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Post by ajerzguy on Feb 5, 2006 13:44:50 GMT -5
The recent flap over caricatures of the prophet Muhammad has now escalated into world tensions. One depicted the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse. The paper said it had asked cartoonists to draw the pictures because the media was practicing self-censorship when it came to Muslim issues. "Anger has broken out across the Muslim world over 12 caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten in September and reprinted in European media and New Zealand in the past week". There have been mass riots against the Danish and Norwegian Embassies in predominantly Muslim countries; Protesters also took to the streets by the thousands elsewhere in the Muslim world, a day after demonstrators in Syria charged security barriers outside the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and sent the buildings up in flames. BEIRUT, Lebanon - Thousands of Muslims rampaged Sunday in Beirut, setting fire to the Danish Embassy, burning Danish flags and lobbing stones at a Maronite Catholic church as violent protests over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad spread from neighboring Syria. (excerpts AP wire) I didn't know that the countries of Denmark and Norway way were Catholic states. I also have a recollection a few years back when there was also a local flap over a couple of "artistic" pieces that were displayed in New York. Namely a depiction of Christ on the crucifix in a jar of urine and a depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung. According to the Muslim stance it would have been ok for Catholics of the world to protest by rioting and burning embassies and houses of other religions. This only supports a couple of my beliefs about nations and Muslims. Nations do have a prejudice against Catholics. Muslims are afraid of, or silently condone the actions of the fundamentalists within their religion. Personally I think it is the later. Looking at news clippings from countries that are Muslim majorities it doesn't appear as though there are any laws against owning weapons. There are many walking around in the open brandishing their weapons. Point in case, Syria, Lebanon, Palestinian occupied lands, Afghanistan, Iran etc. If the Muslim religion was truly one of peace there would be laws against arming oneself as laws were passed in this (US) in the old west. Society must take control over those that would force their will upon the majority (no matter what the so called reason is). If they can't outlaw the weapons then I would think that those that were the true believers of Mohammad would also take up arms and rid themselves of the scourge of their religion. Neither takes place, therefore by their complacency they are as guilty as those that conduct the violence. I'm just wondering when the rest of the free world is going to realize exactly what is taking place. In ancient times it would takes years and decades to conquer countries. Today with the advent of WMDs it would take much less time. You read it here first, the beginning of the end will be with the destruction of Israel. This will be done with the weapons that are going to be produced by the Iranians with the help of some countries that exist outside the middle east. And it will all be in the name of "religion", the "Muslim religion". There will be a "world war" which will be propagated in the name of Muhammad. Luckily at my age I won't be around when it happens. World Peace be with you.
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Post by yilar on Feb 5, 2006 16:22:55 GMT -5
It's been all over the news here for the last week. All day everyday!
The problem revolves around the Muslims in the poor middle east countries not being use to freedom of speech, therefore they can't take ANY critique of their religion.
Funny thing is that the caricatures have shown to be spot on correct...
Also we aint catholic in Denmark. We are generally prostant christians, but in the recent years religion has been the downfall. People are slowly becomming more and more convinced that religion is actual bs, which I actually agree fully with...
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Post by ajerzguy on Feb 5, 2006 18:24:39 GMT -5
People are slowly becomming more and more convinced that religion is actual bs, which I actually agree fully with... That is the root of the problem. You have the right to think what you do. However, those that "do believe" will eventually win out. The reason for this is quite simple. The "religious Fanatics" are more passionate than non believers. Trust me if you don't believe in their God you won't be able to voice it.
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Post by whiplash on Feb 5, 2006 19:07:12 GMT -5
I actually view the recent developments as good news. It shows the "civilized" world just what goofballs these people are. In many parts of the Muslim world the fanatics are in control. The sooner this is recognized the better.
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Post by archon on Feb 5, 2006 22:30:45 GMT -5
It is forbidden to draw/depict/visually show the prophet, Mohammod. When Mohammod was alive he issued this order so that future followers would not begin to idolize his image - as worshipping idols are forbidden. It is a sin. Hence, the reaction. The reason the reaction is so bad in this case is becuase of previous tensions.
As for freedom of speech, there is a "limit" imho. Sure, you have the right to post pics of the prophet with a bomb (as was depicted), but the editors should of had some common respect for Moslems to not publish those pics. They invited this reaction to themselves.
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Post by yilar on Feb 6, 2006 1:24:27 GMT -5
It is forbidden to draw/depict/visually show the prophet, Mohammod. When Mohammod was alive he issued this order so that future followers would not begin to idolize his image - as worshipping idols are forbidden. It is a sin. Hence, the reaction. The reason the reaction is so bad in this case is becuase of previous tensions. As for freedom of speech, there is a "limit" imho. Sure, you have the right to post pics of the prophet with a bomb (as was depicted), but the editors should of had some common respect for Moslems to not publish those pics. They invited this reaction to themselves. It is forbidden to draw muhammed according to the Qu'ran, but the Qu'ran is not law, hence they can shut up. Also Muhammed has been drawn for centuries, going all the back to the old ottoman empire.
