Seems Muslims around the world have their panties all in a twist over some political cartoons one of which had a caricature of the prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse. Say what you will about Christian Fundamentalists, at least they don’t threaten to kidnap and kill people simply because someone printed a cartoon they didn’t like. Sure, they like to talk like they would love nothing more than to hunt you down and burn you at the stake, but they almost never actually try to realize such desires despite how angry they get unlike some Muslims out there:
Foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers began leaving Gaza as gunmen there threatened to kidnap citizens of France, Norway, Denmark and Germany unless those governments apologize for the cartoon.
Gunmen in the West Bank city of Nablus entered four hotels to search for foreigners to abduct and warned their owners not to host guests from several European countries. Gunmen said they were also searching apartments in Nablus for Europeans.
Militants in Gaza said they would shut down media offices from France, Norway, Denmark and Germany, singling out the French news agency Agence France-Presse.
“Any citizens of these countries, who are present in Gaza, will put themselves in danger,” a Fatah-affiliated gunman said outside the EU Commission’s office in Gaza, flanked by two masked men holding rifles.
If the European governments don’t apologize by Thursday evening, “any visitor of these countries will be targeted,” he said.
Worst thing most Christians will do is pray that you burn in Hell or that God strikes you down in some horrible fashion such as giving you ass cancer. All this gnashing of teeth by Muslims around the world sure does put the lie to the claim that most Muslims are peaceful and don’t condone the actions of the radical militants. Hell, no less than Condoleezza Rice has said that Islam is a religion of peace and love, yeah, my ass it is.
Thursday’s events began when a dozen gunmen with ties to Fatah approached the office of the EU Commission in Gaza. Three jumped on the outer wall and the rest took up positions at the entrance. The group demanded the apologies and urged Palestinians to boycott the products of Norway, Denmark, France and Germany.
A leaflet signed by a Fatah militia and the militant Islamic Jihad group said the EU office and churches in Gaza could come under attack and urged French citizens to leave Gaza. The gunmen left after about 45 minutes. Palestinian employees of the EU Commission had not come to work Thursday, and foreigners working at the office are based outside Gaza, and only visit from time to time.
In Multan, Pakistan, more than 300 Islamic students chanted “Death to Denmark!” and “Death to France!” and burned flags of both countries near an Islamic school.
…
Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Yuri Thamrin said that while his country upholds free expression, “such freedom cannot be used as a pretext to insult a religion.”
Sounds like the Mr. Thamrin has a lot to learn about the meaning of the words “Free Expression.” Now word comes that two of the Muslim world’s main political bodies are seeking a U.N. resolution banning attacks on religious beliefs:
The deputy secretary-general of the Arab League, Ahmed Ben Helli, confirmed that contacts were under way for such a proposal to be made to the UN.
“Consultations are currently taking place at the highest level between Arab countries and the OIC to ask the UN to adopt a binding resolution banning contempt of religious beliefs and providing for sanctions to be imposed on contravening countries or institutions,” he said.
I’ve always wondered what it would be like to violate a U.N. Resolution and now I just might find out. I have just as much contempt for Islam as I do for Christianity and this hissy-fit on the part of Muslims has only increased that contempt several fold. Grow the fuck up and stop beliving in children’s fantasies or at least have the maturity to accept that not everyone is going to agree with you and may even mock you for your ridiculous beliefs. You don’t have to like it and you can bitch about it if you really want to, but actually harming folks over it isn’t going to convince anyone to respect you or your beliefs and may end up bring you more trouble in the long run.
Links found via Decrepit Old Fool and Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
This story is over a year old, but it was still news to me: it turns out that the Islamic Society of Denmark was not convinced that the twelve cartoons in the JyllandsPosten were sufficiently offensive to Muslims to foment riots, so the imams made up their own far more hateful anti-Islam cartoons and attributed them to the Danish. How bizarre can religious belief get?
