Muslims offended by caricatures proceed to act them out.
In other news, it appears that despite the idiot Jack Straw's cretinous condemnation of newspapers' poking fun at superstitious lunacy, and the craven cowardice of the entirety of the British press in refraining from publishing the cartoons which have some 1.2 billion idiots going off their heads - cowardice dressed up as "respect" for Muslims - our own resident practitioners of the Religion of Peace aren't about to miss out on a golden opportunity to exercise the peaceful inclinations for which their religion is so renowned:
More than 400 protesters — including small children — carried placards scrawled with messages of hate. A baby girl even had “I Love al-Qaeda” on her bonnet.Touching, isn't it? See this al-Grauniad report if you think The Sun is making it up. And now, some scenes from this touching exercise in peaceful protest:The parents of pretty Farisa Jihad, 20 months, proudly proclaimed she is the youngest member of the terror group.
She was brought to the protest by her father Abu, 38. Next to her was a huge poster exclaiming: “Whoever insults a prophet, kill him.”
Another placard nearby said: “Britain you will pay — 7/7 is on its way.” (emphasis added)
But Islam is a Religion of Peace
Muslim Champions of Liberal Democracy
Catch them young!
Norway needs anti-blasphemy regulations to protect minorities against derisive and hateful expression, says lawyer Abid Q Raja.Uh, right, whatever you say; clearly there's nothing restrictive about giving speech "direction" ... This man is a buffoon, but just imagine what it would be like to live in a society in which even supposedly well-educated lawyers are able to mouth such idiocy knowing they have the backing of millions of voters behind them."The point is not to restrict freedom of speech but to give it direction so that weak groups do not feel insulted or mocked.
PS: Just to show how full the hearts of practitioners of Islam are with love, pacificism and forbearance, the BBC is now reporting that the Danish embassy in Syria has been put to the torch! One can only hope nobody's life has been lost because the savages who subscribe to this barbaric superstition are so easily moved to insanity by a few cartoons. Just imagine how interesting life will become when a nation like Iran run by precisely such nutjobs gets its hands on nuclear weapons!
PS: Now they've moved on to burning the Norwegian embassy as well. Ah, the Religion of Peace™!
Perhaps you can write about that Bobby from Japan again - "Nigerians offended by caricatures proceed to act them out". Because all Muslims are alike, just as all Nigerians are alike.
Posted by: donal | February 04, 2006 at 06:39 PM
Yeah, because it's clear as day that only one Muslim is to blame for all the violence and threats I've linked to here, while other Muslims are the ones who are at the forefront of restraining and lambasting the few idiots in their midst - what a fucking moron! Where do low-quality trolls like you come from?
Posted by: Abiola | February 04, 2006 at 06:59 PM
Yes, but it's equally clear that there aren't ``1.2 billion idiots going off their head''. I don't know what 1.2 billion people simultaneously turning to violence would look like, but it would be a lot different than some marches with shouting and a building being torn down.
Are there thousands of people turning to violent overreaction? Tens of thousands? Sure. Maybe even 100,000, but I don't see any evidence for that. What fraction of 1.2billion is that again?
Posted by: Jonathan Dursi | February 04, 2006 at 08:40 PM
If you can provide any worthwhile indicators that any substantial numbers of Muslims anywhere are opposed to the mayhem going on, I will happily qualify my claim. That said, I think you're going to find it hard going, seeing as the current insanity was unleashed by such marginal groups as the Saudi, Egyptian, Libyan, Malaysian and Indonesian governments, as well as through the leading imam of Saudi Arabia and the highly respected (by Sunnis) Sheikh Yussuf al-Qaradawi, and the heads of such politically influential (and successful at the ballot box) organizations as Hezbollah and Hamas. The dried up sales to Arles Foods and the thousands of hate messages/death threats currently inundating newspaper mailboxes in Europe also argue against any glib "fringe" interpretation, as does most commentary even on such bastions of liberal Islam as MuslimWakeUp and Alt.Muslim. Read the responses to the following posts and see for yourself:
http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2006/01/a_mountain_out.php
http://www.altmuslim.com/perm.php?id=1642_0_25_0_C
In short, I've done my homework, so if you're looking to argue that this extremism *isn't* at least as representative of Muslim opinion as the James Dobsons and Pope Benedicts of the world are of Christianity, you've got your work cut out for you. Otherwise despotic governments throughout the Muslim world are going along with this madness precisely *because* they know it's a crowd-pleaser which happens to offer little domestic risk.
