It is interesting that the newspapers hid behind the argument of free speech. Was that ever in doubt? We all know we can say what we wish, but some things will create consequences. What paper in the western world, or anywhere in the world, would satirize the horrible deaths of Jews in the concentration camps. Such a move would indeed spark outrage, from many camps. The printing and reprinting of those cartoons only serve to show that our culture is insensitive, indifferent, or ignorant to Islam. That in itself, during these sensitive times, has infuriated the Muslim world. While I do not condone violence, it seems that we have set an example by ameliorating our difficulties in the middle east with the gun. Reasonably, we should not have expected different.

The sad thing is that free speech was never really at stake in Denmark, Austria, Norway, NZ, and France where the cartoons were reprinted.

We now risk denying free speech to a huge part of the muslim world because free speech is no longer shown to some as the beacon of freedom, but rather as a tool for religious incitement.

Perhaps I am being Ron Erwinesque but shouldn't Danes have the right to say (draw) what they like and Muslims the right to not listen (read).

Censorship belongs on the consumer side.

This is the biggest story internationally, and it's great to see the Tyee address it, finally.

The cartoons need not be sneered at. The barbs might be trite to us, but they are extremely well aimed, as proved by the reaction.

Of course they are Islamophobic. Phobia means fear. It is right to bring the fear of Islam into public debate. When Christianity and Judaism is satirized, their adherents protest and sue. (Or do nothing, e.g. the non-reaction to "Saved!," the iconoclastic Mandy Moore comedy shot here a couple of years ago.) They do not burn embassies while chanting death threats. Their clergy do not issue assassination orders. Apostates are not subject to murder.

The consequences of these cartoons should have been known. Absolutely. But the consequences are not bad. There is no reason whatsoever to tolerate death threats on the basis of printing a cartoon, or to not want to know which people will kill us for it.

The equivalent is not a cartoon lampooning the death camps of the Holocaust. The equivalent is a cartoon about Moses or Jesus, which I've seen.

There is already cartoons about the Holocaust, stuff like "Maus", Israel has not gone ballistic over it.

Seeing Moslems in the street protesting crashing airliners into buildings or beheading aid workers instead of depictions of a historical figure in a paper in Denmark might be more mature of them.

Let's remember that this started because a children's book couldn't get an artist to draw Mohammed. No artist wanted his name on it because he might get a fatwah issued against him.

Mohammed is a historical figure, not an invented god. It would be like Quebec deciding no one is allowed to draw Champlain on pain of death. Maybe I'll declare Jack Layton my prophet and no newspaper will be allowed to depict his holy image in cartoon or photograph.

Accepting such ridiculous intrusions by foreign religous elements would indeed mean the end of freedom of speech in Denmark because instead you would have freedom of speech except when it comes to Islam.

The article states "But I'm not sure what truth lies in the Danish cartoons"...

It would seem the world Muslim community's reaction is demonstrating their eagerness to prove that there is a significant amount of truth in them.

I think the Islamic world needs more super-bowl-sized sports events to vent its anger and frustration at being held in intellectual bondage by its Western-supported dictators, emirs and various self-appointed keepers of the faith.

Hey Crawford, did you read my story "Smart Animals" which I sent to your North Vancouver address a few years ago?

Censorship belongs on the consumer side.

No, you are not Ron Erwinesque for this belief: Ron doesn't own our collective -- one might almost say sacred -- value we place on freedom of expression. We should never kneel to theocratic thuggery.

No mullah or priest should have the power to determine what is published, what I can draw or write, or what I can read. Period. If they don't want an outsider's view of their religion, they don't have to read the literature and cartoons of non-muslims.

Simply being offended is not sufficient justification for death threats and rioting.

Muslim extremists should simply get over the fact that many people do not believe that Mohammed is sacred. Live with it -- don't kill over it!

If we capitulate over this, what else will be demanded? Perhaps our educated, freedom-loving, unveiled women offend them -- does this mean we should restrict our women's freedom to appease some dogmatic theocrat?

I'm actually surprised at all the intelligence here that cannot see through the facade of this "cartoon" incident. For it should be clear by now, I would think, that this has nothing or very little to do with a cartoon. Rather, this has everything to do with the tinder dry rage of the Middle East/Muslim street with the way the west generally just rolls right over them, installing and propping up authoritarian regimes, plunking their European "Jewish Problem" amidst them in the form of an Israeli state, ripping, raping and running through their oil and other resources, delivering Hellfire imperialist wars upon them wherever they do attempt to stand upright, and, as in Afghanistan, hiding plans to build an oil pipeline across the country to deliver even more oil to the West behind a facade "war for democracy".

