This has gone far enough! Riots, embassy torchings, death threats, arrests for printing cartoons - chalk that up to Islamic extremism. (And yes, all of those are separate links)
But WESTERN Governments shutting down websites? That goes too far.
Appeasement will not eliminate the problem, only the symptoms. I agree with the Danish Government's refusal to appologize and find it unfortunate that the newspaper did. The newspaper did not do anything wrong, legally or morally. And the "reactions" to the cartoons are not reactionary at all. They were planned.
Look at the timeline of events. Someone had to orchestrate the demonstrations, for it did not take months for the people to get upset.
Furthermore the chantings of this crowd in Malaysia show that this is not the proper reaction of a group wanting the rest of the world to take their claims seriously.
"Long live Islam. Destroy Denmark. Destroy Israel. Destroy George Bush. Destroy America"
These sentiments may be intended well:
"The West should treat Islam the way it wants Islam to treat the West and vice versa - they should accept one another as equals" - Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi
But he declared posession of the cartoons as illegal and shut down a newspaper for reprinting them.
Do I advocate purposely offending others based on their religion? No. And reprinting the cartoons just to rile someone up is wrong. But giving up the right to free press and having to worry about censorship from the government because of the childish (yes, throwing a tantrum is childish) actions of others is also wrong.
The radical Islamists are our generation's book burners who search for secular Galileos and Newtons. They are the new Nazi censors who sniff out anything favorable to the Jews. These fundamentalists are akin to the Soviet commissars who once decreed all art must serve political struggle — or else.
If we give in to these 8th-century clerics, shortly we will be living in an 8th century ourselves, where we may say, hear, and do nothing that might offend a fundamentalist Muslim — and, to assuage our treachery to freedom and liberalism, we'll always be equipped with the new rationale of multiculturalism and cultural equivalence which so poorly cloaks our abject fear...
The deluded here might believe that the divide is a moral one, between a supposedly decadent secular West and a pious Middle East, rather than an existential one that is fueled by envy, jealousy, self-pity, and victimization. But to believe the cartoons represent the genuine anguish of an aggrieved puritanical society tainted by Western decadence, one would have to ignore that Turkey is the global nexus for the sex-slave market, that Afghanistan is the world's opium farm, that the Saudi Royals have redefined casino junketeering, and that the repository of Hitlerian imagery is in the West Bank and Iran.
The entire controversy over the cartoons is ludicrous, but often in history the trivial and ludicrous can wake a people up before the significant and tragic follow.
“Can you explain why Muslims are so angry over a cartoon and why they are rioting, killing and making threats?”
...First, I think Muslims take their religion more seriously than Christians.
The war/battle/hallabaloo is not "West vs. Islam" -- but "against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."
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