Posted by: Abiola | February 04, 2006 at 09:02 PM
Show me the Nigerians who support Bobby and I will turn a blind eye to the preponderance of evidence for a majority of Muslims supporting this nonsense.
Its amazing how stupid buzz words like tolerance, respect and diversity can make people!
As though all the Nazis in Germany were in the army - or all the Communists in the world were hauling people off to Gulags.
Now that Embassies are being torched - I can only wish that this was about a couple of misguided loons getting angry over a bunch of cartoons. Dont want to get my referents mixed up you know.
In any case, all hope is lost. If the British, if the British can become such a bunch of idiots, that their Foreign Minister can condemn a private news organization for printing a bunch of cartoons - ALL HOPE IS LOST!!!
Respect for Islam? WTF is that? Where is the respect for Raelians, or Mormons, or for that matter, Catholics?
We have come to a sad day in the West where a fear of offending those who subscribe to a certain set of ideas ramifies all levels of government. Self censorship in the Western media over this? Who woulda thunk it.
And you know - I cant help blaming globalization for a large part of this moral decadence in the West. Now, Westerners feel they have to please everybody in the name of tolerance - as though the West doesnt have its own culture, values and mores to nurture. We shout to the heavens that other cultures be allowed to nurture and express themselves in whatever savage way they see fit - but Westerners express their own values? Hell no.
Muslims in London, in Khartoum are up in arms - and Im sure the Muslims in Pluto are joining them too. The sad thing about this is the wry \"I told you sos\" one can expect from the likes of Buchanan, Hanson, Huntington and other right wing types who will not hesitate to generalize from this Islamist nonsense to other relatively innocuous populations like Hispanics and Africans.
Posted by: Chuckles | February 04, 2006 at 09:21 PM
I'm very interested in exploring this notion you have of shared accountability; that if something isn't condemned loudly enough to your liking by members of a group, that they share responsibility.
How do you determine whos in the group, and are you the sole arbitrator of whether they condemn something loud enough? Are, for instance, Americans who don't march in protest of their governments actions, equally guilty of torturing people to death as those who actually committed the act? What level of condemnation would insulate them from guilt in that case? Is voting for a different party enough to protect them from shared guilt, or do they actually have to stand on a corner with a bullhorn decrying the actions to be `saved', in your eyes?
Are all Catholics equally guilty of child molestation? Some have taken active steps to have guilty priests expelled, and named and shamed; many haven't. Are each of those Catholics who have made no special, personal, effort to do something just as guilty of molesting a child as those priests who actually did? Is child molestation representative of Catholicism, because there have been no hundred-thousand-person marches in the street? Or is a sad shake of the head enough to protect these Catholics from shared blame? Are there, in your view, important differences in how Catholics and Muslims share blame for these acts?
You have found a handful of protests by handfulls of people, and two web posts, as evidence to back up your preconceptions that an entire group of 1.2 billion people is inferior, or especially violent and deserving shunning. That's not a new approach to thinking about visible outside groups, and there's a word for it. But it's a complicated view of the world; you have to view those two web links as representative of The Truth about a community, but to ignore other links
http://www.cair-net.org/
http://www.milligazette.com/Archives/01012002/0101200222.htm
as being somehow unrepresentative for some reason. I have a simpler approach to moral accountability, that you may want to try sometime; when someone does a bad thing, I assign blame to the person who did it, and not to other people. It's a suprisingly useful moral technique, and I highly recommend it.
Posted by: Jonathan Dursi | February 04, 2006 at 09:25 PM
"I'm very interested in exploring this notion you have of shared accountability; that if something isn't condemned loudly enough to your liking by members of a group, that they share responsibility."
