I agree, G. Of course points that are tactlessly made will be ignored. And I agree with the hypocrisy of the old boys in defending satire only when it correlates with their bigoted agenda. I’ve argued that myself.

All this is context, but it misses the main point of this thread.

Here, you seem to be arguing against free speech - particularly when it comes to publishing images of Muhammed. But you’re arguing for free speech when it comes to Holocaust deniers. And you’re citing first grade nice people as a reference.

You must admit, it doesn’t look too good, does it?

To both of you:

a) I am not condoning violent reactions to insults and b) I am not defending calls for censorship. Nowhere in this thread have I done this. FD is under the misapprehension that the Hizb-Ut-Tahrir protestors are specifically calling for censorship, yet he can't find them saying this. All he can find them saying is that they are against the type of freedom that says muslims must be insulted. That is not calling for censorship. But thats FD all over - muslims speaking out on anything must always mean they are attacking freedom, even when - nay especially when they don't say it. Its the same routine with everyone here - muslims are guilty by what they say against our values, they are guilty by what they say in support of our values, and they are especially guilty when they say nothing at all. Soren and FD are just a slightly more sophisticated version of yadda. Always, never ever...

Soren wrote on Jan 27^th, 2015 at 9:09pm:


The point is muslims should be able to protest the mockery of their religion without being labelled freedom haters - unless they are specifically calling for laws to enforce censorship or violence against people who mock them.

Soren wrote on Jan 27^th, 2015 at 9:09pm:




Soren,

Non-moslems are insulted and denigrated in many, many ways within ISLAMIC texts.

e.g.
Quote:
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Articles/Quran_Hate.htm



QUESTION;

How should we non-moslems respond to these insults to our character and persons, FROM ISLAM/MOSLEMS ???

Should we have street protests, and hold up placards, which call for the beheading to those who insult and denigrate us and our culture ???

They reject the right to depict and mock Muhammed. They are not merely demanding we abandon our hypocrisy by allowing them to deny the holocaust. You are seeing something that is simply not there.

1,203 Comments
Rod Liddle 24 January 2015

They have been burning churches and murdering Christians again in Niger. You’d think that they’d have more immediately pressing concerns than worrying about a cartoon, Niger regularly winning the award for being the worst country anywhere on God’s earth, and the poorest. But nope, it’s kill-a-kuffar time once more. Some 45 churches set alight and at least five people killed and 50 injured. Adherents of the Religion of Peace (© all UK politicians) included in their pyromania a Christian orphanage, which was thoughtful of them. There have also been massed rallies and protests and the usual effigy-burning business in the vast and dusty Islamic desert rat-holes next door, Mali and Algeria. Not to mention Senegal, and the fragrant delight which is Sudan, plus Niger’s red-hot rival for the worst-country-on-earth award, Mauritania.

Death to France! Death to infidels! Death to Christians! And that’s just Africa. There was more effigy and flag-burning plus the requisite homicidal screeching in good old Pakistan, and next door in Afghanistan, and of course in Iran. Even the Chechens got in on the act — a massed rally in the central square of Grozny with an estimated 800,000 people howling their loathing of France and cartoonists and the West in general, protests which spread over the border into another backwards enclave which the Soviet Union, to its immense credit, succeeded in briefly civilising, Ingushetia. Oh, and there was still more fury in the Philippines, the usual howling at the moon from the country’s Islamic minority whose political wing, the MNLF, was habituated to kidnapping and murder in the Sulu peninsula and Mindanao.

Smoke billows in a street as people demonstrate near the grand mosque in Niamey, Niger Photo: Getty
Everywhere you look in the Islamic world there is outrage and fury and screaming and violence. An anger not occasioned by the vicious executions of 11 people in Paris, but in response to the ‘Je suis Charlie’ stuff, and the magazine’s post-murder edition featuring Mohammed on its front page. The murders did not bother them at all and a substantial majority, by the look of things, will have wholly approved of them. It’s the cartoons which made them go on the rampage, killing people of a different faith.

So next time some jackass of a politician tells you that the Charlie Hebdo attacks were ‘nothing to do with Islam’, or some hand-wringing, PC, public-school broadcaster on the BBC puts it all down to ‘extremists’ — point them in the direction of the millions of people in the Islamic world who rather fervently disagree with that flip and patently delusional diagnosis. If all those people are ‘extremists’, then we need to redefine the word ‘extreme’ so it means something closer to, say, ‘mainstream’ or ‘moderate, consensual centre’. In this, our own vile and incendiary Islamic preachers, such as Anjem Choudary, are much closer to the truth than are our politicians: this is not ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It is all about Islam.

If you doubt it, look around you. It is as the former leader of one of the world’s more moderate Islamic countries, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia, put it. It’s a clash of values, he said — and if the West wishes to sort it out, then the West should give in. I say moderate: under Yudhoyono, Indonesians have been imprisoned for the alleged crime of blasphemy, many for a term of five years. It’s that moderate vs extremist thing again — hard one to call, isn’t it?

So the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, deserves a bit of credit for his round-robin letter to our country’s mosques, which has succeeded in shoring up the familiar sense of acquired victimhood among British followers of Islam. Pickles suggested that British followers of Islam should ‘prove’ their identification with British values.

I suppose it’s a bit late in the day for that sort of thing — remember, 68 per cent of our Islamic community believe that blasphemers should be punished somehow — but better late than never. Forty years of being told that their cultural practices are every bit as valid as those of the Christian majority, however, has established a mindset which will take some shifting.

And so it has proved — self-appointed Muslim leaders have reacted with the usual mixture of petulance and confected outrage. The letter, they insist, is ‘patronising’. One spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain asked: why no similar letter to Christian church leaders demanding they disassociate themselves from the English Defence League? It is difficult to imagine a more lame or ridiculous riposte.

Soren wrote on Jan 28^th, 2015 at 3:43pm:


Freeeeedom, old boy. Get it right.

It’s a tried and trusted trademark. Nine out of ten old boys prefer Freeeedom to freedom.

Freedom? You tried it once yourself, no? Never again.

Never ever.