs said: The boycot from Sudan is gonna be a lot worse for them, than it will for us. Because as long as the boycot on Danish goods goes on, they can't become members of WTO (World Trade Organisation) and that is going to cost them dearly.

The value of the Danish goods exported to Sudan in 2006 was apparently around 10 million £.

I cannot express my hatred for these extremists. We spent huge amounts of money on them, and what do they do? They burn cars and government property because they have no sense of humour. Fuck them and their medieval attitude. Shove the fuckers out of here. You don't see Jews or Christians acting like this.

Though I would categorize much of what is wrong in the Middle East as having a lot to do Jewish extremism; unfortunately a lot of it is exported from the U.S. in the form of trigger-happy settlers from Brooklyn who settle the West Band and actually believe the hate rhetoric of extremist Jewish organizations like JDL/Kach/Lubovitchers and just shoot at anyone who comes close to them.

Not that I disagree with anything else you've said. That kind of medieval nonsense has no place in Western nations, and if they don't like it, I hear real estate in Khartoum is dirt cheap. The fact that some would like to give up their own sovereignty in exchange for the empty promise of a "multiculturalism" that turns its back on the rights of women and allows Shariah law to proliferate in Western Europe is self-destructive at best, and madness at worst.

Extremism is only good in Black Metal, folks.

What people fail to understand is that not all Muslims are turban wearing, AK.47 toting, Arabs! Muslims can be any race, any age, any gender and any sexuality. Muslims are the followers of Islam, not a race. Also, Fundamentalist Muslims are the ones who want to kill everyone, not normal Muslims.

That is true, however it should be noted that the level of complacency seen from even the moderate muslims about extremist activities is horrible. It is up to them to do more to alienate and fight against the brutal sects that are tarnishing their global image. The world isn't seeing this, and it's beginning to look an aweful lot like they don't care.

There are extremists in almost all religions. Christianity has those "GodHatesFags" bastards, the Jews set up bombs in preschools in Israel, Fundamentalist Muslims kill anything that differs from their ideologies, literal Satanists kill for some Omnipotent being (like every religion), Scientologists are money grubbing bastards, Buddhists (while I do find their religion extremely cool) are judgmental, dogmatic fools who believe that living a terrible life and violently punishing yourself is the only way to have a good life in your next life.

Nice to see we agree on something.

Your understanding of world religions is shallow and one-sided. First, the GodHatesFags crowd is considerably more benign than Hizbollah, Al Qaeda, or the PKK. Second, Israel is mostly populated by Jews and unless there is a specific example of the aforementioned behavior on their part, I'm going to assume you were actually talking about Muslim terrorists from the West Bank and Gaza. I don't think literal Satanists constitute a significant population to warrant inclusion among the world's terrorist organizations. In fact, outside of Varg et al, I don't think there have been any Satanically motivated acts of terrorism. Your post is the intellectual equivalent of firing a hose of feline diarrhea at random houses of worship.

To add to this, the Christians who go around going "God Hates Fags" is the Westboro something something (I forget) and they consist of about 30-50 members; and versus 300,000,000 in the United States, I'm sure thats minute.

I quite agree with your assessment of his post with the following caveats:

I'm not familiar with the incident mentioned (and it was probably a poorly worded reference to the indiscriminate "collateral damage" carnage that often typifies Israeli airstrikes into Palestinian territory), but if you think there aren't Jewish extremists, I think your own understanding of world religions might be one sided.

The Israeli state practices such a widespread and endemic system of bigotry against non-Jews both in its own territory and the territories it occupies that this might well be true. The first mass-scale terrorist bombing of the modern era was perpetrated by the Irgun at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946; almost one hundred people died. The head of the Irgun was Menachem Begin.

I'm sure as hell not saying that they're any worse than Hamas or Hezbollah, but I'm not so sure they're a whole lot better, either. If you read my previous posts you'll see I'm pretty much equal in my condemnation of extremism and ignorance (and the latter includes the self-imposed form of ignorance that calls itself "political correctness") no matter what religion or culture it cynically exploits.

Also, the PKK is a nationalist/separatist movement (named the Kurdish Worker's Party), not a religious one, but please don't let facts stand in the way of idealism.

I was mostly pointing out that Jews bombing Israelis makes little sense, and most certainly is not a widespread phenomenon. It was not my intent to moralize, merely deride for lack of understanding.



I'm fully aware that Israel is not angelic. I also understand that Hamas and similar groups have no other methods of fighting an asymmetrical conflict than through means that are indiscriminate, and that Israeli casualties are much lower than Palestinian ones. Israel's use of cluster munitions (hundreds of thousands of which remain unexploded) during the war with Hizbollah, for example, is utterly reprehensible.



I am aware. I merely stuck them in the list as a generic terrorist entity. I also don't see exactly where I displayed idealism. I don't view Islam as a monolithic block of terrorists waiting to destroy the West though I am wary of the influence of radical Islam.

There were those christians that bombed abortion clinics in the 90's.

You're an idiot. That's nowhere near on the same level as 9/11, the bali bombings, the many suicide bombings in Iraq etc.

Basically, I would otherwise agree with what everyone else has said here.



And this is also a good point. It's hard to think of a more loathsome ideology then extremist Islam, and as someone else said, the silence from the moderates is deafening.