No, of course they don't: most Nazis didn't kill any Jews with their own hands, so we've got to let them off the hook; most fundies today aren't actively running for schoolboard seats or politically agitating for gay-marrigage bans themselves, so the ones that are clearly aren't representative of anything ...
"when someone does a bad thing, I assign blame to the person who did it, and not to other people."
Yours is an incredibly stupid argument: the fact of the matter is that the *vast majority* of Muslims *wholeheartedly support* these acts of violence and intimidation, and *that* is what is at issue here, rather than this sanctimonious, blind, intellectually confused bit of pabulum you've chosen to regurgitate. You clearly aren't actually able to dig up any real evidence indicating to the contrary of what I'm claiming - which isn't surprising, seeing as even "moderate" Muslims are openly boasting about the universal sweep of the boycott instituted by this hysteria -
http://www.altmuslim.com/perm.php?id=1644_0_24_0_M
yet you think I'm supposed to swallow the hypocritical bleatings of CAIR, an American lobbying/Islamic-apologist group infamous for its double-speak and oversensitivity, as if it were representative of the worldwide Muslim ummah? Maybe when you learn something about what statisticians mean by a "representative sample" I'll take what you have to say as more than the smug lecturing of a holier-than-thou who refuses to admit let alone understand the evidence right before his eyes. Frankly, debating people whose thought processes are as shallow as yours is a waste of my time - save your patronizing nonsense for someone down on your intellectual level.
Posted by: Abiola | February 04, 2006 at 09:59 PM
Let's just be completely clear here; you're claiming an equivalence between the Nazis attempted extermination of an entire people, and the recent obnoxious protests and burning down a building.
Yes, one can contribute to a noxious act without actually committing it; there's a term for that, `accomplice', and you can look it up if you like. Over the last centuries, people have come to a fairly clear understanding of what acts make you an accomplice and what don't. You are applying an unusual (to put it mildly) stretch of this term to tar all 1.2 billion Muslims by saying the signs carried by that small sub-group of the 400 protestors -- themselves a small subgroup of London Muslims -- represent the opinions of all Muslims everywhere.
You haven't answered me yet about whether those Catholics who have taken no postive actions w/rt the recent sexual abuse scandal are personally guilty of the sexual abuse that occured by leaders in their church. If they are not, why are Muslims who are not loudly condeming the signs at this protest `guilty' of having the opinions on that sign -- or of torching an embassy on the other side of the world? Should all the Muslims in London have come down to the protest and vetted the signs personally before allowing the protest to go forward? How, in your view, should this self-policing best be done?
You can call names -- to me, to muslims -- as much as you like, and be as loud and sarcastic as you like. Maybe you've found that a useful rhetorical strategy in the past. But it does nothing ut its your logic which is fairly flawed here. (The immediate leap to comparison of a group you don't like with Nazis is an immediate clue, as does referring to people as morons, smug, shallow.) Quick hint -- linking to smart books on your typepad blog doesn't, in and of itself, make your insights any smarter.
Posted by: Jonathan Dursi | February 04, 2006 at 10:16 PM
"you're claiming an equivalence between the Nazis attempted extermination of an entire people, and the recent obnoxious protests and burning down a building."
So you're not only stupid but historically ignorant as well? What exactly do you think the Nazis spent the 20s and 30s doing other than parading around with signs *just like these*? Ever heard of "Blut muss fließen" or "Die Juden sind unser Unglück?" What do you think Hitler did for 15 years other than preach the death of his "enemies", freedom of speech and democracy? You really are a fool ...
"You haven't answered me yet about whether those Catholics who have taken no postive actions w/rt the recent sexual abuse scandal are personally guilty of the sexual abuse that occured by leaders in their church."
Were those acts committed in the name of Catholicism? It's precisely because of illogical tripe like this that you're so richly deserving of contempt.
"You can call names -- to me, to muslims -- as much as you like, and be as loud and sarcastic as you like. Maybe you've found that a useful rhetorical strategy in the past."
No, I've found it to be a most satisfying way to relieve my irritation at knowing there are idiots out there like you and these Muslims engaging in mayhem.