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Post by Magzi on Feb 6, 2006 3:30:36 GMT -5
Unfortunately, the tensions have always been there. This just shows how frail the binds preventing complete breakdown are. As for the western press, they seem to regularly publish with a view to provoke reaction on many different subjects. Fortunately, I do believe most of us wherever we are have some common sense and it is only a few fanatics fanning the current problems. Lets hope so anyway.
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Post by tommynt on Feb 6, 2006 7:49:42 GMT -5
free speach is bugged -
sometimes game and reallity not that far from each other
in fact most of moslems now settting fire are just waiting for some reason to do so - now they got it
some lil carton - who cares ...
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Post by MMV on Feb 6, 2006 9:05:47 GMT -5
I constantly hear/read about people from around the world extoling the term "Freedom of Speech" and have always wondered something...
In the United States, "Freedom of Speech" is guaranteed through it's constitution and Bill of Rights. It's NOT "all encompassing and without limits" as indeed there are expressed limits within the documents themselves - i.e. .........UNLESS this freedom limits/effects/infringes upon the other's rights to this same freedom.
In other countries - what specifically guarantees their freedom of speech?
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Post by Tony on Feb 6, 2006 9:19:32 GMT -5
Its kinda funny a so called peace loving religon seems to get into so much trouble.
Even the words they use in there protests "behead those that insult islam".
This is the bottom line, western values and Islam CANNOT co-exsist.
The so called war on terror has made things 100% worst, it has united muslims and made non muslims aware of there cause. i belive since 9/11 a record number of americans have converted.
Im not sure what can be done:
1) Give in, and give them what they want - Then we are facing a bleak future, with little freedom. This will be the first of many demands.
2) Stand firm - Face attacks, with enermies of the state living within the state, as 7/7 demostrated, attacks are very likely.
I belive denmark will get attacked unless they back down, as Ajerz said belivers are always more passionate then non-belivers, if you dont mind dying (Some actually want to, in the name of islam), then what can anyone do to you?
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Post by Avogadro on Feb 6, 2006 10:45:25 GMT -5
I constantly hear/read about people from around the world extoling the term "Freedom of Speech" and have always wondered something...
In the United States, "Freedom of Speech" is guaranteed through it's constitution and Bill of Rights. It's NOT "all encompassing and without limits" as indeed there are expressed limits within the documents themselves - i.e. .........UNLESS this freedom limits/effects/infringes upon the other's rights to this same freedom.
In other countries - what specifically guarantees their freedom of speech?
Freedom of speech yes. But people can only speak about what they perceive. What do you do when all the information in the papers is propaganda and erroneous?
Muslims are like the rest of us, no better, no worse.
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Trayk
Worker
Lets Party at your place!!
Posts: 148
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Post by Trayk on Feb 6, 2006 13:47:51 GMT -5
I constantly hear/read about people from around the world extoling the term "Freedom of Speech" and have always wondered something...
In the United States, "Freedom of Speech" is guaranteed through it's constitution and Bill of Rights. It's NOT "all encompassing and without limits" as indeed there are expressed limits within the documents themselves - i.e. .........UNLESS this freedom limits/effects/infringes upon the other's rights to this same freedom.
In other countries - what specifically guarantees their freedom of speech?
Freedom of speech yes. But people can only speak about what they perceive. What do you do when all the information in the papers is propaganda and erroneous? Muslims are like the rest of us, no better, no worse. Perception does not matter. The guy with the cruxified Jesus in urine offended me (im not Catholic, but Jesus on the cross in not JUST a Catholic symbol). But that DOES NOT give me the right to go ballistic and burn down the museum, incite riots, threaten and kill!! Free Speech is as much about tolerance of others views and opinions as anything. I CAN call you an idiot, but thats my right. My opposing opinion IS allowed.
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Post by whiplash on Feb 6, 2006 14:13:41 GMT -5
Free Speech is a totally foreign concept to these goofballs. It all begins with the Masada. They are brainwashed from early childhood to not think on their own but rather to respect the Muslim Authority and do what they are told. The Cleric pushes the riot button and they riot.