And then they dare depict the Muslims as warmongers turbaned with a bomb!

Fuch! The tinder dry fuel for this has been building in the Middle East for a very long time, accelerated by Iraq, and the hypocritical treatment of Iran by the West as part of The Empire's insistance on its own nuclear monopoly and dominance of weapons of mass destruction.

The cartoon was but the match to hand, the straw that broke the camels back. It really has very little to do with a cartoon per se. If one doesn't understand this, they have little, no, or but a shallow understanding of what is going on in the Middle East and with Western Imperialism.

It's more like the Irish Troubles, in which the religious issues between Catholic and Protestants but veils the real underlying, long festering sore of Irish "nationalism's" ongoing attempt to throw off British dominance.

The issue of the cartoon is a phony one, but I support the people of the Middle East in what it really masks-, their protest against the contemptuous and disregarding way the West perceives and treats them overall.

Ah, Coyote. I was wondering who would jump in to carry the flag for the suicide bombers. With your superb understanding of the Middle East, do explain for us the anti-imperialist justification for throwing acid on women, killing daughters for love marriages, the death penalty for apostacy, and Sharia.

The west has been not nearly contemptuous enough of such values.

Can one imagine the outrage that would erupt here, in even this overblown democracy, if the media were to depict mocking cartoon images of the Jews, say as concentration camp guards over Arabs, or of Jesus's mother as really a harlot rather than a virgin. We only appear above the Arab masses on the issue of religious censorship and intolerance because no major media outlet here would dare mock dare do it, say of Christians or Jews. Our media is self-censored on that issue, just not of Muslims and Arabs.

And I support all freedom of expression. One does need to understand the cosequences of it that can arise however, especially amongst a long oppressed people as the Middle East. Where the issue is really about the West's brutal, self-serving and racist treatment of the Muslim Arab masses specifically and generally.

We and our understanding remain the problem, not the Arab street. Treat the Arabs fairly and well in all other regards, and stop killing and exploiting them, they will be at least as tolerant of criticism and satire as our own Christians and Jews.

(And I'm an athiest.)

Oh, please. You can go to any library here and rent Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Jews don't burn down the library or have the publishers killed.

Mordecai Richler wrote a great essay zapping the antiSemitism in the James Bond novels. The Jews did not descend on Fleming's estate looking for hostages.

As for insults to Christianity, they are all around us. (And thank God.) We mock pedo Priests. Christopher Hitchens went off on Mother Teresa, no death threats. Piss Christ attracted controversy over public arts funding, but nobody was burnt or hung.

Mocking Jews and Christians is really easy. They turn the other cheek. The only positive Christian reference I've seen in a movie recently is the kindly, thoughtful priest character who counsels Laura Linney in "I'll Be There For You."

Artists refrain from criticizing Islamists because you're more likely to get snuffed, like Rushdie's Japanese translator. That's the point of the cartoons, thematically, and their value sociologically. Do you get it now?

As for the West's brutality towards the Muslim Arab masses, do you think the Muslim Arab masses thrive under their leaders? Is there the slightest evidence to suggest that?

"With your superb understanding of the Middle East, do explain for us the anti-imperialist justification for throwing acid on women, killing daughters for love marriages, the death penalty for apostacy, and Sharia." Yammering Yammer.

"Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" teaches the Christians obedience to the State.

And I come out of a Pentacostal Christian household, where the teaching and practice firmly was and is that men are the head of the household, and it is the responsibility of women to obey their husbands. This is still a common teaching within many elements of Christianity, with scriptural justification.

And obviously, you have not heard of Robert Pickton, or the mass assassination of female engineering students in Quebec, or the many other jealous rage murders of women that occur here in the enlightened west all the time. And clearly you are unaware of the "Christian" community of Bounty, B.C , and the way in which it drives out all its young sons and males, so that the old men who run the community can divide up the young girls amongst themselves, without competition from these younger males. Nor clearly are you aware of the "free" market in young women for purposes of forcing them into prostitution and pornography that is centred here in the enlightened West everywhere. Or the special and widespread levels of poverty amongst women and children in our society.