"Quick hint -- linking to smart books on your typepad blog doesn't, in and of itself, make your insights any smarter."
Said by someone so stupid that he equates the sex crimes of a few individuals with mayhem instituted in the name of a superstition with the explicit support of the leading authorities in that superstitious tradition. You're nothing but a dumb troll, and you may consider your invitation to comment here withdrawn.
PS: More intelligent and more historically informed readers are welcome to compare the following phrase with what our typical gentle Islamic protesters have to say at any event.
http://www.hagalil.com/aktuell/israel-0201.htm
"Blut muss fließen, Knüppel müssen fliegen, ich scheiße auf die Freiheit dieser Judenrepublik"
Translation: "Blood must flow, cudgels must fly, I shit on the freedom of this Jew-republic."
And yet to think some dullards find the comparison farfetched ...
Posted by: Abiola | February 04, 2006 at 10:25 PM
By the way, your book list isn't especially good; Wald, Stephani, or even Carrol, are better and more up-to-date GR texts than Misner, Thorne, & Wheeler; and Sakurai or Zettili are better and more up to date QM texts than Shankar. Just sayin'.
Should such intolerance as displayed on those signs go unchallenged? No, no way. And they won't. But you know what? That doesn't mean all 1.2billion muslims are bad, any more than the Holocaust/Sho'ah means that all people of German decent, or all Christians are terrible murderous people.
There's a term for pre-judging a group of millions or billions of people based on the actions of a small number. Either embrace that boldly or re-think your positions; don't try to dress up religious/ethnic hatred as being a logical, principled, considered opinion. That is just what the handful of extremists you rightly mock are doing.
Posted by: Jonathan Dursi | February 04, 2006 at 10:44 PM
"There's a term for pre-judging a group of millions or billions of people based on the actions of a small number."
... So "small" that governments all across the Muslim world are catering to this "small" group, the one Muslim-run paper to speak out against it has been shut down and its editor arrested, and Danish sales in the Middle East have dropped to zero in several product categories ...
"don't try to dress up religious/ethnic hatred as being a logical, principled, considered opinion"
Yeah, it's "ethnic hatred" that must be driving me to feel contempt for a religion several blood relatives of mine actually belong to (to their own misfortune). Nice try there, you might actually have got yourself a gold medal by throwing in the "racist" charge while you were at it. Given your incredible ignorance of history and utter inability to draw the correct conclusions from facts available through any news outlet, you're in no position to be lecturing me in logic, "principles" or "considered opinion", and any more patronizing drivel in the same vein by you will promptly be deleted.
Oh, and for the record, there is absolutely *nothing wrong* with hating a religion: I hate Islam in the same manner I hate Scientology or Communism, as a malign ideological system which is a blight on humanity, and I'm tired of the pious claptrap which tries to equate this thoroughly justified aversion with racism, xenophobia or anything of the sort. I hate Islam precisely *because* I know it all too well both as a creed and from first-hand experience, unlike most of those quick to deny reality to lay the blame for its manifest failings on a "fringe" of "extremists" [sic], not least of all yourself. Learn something substantive about the bloody religion before wasting yet more of my time with the pious lecturing and stupid insinuations; I bet you don't even know what the five pillars are, let alone the names of the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence or their philosophies, yet here you are presuming to tell me what is and isn't representative of Muslim opinion? What self-regarding nonsense!
Posted by: Abiola | February 04, 2006 at 11:06 PM
You may want to read one of my last posts
"Why the western world cannot defeat terrorism"
I am being shot by all sides for it
Maybe you want to join the shooting ;) or perhaps you can see what I mean with it.
I don`t agree with people imposing on othe people anything.
I think it is wrong. But how do we go to stop it and what is the cost?
Regards
http://niquel757.blogspot.com
Javier
Posted by: Javier | February 05, 2006 at 10:49 PM
Javier,
Although I don't agree with the conclusions you draw - I don't believe they follow even from your own arguments - I don't think you're completely wrong either. The fact is that the fanatics *are* far more committed to their beliefs than most Westerners are to principles like freedom of speech or freedom of/from religion*, and this puts the extremists at an advantage - this is straightforward game-theory.