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Post by archon on Feb 6, 2006 14:26:48 GMT -5
Excellent article which can be read here: www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2025511_1,00.html These cartoons don't defend free speech, they threaten itSimon Jenkins I think, therefore I am, said the philosopher. Fine. But I think, therefore I speak? No way. Nobody has an absolute right to freedom. Civilisation is the story of humans sacrificing freedom so as to live together in harmony. We do not need Hobbes to tell us that absolute freedom is for newborn savages. All else is compromise. Should a right-wing Danish newspaper have carried the derisive images of Muhammad? No. Should other newspapers have repeated them and the BBC teasingly “flashed” them to prove its free-speech virility? No. Should governments apologise for them or ban them from repeating the offence? No, but that is not the issue. A newspaper is not a monastery, its mind blind to the world and deaf to reaction. Every inch of published print reflects the views of its writers and the judgment of its editors. Every day newspapers decide on the balance of boldness, offence, taste, discretion and recklessness. They must decide who is to be allowed a voice and who not. They are curbed by libel laws, common decency and their own sense of what is acceptable to readers. Speech is free only on a mountain top; all else is editing. Despite Britons’ robust attitude to religion, no newspaper would let a cartoonist depict Jesus Christ dropping cluster bombs, or lampoon the Holocaust. Pictures of bodies are not carried if they are likely to be seen by family members. Privacy and dignity are respected, even if such restraint is usually unknown to readers. Over every page hovers a censor, even if he is graced with the title of editor. To imply that some great issue of censorship is raised by the Danish cartoons is nonsense. They were offensive and inflammatory. The best policy would have been to apologise and shut up. For Danish journalists to demand “Europe-wide solidarity” in the cause of free speech and to deride those who are offended as “fundamentalists . . . who have a problem with the entire western world” comes close to racial provocation. We do not go about punching people in the face to test their commitment to non-violence. To be a European should not involve initiation by religious insult. Many people seem surprised that a multicultural crunch should have come over religion rather than race. Most incoming migrants from the Muslim world are in search of work and security. They have accepted racial discrimination and cultural subordination as the price of admission. Most Europeans, however surreptitiously, regard that subordination as reasonable. What Muslims did not expect was that admission also required them to tolerate the ridicule of their faith and guilt by association with its wildest and most violent followers in the Middle East. Islam is an ancient and dignified religion. Like Christianity its teaching can be variously interpreted and used for bloodthirsty ends, but in itself Islam has purity and simplicity. Part of that purity lies in its abstraction and part of that abstraction is an aversion to icons. The Danes must have known that a depiction of Allah as human or the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist would outrage Muslims. It is plain dumb to claim such blasphemy as just a joke concordant with the western way of life. Better claim it as intentionally savage, since that was how it was bound to seem. To adapt Shakespeare, what to a Christian “is but a choleric word”, to a Muslim is flat blasphemy. Of all the casualties of globalism, religious sensibility is the most hurtful. I once noticed in Baghdad airport an otherwise respectable Iraqi woman go completely hysterical when an American guard set his sniffer dog, an “unclean” animal, on her copy of the Koran. The soldier swore at her: “Oh for Christ’s sake, shut up!” She was baffled that he cited Christ in defence of what he had done. Likewise, to an American or British soldier, forcibly entering the women’s quarters of an Arab house at night is normal peacekeeping. To an Arab it is abhorrent, way beyond any pale. Nor do Muslims understand the West’s excusing such actions, as does Tony Blair, by comparing them favourably with those of Saddam Hussein, as if Saddam were the benchmark of international behaviour. It is clearly hard for westerners to comprehend the dismay these gestures cause Muslims. The question is not whether Muslims should or should not “grow up” or respect freedom of speech. It is whether we truly want to share a world in peace with those who have values and religious beliefs different from our own. The demand by foreign journalists that British newspapers compound their offence shows that moral arrogance is as alive in the editing rooms of northern Europe as in the streets of Falluja. That causing religious offence should be regarded a sign of western machismo is obscene. The traditional balance between free speech and respect for the feelings of others is evidently becoming harder to sustain. The resulting turbulence can only feed the propaganda of the right to attack or expel immigrants and those of alien culture. And it can only feed the appetite of government to restrain free speech where it really matters, as in criticising itself. There is little doubt that had the Home Office’s original version of its religious hatred bill been enacted, publishing the cartoons would in Britain have been illegal. There was no need to prove intent to cause religious hatred, only “recklessness”. Even as amended by parliament the bill might allow a prosecution to portray the cartoons as insulting and abusive and to dismiss the allowed defence that the intention was to attack ideas rather than people. The same zest for broad-sweep censorship was shown in Charles Clarke’s last anti-terrorism bill. Its bid (again curbed by parliament) was to outlaw the “negligent”, even if unintended, glorification of terrorism. It wanted to outlaw those whose utterances might have celebrated or glorified a violent change of government, whether or not they meant to do so. Clarke proposed to list “under order” those historical figures he regarded as terrorists and those he decided were “freedom fighters”. The latter, he intimated, might include Irish ones. This was historical censorship of truly Stalinist ambition. By such men are we now ruled. That a modern home secretary should seek such powers