Zilch, Dawkins in The God Delusion has more background material. Apparently Cartoongate was a case wagging the dog, but this doesn’t paint the rioting masses in a brighter light.
I would say that it’s often hard to paint rioting masses in a good light, especially when the cause is not lack of food or human rights, but an imagined slight to an imaginary friend…
Sort of a pen-and-ink “Gulf Of Tonkin incident”. It takes corrupt leaders to fabricate evidence but it takes a gullible, fearful and hateful public to go along with it to violence.
Exactly, dof. But what can we do to lessen gullibility, fearfulness, and hatefulness among our fellow humans? That ought to be a more important goal than securing oil fields…
The education system might help – integrating and making it a non-issue, but gullible, fearful, hateful people are politically useful if you can get them to do stuff and approve the unfair, it also provides a mask behind which you can hide an agenda, like the oil field securing or just generally causing a distraction
I agree these muslims need to grow up. They throw childish tantrums over the smallest things, the big babies. And over some dumb cartoons, get over it move on.
Course Americans don’t always paint them selves in a good light. Even if it’s not the violent- such as Bush’s support for the overthrow of a democratic government by a military dictatorship, then American people seem to be told they should be getting outraged over the slightest thing- Janet Jacksons tit for instance. Cartoonist Scott Adams once had to edit out the top of the buttock cleft showing above the waist band of a person bending over (Wally being branded if you must know). The not very well drawn part of the backside was feared to be offensive, while corporate branding of employees was considered ok to show (ok it was satire, but really!)
On The Simpsons, a scene in which the Simpsons’ cat, Snowflake, was violently killed, was edited out as offensive, even though on “Itchy & Scratchy” the cartoon-within-a-cartoon of the Simpsons, the cat is regularly dismembered alive, burned with acid, blown up, etc.
The reasoning was, that Scratchy is a cartoon, so it’s OK.
*blink blink*
Well, dof, if we want to get picky, the pain you and I feel isn’t “real” either, because it’s
a) “just” electrochemical signals
b) here on earth and not for eternity in hell.
Right, and evil doesn’t exist. What we mistake for evil is just some tough divine love that builds character for the afterlife.
dof – I think it’s considered a lot worse to kill a character that the viewer might get emotionally attatched to, you almost expect scratchy to die
I’ve noticed in films too, many ‘cannon fodder’ unknowns die and that’s acceptable because nobody cares so they’re a lower form of life, but the main character(s) need only be injured to get more empathy, they also seem to be able to take/evade more hits too (like human tanks) – ie boromir/gandalf – even then they don’t always stay dead
I’ll give some ammo – Something seems a little off with the idea, i meen people do get more resilient and experienced, but even if people need a kicking, we shouldn’t have to need it in the first place-
If a god could make perfect people who need do nothing to retain happiness and never feel bored, who instantly knew everything life could teach and had no needs to fight over, then I can see no way that there would be a need for people to learn to deal with evil
Ah, but Bahamat, you know the standard Christian answer to that: if God had made people incapable of choosing to do evil, they would just be happy little robots, and who wants to be worshipped by robots?
Of course, the problem with that viewpoint, imho, is that free will cannot be reconciled with omnipotence and omniscience, two qualities often attributed to God. I’ve had Christians tell me that even though God knows that I am going to Hell (for example), and He made me knowing I was going to Hell, that I still have free will, and it’s my choice if I go to Hell or not.
This reminds me of a wonderful book I saved up for when I was about twelve called The Boy Mechanic. It had a series of projects from Popular Mechanics magazine, some of them going back to the thirties, many of which were impossibly romantic to a city boy in the sixties (make a crossbow from an old boxcar leaf spring! You can find them lying around railyards. Etc.)
But some of the projects were doable. One was making a two-headed coin, with which you could amaze your friends and confound your enemies, as the saying goes. The coin might think that it’s making a choice when it’s flipped, but you know better: it will come up heads, come hell or high water.