Where I think you go wrong is in expecting that any amount of talking with said fanatics will achieve anything whatsoever - the correct answer is to show that there are enough people on your side who are sufficiently committed to maintaining the principles of your society that the fanatics realize that there is essentially *no chance* of their getting their way, even if all of them were to sacrifice their lives in an attempt to do so. That, unfortunately, means being as willing to kill them as they are to kill you, but being much, much better at it; it also means keeping the supply of potential fanatics within your society to a minimum, which is why I've come around to thinking that perhaps taking on more Muslim immigrants isn't quite as sensible as letting in Mexicans, South Americans, Hindus and Chinese ...
*Just look at the cowardly talk in the American and British press about not showing their audiences the riot-provoking cartoons "out of respect for Islam", when no such respect is ever extended when crosses are dipped in urine ("Piss Christ") or portraits of the Virgin Mary are made from elephant dung; the truth is that nobody in the US or Britain wants to publish the cartoons because nobody wants to be stabbed in the chest or have his head cut off by an irate, violence-prone Muslim, of which there are many about.
Posted by: Abiola | February 05, 2006 at 11:14 PM
jonathan,
Your analogy of Muslims with Catholics is dishonest and stupid. It was catholics themselves who raised the howl over pedophilia among priests in fact where there were civil prosecutions, overwhelmingly it was Catholic prosecutors who pushed the prosecutions. Is it Muslims who are decrying all this violence? Hardly - no, they are yammering and whining about how their feelings have been hurt. How is it that the totlaitariangovernment in Muslim Syria could not prevent the destruction of an embassy?
As for saying that it is unfair to blame all 1.2 Muslims for the actions of a few - do you fancy yourself somehow more intellectually or morally rigorous than the rest of us? or do you just fail to see that it is quite immaterial that only a few are dangerous when you cannot discern who those few are and thus have no option but to suspect the whole lot? Flies are 98% high-quality protein, but it is the the 2% that makes then inedible.
It is not a matter of fairness. Fairness is childish silliness when you are dealing with enemies. I truly wish to deal with Muslims as friends, but it is not my job to convince myself that they are my friends; it is their job, and since they really have more to fear from me than I from them, once I stop indulging their barbarism, they had better start worrying more about my feelings and less about theirs.
As`for insults and hurt feelings - I have my religious convictions and my feelings are hurt whe that is attacked. Whose problem is that? MINE ALONE. Those feelings are my vulnerability and my problem, no one elses. Muslims who cry so much about how little the West respects their feelngs obviously don't believe that BS themselves - why else would they bother telling us if they didn't expect us to listen? They act like a bunch of whiny babies, crying about their hurt feelings, and wonder why no one respects them. If they had any manhood at all they wouldn't need to be so misogynistic.
Posted by: Jim | February 05, 2006 at 11:26 PM
Good on you Jim.
Posted by: Chuckles | February 05, 2006 at 11:30 PM
[If you can provide any worthwhile indicators that any substantial numbers of Muslims anywhere are opposed to the mayhem going on, I will happily qualify my claim. ]
Well, the fact that both the MCB and the MAB have condemned that march for having been hijacked by al-Muhajiroun, meaning that the people holding those placards didn't even have the support of the majority of Muslims _on_their_march_, would seem to be indicative.
I'm rather impressed that the UK papers haven't gone for a cheap circulation boost by printing the cartoons; I was sure that the Independent would have done it at the weekend. It's daft to say that there is any free speech obligation to randomly have a go at the Muslims; I notice that they didn't print a page of Holocaust denial when covering the David Irving case either.
Posted by: dsquared | February 06, 2006 at 08:21 AM
It's also not helpful to condemn groups like the ones you cite above for the vile things they have said in the past when in the present they are saying something good and useful. We can save those condemnations for the future, but for now they get in the way. If people are calling on Muslims to condemn the extremists, then we can stand to listen to them when they do, listen to that part at least, and then go from there.