illustrates the danger to which a collapse of media self-restraint might lead. Last week there were demands from some (not all) Muslim leaders for governments to “apologise” for the cartoons and somehow forbid their dissemination. It was a demand that Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, commendably rejected. It assumed that governments had in some sense allowed the cartoons and were thus in a position to atone for them. Many governments might be happy to fall into this trap and seek to control deeds for which they may have to apologise. The glib assumption of blame where none exists feeds ministerial folie de grandeur, as with Blair’s ludicrous 1997 apology for the Irish potato famine. In all matters of self-regulation the danger is clear. If important institutions, in this case the press, will not practise self-discipline then governments will practise it for them. Ascribing evil consequences to religious faith is a sure way of causing offence. Banning such offence is an equally sure way for a politician to curry favour with a minority and thus advance the authoritarian tendency. The present Home Office needs no such encouragement. Offending an opponent has long been a feature of polemics, just as challenging the boundaries of taste has been a feature of art. It is rightly surrounded by legal and ethical palisades. These include the laws of libel and slander and concepts such as fair comment, right of reply and not stirring racial hatred. None of them is absolute. All rely on the exercise of judgment by those in positions of power. All rely on that bulwark of democracy, tolerance of the feelings of others. This was encapsulated by Lord Clark in his defining quality of civilisation: courtesy. Too many politicians would rather not trust the self-restraint of others and would take the power of restraint onto themselves. Recent British legislation shows that a censor is waiting round every corner. This past week must have sent his hopes soaring because of the idiot antics of a few continental journalists. The best defence of free speech can only be to curb its excess and respect its courtesy.
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Post by archon on Feb 6, 2006 14:33:04 GMT -5
Tommy is right: in fact most of moslems now settting fire are just waiting for some reason to do so - now they got it A friend of mine posted: "Just so you guys know. The majority of people burning and breaking the area (as well as Embassy) apart in Beirut, Lebanon were Syrians and Palestinians. The people demonstrating were holding people back, aswell as trying to get them to stop. It was like 10 people holding back one person trying to start trouble. And I know this because I was there." As for the "little cartoon" remark, that comment is from someone who has has no clue what the religion entails. Not pouncing on you tommy, but stating that most Western people view the same thing: "It's just a cartoon" "Cartoons don't insult ppl or ideas....they are there to make a person laugh" Respect for and from others comes from knowing your neighbours.
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Post by whiplash on Feb 6, 2006 15:17:57 GMT -5
Despite the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammed under any circumstances, hundreds of paintings, drawings and other images of Mohammed have been created over the centuries, with nary a word of complaint from the Muslim world. The recent cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are nothing new; it's just that no other images of Mohammed have ever been so widely publicized.
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Post by yilar on Feb 6, 2006 15:24:29 GMT -5
Well that dude hasn't understood the problem as many others. He still thinks the newspaper did it because they wanted to offend people on purpose.
It's the newspaper that dictate what they want to write, not the other way around. Certain religious fanatics people should not dictate what should be written and what should not be written. That's what free press is all about. If you were to dictate what a newspaper could write then it would no longer be free speech, it would be limited.
The whole story starts with a childrens book author wanting pictures of muhammed for his book, but he can't find artists that would not draw him of fear of death threat (theo van gogh critized islam and was killed). Now Jyllandsposten decides to test the limits of free speech, is it up to the fanatics to dictate what should be written and what should not be written? I think the point is fairly clear. The fanatics have shown exactly what the artists thought of them.
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Post by MMV on Feb 6, 2006 17:00:10 GMT -5
It's the newspaper that dictate what they want to write, not the other way around. Certain religious fanatics people should not dictate what should be written and what should not be written. That's what free press is all about. If you were to dictate what a newspaper could write then it would no longer be free speech, it would be limited several here (not just yilar) have posted about the "press" and "newspapers" there are HUGE differences between "freedom of speech" and "freedom of press" Most arab countries do not enjoy full freedom of the press. Listen to american or european music in an arabic country and you will find MANY words simply "blanked/cut out." The same with american/european television shows that are re-broadcast within the arab countries. And, to the point, the non-arab press who printed the pictures of Mohamid - which would NEVER happen within the arabic press. I think that many members of these arabic countries don't understand "freedom of the press" (nor perhaps, should they)
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Post by Avogadro on Feb 6, 2006 18:22:47 GMT -5
Yes the distinction is there between freedom of speech and press. My point was merely that the Bush administration has installed a fear of terrorism which allows it to keep the power at home. They control the flow of imformation so although freedom of speech may exist it is often ill informed particularily concerning anything muslim.
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Post by archon on Feb 6, 2006 18:32:05 GMT -5
Have you actually seen the cartoon pics?
The reason it was reprinted in those newspapers was exactly "because they wanted to offend people on purpose". Those people just happened to be Muslims.
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