From a comment by Muge Dreamer to a post here about the Mohammed cartoon.

Even though i’m not that religious and all,as a Turkish muslim, i’d like to say that this whole cartoon issue is making me sick. First of all, i can’t get why this person decided to show our prophet as a terrorist. How much does this guy know about Islam? Does he have a secret edition of the Quran that we don’t know off? Or maybe our Prophet had this diary where he wrote all these ideas on terrorism and how bombing buildings and killing innocent people would get us all to heaven.. That must be it, because there is no other way a person would show THE PROPHET of a RELIGION as a terrorist, just because there are some sick people -i don’t even want to call them muslims- who think they will go to heaven by killing innocent people. It’s just so amazing.. “The civilized west versus the terrorist east” story over and over again!

I’d like to add that no reasonable person in Turkey bothers to think evil stuff about christians and jews and all the rest..We are busy with our own lives and we really-don’t-care-that-the-rest-of-the-world-is-not-muslim!

Why don’t you chill out as well and please be a bit more respectful. I seriously think that this kind of offensive stuff makes some people more religious than they already are and some of them end up being the terrorists that blew up the HSBC building in istanbul or the ones behind the Madrid or London attacks..In the end it harms us all.

It might sound lame to some of you, but i’ll write it anyway :

“Imagine all the people, living life in peace…” *may Lennon rest in peace*

You just said everyything I’ve been trying to say. Thank you.

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From the Times of London

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.

Aha, now we’re getting somewhere. As I suspected, the newspapers that originally printed the cartoons are right-wing. Why am I not surprised that right-wing papers will cheerfully fan the flames of racism?

Despite Britons’ robust attitude to religion, no newspaper would let a cartoonist depict Jesus Christ dropping cluster bombs, or lampoon the Holocaust.

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.

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.

AKA racism.

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.

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.

[tags] “Mohammed cartoons” [/tags]

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‘Cartoons triggered Holocaust too: Let Europe learn from history’

Robert Seiple, the US government’s first ambassador for religious freedom, heavily criticized those who published the insulting cartoons of Prophet Mohammed and recalled, “Cartoons triggered the Holocaust, too.”

Seiple serving as the first United States ambassador for religious freedom in 1998-2000 during Bill Clinton’s presidency said, “The question is not the freedom of expression but being civilized.”

Seiple speaking to Zaman warned the European governments “to learn a lesson from the past” and “not to be late”.

The former ambassador suggested Muslims to react against incidents quickly like Jewish people do. Seiple said the religion is sacred and the cartoons ridiculing “the sacred” are “impudent.” “Ridiculing the sacred has no place in a civilized world based on values,” Seiple noted. If the same is valid for Jesus-Christ, he added, a group of Christians would be rightly “very offended.”

Seiple, recalling the caricatures published in Germany during the 3rd Reich period contributed to the formation of the atmosphere leading to the Holocaust, criticized the anti-Semitic cartoons published particularly in Egypt. Nazis had published several anti-Semitic caricatures during the 3rd Reich era. Jews in these drawings was regarded as a race exploiting Germany unmercifully, the source of all evils and corrupting German women.

Cartoon row: Danish embassy ablaze

The newspapers involved no doubt are happy because their sales are up, even as they fuel the hatred and zenophobia. Imagine the reaction if the New York Post ran ‘cartoons’ showing Christians as ignorant white trash cleaning their shotguns so they could kill more abortion doctors, gleefully running more such cartoons every day as protests grew, deliberately throwing gasoline on the fire.

That would be vicious bigotry hiding behind freedom of the press, wouldn’t it?

[tags]Mohammed cartoons[/tags]

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Beware the Ides of March

Osama bin Laden’s latest message. Most observers, including the White House, seem to have missed its significance. In it, bin Laden offered us a truce (an offer we should have accepted, if only to attempt to seize the moral high ground). The Koran requires Muslims to offer such a truce before they attack. The fact that bin Laden himself made the offer, after a long silence, suggests al-Qaeda attaches high importance to it.

We are moving toward war with Iran. Our diplomatic efforts on the question of Iranian nuclear research and reprocessing are obviously designed to fail, in order to clear the boards for military action. It will probably come in the form of Israeli air strikes on Iran, which, as the Iranians well know, cannot be carried out without American approval and support.

Read the whole thing

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