How is this different than the case of omniscience, omnipotence, and free will?
exactly! I have had xtians tell me that the free will/omniscience contradiction is not a contradiction. They attempt to define omniscience one way at the beginning of an argument, only to change the definition halfway through.
I’ve gotten something like your example many times talking with believers:
We agree that Omniscience means knows everything, and that if god exists, then god knows everything, but christians continue: god allows us to choose what to do, even though he knows what our choices are, so we still have a choice. That’s utter gibberish of course – omniscience means not a single exception exists to the knowledge of a being that has that property. I can only be a robot if I am not the omniscient one, or I can only have free-will if no omniscient one exists.
They even compared god to an electric fence once -
until you touch the fence, you don’t know if you will be zapped or not, so you have free will to try it or not, but the fence knows if it is currently electrified or not.
Of course this is not the same as god knowing what I will do. The fence doesn’t know whether I will touch it or not, hence it does not have the omniscience property.
If we start from the assumption of an omnimax creator, then we are robots by definition. It’s just that we can’t reverse-engineer the programming faster than simply living it.
And again, why does God need to be worshipped?
And to “prove” it, the more educated ones fall back to the undisputed king of word game creators: modal logic.
Before anybody objects, modal logic in and by itself isn’t the problem. It’s its application outside of the realm of formal systems and the way apologists conflate operators and common language.
I think an interesting aproach is asking ‘why create us’?
It would only be for worship if god was insecure enough to need worhipping
It would only be for having little robots if he was either bored or wanted to delude himself of having power over something he made up
It would only be to send us to inevitable doom if he got a peverse kick outa it
And it would only be for company/pleasure if he felt loneliness/sadness (or at least had room for improvement on those feelings)
It would be difficult to love a robot, unless you could delude yourself sufficiently into thinking it wasn’t a robot – so he probably wouldn’t be conciously controlling and loving the same sockpupet at the same time
On free will – if you had the power to control people’s feelings and wants, you could make them freely decide to do exactly your bidding. You would be quite vulnerable to a being that (1)desired your trust for no objective reason (2) controlled your feelings and (3) tried to sway your choice/views. But such a being could be benevolent, you need to ask yourself whether or not it has a vested interest that would give you a reason to withold trust
C’mon, dof. Do you really need to ask?
Never too late to join I hope. My thoughts:
Islam as a religion does seem to have more violent followers than other religions. Something that might be explained by the tribalism that runs rampant in those areas, but I am not entirely convinced of this anymore considering there cases of violent Muslims in other industrialized countries. This brings up the case of the American Muslim father that killed his daughter for disobeying him and having sex with her boyfriend.
I think I can say that comparing Islam to Christianity and other religions is bullshit. I have a few Muslim friends and I do know other Muslims that mean no harm, but if there are Muslims that condemn the actions of the “fundamentalists” I haven’t really read about them.
I will say that there are documented cases of Muslims protesting the violence and terrorism. Once such protest took place in Israel. Mothers of Palestinians and Mothers of Jews marched together against the violence of both sides, and thousands showed up. But I think the media in the Middle East is just as bad at reporting these events as our media is. I’m not convinced there is a conspiracy in the American media, but I will say that American broadcasts tend to be one sided and in some cases blatantly false, on the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
While what set of rules and documents a religion uses as pretext to their beliefs shouldn’t matter in the actions they take, the Quron is taken much more literally and seriously in Islam from what I have seen. One Muslim friend takes the Quron very seriously, as he put it, the book is the words of Allah, and it is strictly forbidden to translate the Quron in another language so that it is taken seriously.
I think the problems of living in poor economic conditions, being surrounded by war and fighting, having poor relations with industrialized countries (think US involvement that screws things up worse), a religion that was developed for tribal societies, and poor education all lead to many of the problems we have in the Middle East. And invading countries and dropping bombs on them doesn’t do a damn thing.