Posted by: Jim | February 06, 2006 at 08:13 PM
Reprinting the cartoons might very well be just a cheap publicity stunt on the part of the newspapers who do it. But then I'm wondering why they don't go the whole hog and print up some Mohammed cartoons of their own? I mean how hard is it, it's not like they have to be particularly good to achieve their purpose?
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Posted by: radek | February 07, 2006 at 04:23 AM
LOL this thread. You don't pull any punches.
I must say I was a little annoyed at Abiola's antics over at Catallaxy a while ago, but this is just classic stuff.
Abiola, have you written much about Islam in Nigeria?
Posted by: Steve Edwards | February 07, 2006 at 10:32 AM
Iran has announced it will be holding a holocaust cartoon competition in response to this, because obviously it is all the jews fault. I suspect the response to this will illustrate the difference between the west and the islamic world quite nicely.
Posted by: Ross | February 07, 2006 at 01:04 PM
[...I suspect the response to this will illustrate the difference between the west and the islamic world quite nicely...]
Precisely. Precisely. A dit avec precision.
Whats more: The fools obviously cannot be bothered to explained to us exactly *how* the murder of 6 million Jews compares to cartoon caricatures of a Prophet. It is this self serving egotism of Islam that is its fatal blow. This is what is causing all these hyperinflated reactions to Islamic subordination to the West, and this is what causes them to think that every imagined slight to them somehow compares to the suffering of others: In of course, glaring oversight of the notion of their history of inflicting pain and sorrow on a vast section of humanity.
Posted by: Chuckles | February 07, 2006 at 03:50 PM
"Iran has announced it will be holding a holocaust cartoon competition in response to this"
That's funny, I thought that was what all of the Muslim world's press had going on a perpetual basis; how's this going to be any different from reading the normal stuff in rags like "Al-Ahram"?
"because obviously it is all the jews fault"
But isn't everything? If a Muslim wakes up on the wrong side of bed in the morning, a Jew must have snuck in at night to do the deed; if the sink gets clogged, Mossad must be at work. Absolutely everything which goes wrong in the ummah can and will be laid at the door of "The Jews", which is what makes the attempts to use Europe's history of anti-semitism to defend Muslims going crazy over a few cartoons particularly disingenuous - the very people who try to make stupid arguments that lampooning Mohammed is as bad as Der Stuermer's output, and is in fact a foreshadowing of a new Nazism directed at Muslims, are the same ones who spend the rest of their time continuing Hitler and Julius Streicher's legacy, even as they make the claim that the Holocaust never happened anyway ... "The gas chambers didn't exist, but supposing they had, it's a shame they didn't get to finish the job they were built for." Muslim hypocrisy and opportunism seemingly knows no bounds.
Posted by: Abiola | February 07, 2006 at 04:32 PM
"seeing as even "moderate" Muslims are openly boasting about the universal sweep of the boycott instituted by this hysteria -
http://www.altmuslim.com/perm.php?id=1644_0_24_0_M"
Boasting? I believe the word used was "noted." Which it was by non-Muslim media such as the Economist in addition to us.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5504051
If you really want to stretch things to make it seem that we are part of the problem (or judge us by the comments that some readers of our site make), you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone who wants to look at this issue more objectively.
Posted by: zahed | February 17, 2006 at 01:39 PM
I don't have to "stretch" anything: all I have to do is note which site is hosting lame apologias for throttling freedom of speech like the following.
http://www.altmuslim.com/perm.php?id=1658_0_25_0_C
If the definition of "moderate" is arguing that "social responsibility" ought to outweigh the most fundamental of the freedoms which are responsible for creating the free and prosperous West of today, then said "moderation" isn't worth anything at all.
Posted by: Abiola | February 17, 2006 at 02:30 PM
"If the definition of "moderate" is arguing that "social responsibility" ought to outweigh the most fundamental of the freedoms which are responsible for creating the free and prosperous West of today, then said "moderation" isn't worth anything at all."
Glad to see you're against a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution, then. I'd say much more than a "fringe" of Americans aren't. But go ahead and fight the good fight...
Posted by: zahed | March 16, 2006 at 06:15 PM