People want to fix the Middle East by killing all Muslims. What does that accomplish even if you could? That’s just a cop out for fixing the problems of the world and is a solution I would expect from a tool like Bush, not anyone with a modicum of intelligence. Every civilian we kill in any war we fight generates more terrorists, I think the inverse square law applies here. So how does fighting in Iraq make us safer, or better yet, Iran? Instead of blowing them up why not try to actually fix the problem?
On another topic, I have also gotten into debates with believers that throw the free will shit down. They usually approach from the angle that God created the universe, then just sat back and watched what happened. Which means that there could not possibly be a Heaven or Hell unless God created them, meaning he also has the omniscience property… but I usually just start nodding and say uh huh at the part where God created the Universe, knowing where things are going to head.
Yep—Drop pretty much any other faith into the same conditions and you’d have the “True Believers” fighting over the scraps in the rubble.
At one time, the places we associate with car bombs and such were beacons of tolerance and community compared the Christian West. (I have sort of a history-nerd crush on Saladin, actually.) Then the Crusaders moved in. Followed by the Mongols. As Will Rogers aptly observed, the problem with giving someone a lesson in meanness is that they usually learn it.
you’re fucking sad, pathetic people who need to get the fuck off the computer. you’re embarrassing to the human race and especially america.
?
Don’t anyone say it- lets just all think it about chorpo! (One of Zilch’s lot anyway)
[runs, ducks and hides] Last Hussar [/runs, ducks and hides]
Well, aren’t you charming? What’s the matter, did you actually believe that guy when he said he wouldn’t cum in your mouth?
MUSLIM SCUM
SPREAD THE WORD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjFh4wR2QcM
http://www.apostatesofislam.com/media/stoning.htm
http://mosquewatch.blogspot.com/2008/04/die-non-muslim-scum.html
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=29201_Wafa_Sultan_on_Al_Jazeera&only;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-yJp4EcZJA
“Citizen”, it’s a long way from “that religion is absurd and not what it claims to be” to “people who believe in that religion are (negative attribute).” There are a billion Muslims in the world and the vast majority of them are just like anyone else.
am troubled with the fact that a lot of muslims seem to see themselves as victims… they seem to think that the whole world is out to get them, humiliate them, etc…
honestly speaking… wtf… get on with your lives dudes… work hard, play hard, travel around the world, learn pottery (hmm why not right)… there is much more to life… anyways my 2 cents
Nothing uniquely Muslim about that, aingster. Have you ever listened to Pat Robertson, James Dobson, etc.? Christians, by far the most powerful majority in this country, are constantly persecuted and beaten down by humanists. It’s a sign of the end times!
Quickest way to get called anti-semitic- suggest Israel may not always be right.
I’ve linked before- but it is a goodie.
New series on in… ooo, about 14 minutes. I love the BBC
how can u make such judemental comments just based on wat uv seen in the media not all muslims are the same wat u c are extremeists and frankly they disgrace our religion n wat would you know abt religion ur an athiest so u dont believe in religion or faith…. n respect all religions therefore i aint saying anythin.. keep ya filthy comments to ya self especially if thier not true…
nadia: Please read all the posts. You’ll see that most of us are not judging all muslims, but merely the actions of a few fundamentalist whackos. We are not concerned with what you believe, so long as you let others believe whatever they want, or not. The right for you to swing your fist stops where my jaw begins.
nadia writes (rather poorly I might add):
I’m not basing it on just what I’ve seen in the media. I’ve had a few discussions with Muslims personally that back up my stated opinion.
I agree it’s not representative of all Muslims, but the fact that some Muslims don’t act upon the more negative teachings of their religion doesn’t make those negative teachings any less reprehensible. For the record, the same is true of the more negative teachings of Christianity.
So you’re saying that because I’m an atheist it’s not possible for me to have studied any of the religions I’m criticizing? Sorry, that’s bullshit. I’ve read the Bible extensively and the Koran more than most. The fact that I don’t practice a religion, or hold any religious faith, in no way forbids me from commenting on it.
And yet you’re already said too much. As for respecting all religions, no, I don’t think I will.
Here’s where I offer you a hearty “fuck you.” Don’t like what I have to say? Don’t read my opinions.
you know what man, fuck you and everyone youre related to. you athiest faggot.
Gosh Hussein, why don’t you strap a bomb onto your chest and tell us how your really feel?
My, my. Do I detect a slight note of antagonism?
u know what i say fuckin bomb em all
there rligion is about peace…thats why they blow up busses and trains full of inocent people.they think there the victoms there the ones killing inocents….whats there problem??
????
The US kills innocent people when it invades countries. Its economic policies kill hundreds and thousands every year. So a Muslim extremist blows up a bus of people? (Let’s not forget that Chrsitian extremists have no problems killing either) Well, let’s just put this in context, shall we? Imagine that some foreign power takes away everything you have, just for political gain. Imagine that your family business gets destroyed because Wall Mart moves in next door. Imagine you can’t pay for your son’s healthcare, and he dies. Imagine your wife leaves you as a result. You lose everything, and who is to blame? American economic expansionism. Does that make killing people right? No. Of course not, but let’s not pretend there isn’t blood on the hands of both sides in these conflicts, and instead of promoting further violence, why not try to understand why someone is so willing to commit the ultimate sacrifice – what are they fighting against?
Someone asked if the Quran is really so hateful and filled with statements inciting violence and Islam taking over the world. The answer is “yes!!!” to all of these. And the Muslims are dead serious about all of this. “Strike off their heads and their fingertips and slay them wherever you find them (non-Muslims)”. “Take not the Jews or Christians for friends – they are friends of each other (only)”. You can learn more about the horrors of Islam, the Koran, Muhammed, the Hadith…go to the Internet and type in any of those terms, along with “violence”, “evil”, “infidels” or “dhimmi”. Westerners are so eager to believe that “it can’t be that bad.” It can. It is. Wake up!
Look how everyone jumped on the “Muslim hater” on this forum. I guarantee this: when a “Jew hater” or “American hater” shows up on a Muslim forum, he gets many pats on the back, congratulations, and “of course, brother, we all hate them” type of replies. So, for all the politically correct tender-hearted ones: WAKE UP!!! Do you see my name? ExMuslimConvert. They had me fooled for years with the “peace and love” crap. And, yes, I got to know plenty of Muslims. At this point, I have no Muslim friends that I know of. Does that tell you something about “nice” Muslims, once they realize they can’t indoctrinate you?
Ex-Muslim Convert
Yes, yes, we know Muslims can be petualnt little shits who really need to wake up and smell the espresso. Promoting violence against them isn’t the way to do it though – that only feeds their persecution complex. Ridicule, education (especially women) and logic are far better weapons.
The whole world of Islam is nothing less than a cesspit of evil minded parasites. Islamic countries breed, breed and breed like the vermin they are with no respect for life. They have no knowledge of the one true God, they contribute nothing to life and should be exterminated without thought. The floods in Pakistan prove my point that they are worthless pieces of shit. How many so called brothers in the other Islamic nations are helping them….? NO NOT FUCKING ONE. SO DAMN THE MONKEY BASTARDS TO HELL!
im so srry for what ever u think we did to u…but i litterly cried while readin this crappy article..what the hell is wrong with u ppl ..
i dont get it..
im only 13 and im proudly a muslim girl
i luv my religion and its all my choice ..im not opppressed or anything ..
this article just rove u have no life
was it really necessary ..theres no point ..why hate !!
if u dont like the religion ..keep it too urself
i c children more mature then u ..ur no good example
do us all a favor and think before u do or say because its so sad too c ppl like u doing this
like i siad im srry 4 what ever u claim we did
but dont let ur anger out on us
plz stop plz
i kno ur probly awsome beneath all the hate
ur probly really sweet too
not too offend u
thx in advance =)