This unequal and often brutal treatment of women is a universal problem everywhere, even here in one of the lands of Christiandom. It is not a specifically "Muslim" domain.

I'm not thrilled about Pickton or the porn industry or religious morons of any sort who live here. Women are oppressed everywhere. But the West strives to punish criminals, even when the testimony comes from a woman. That's a key difference between Western and Islamic courts, and the probable reason why women here are not oppressed to nearly the same degree.

Hey, I'm willing to call it something else, if you don't like "west" vs. "Islam." You could also call it "post Enlightenment" vs. "medieval" and that would be the same.

ake the most obvious contradiction. Canada is a secular nation. At one point it was even against the law to broadcast religious messages on the airwaves. By contrast, Islam is meant to be both a religion and a government. Muhammad left no legacy of distinction between the two.

Freedom and tolerance are also defined quite differently in Islam. A Muslim is not free to leave the religion, for example, since apostasy is punishable by death. If a person is prevented by penalty of death from choosing their most important personal beliefs, it's certainly a farce to suggest that freedom is a part of the religion.

According to Islamic law, religious tolerance is conditional upon non-Muslims accepting a position of subjugation. If they don't submit to third-class status and pay the Jizya (tax), then war is to be waged against them until they are killed, converted or forced into dhimmitude.

And, although Canadian law is certainly predicated on the rule that all persons are equal before it, there is absolutely nothing in Islam that isn't based on strict hierarchy of gender and religion. Women and non-believers are to be accorded very different treatment from Muslim men under the law, according to Muhammad - and there has never been any Muslim country that failed to put this into practice.

In fact, when Canada recently flirted with allowing resident Muslims to practice Sharia for certain family matters, some of the strongest opposition came from Muslim women, who preferred their newfound civil rights to reduced status under Islamic law.

Remember, it's the "religion of peace!"

Coyote; It's true. We run over them.

But then they run over us. And each other. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Men Women whites blacks the rich the smart the right the left, bloody near everybody runs over bloody near everybody else just about every bloody chance we get. Seems to be a pretty universal human trait.

If you analyze the thinking that is brought to justify all this abuse, you will find it lacking in persuasiveness.

The Danes, or Westerners are unlikely to have been so rude without some reason to disrespect Muslims. What is that reason? The turban like a lit bomb might be a clue.

Who brought Islam into disrepute?

The cartoon, done by a Dane, was not blasphemy unless the cartoonist was Muslim. The real blasphemy comes when somebody murders God's innocent children coming home from school on the bus, then says God wanted it. Or Grandparents taking their grandchildren out for pizza. Or young people at a party, or mothers standing in line for vegetables.

If these people believe God made us all, then say it's a good thing He has them around to correct His stupid mistakes by slaughtering anyone who disagrees with their own prejudices, then it's not God they serve.

So far from the Islamic ideal of being God's slave, in perfect submission to His will, these murderers have enslaved God himself to justify their own sins and crimes.

Is it any wonder that some people begin to feel justified in showing rudeness? Or even disrespect? And who's really to blame for that?

You are indeed starting to yammer on senselessly, Yammer. :-)

And since even the time of the Crusades, through the great colonialist and especially brutal European Empires of the Dutch, Portugeuse, Spanish, Germans ad infinitum, from then through to the near complete domination of the Middle East by the no less brutal British and French Empires down to their being supplanted by the great current US Empire, which Region they have all divided and re-divided amongst themselves, created, conquered and re-created along ever changed borders and peoples, nearly all the states of the Middle East, they have installed and defended all of these despotic regimes over the Arab masses. And they armed these regimes sufficiently, as they are attempting to do in Iraq and Afghanistan, just enough that they could control and oppress their own people, in the service of whichever Western Empire then prevailed over them.

Dared they, like Sadaam, and currently the Iranians however, to act in their own national interest and defence however, then as we are now witnessing, the full wrath of the West would be visited upon them, and new regimes imposed upon them, impoverishing the peoples to such levels that it would be nearly impossible for them to rise up.

It is the West by and large, with its installed and sanctioned Royal Families of such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan etc, and other despotic regimes, however thin the veil of "democracy" which has maintained this state of affairs, while siphoning off the economic resources which might have otherwise been used to raise the mass standard of living, their modernization and freedom.

It is not about "cartoons". That is only so much mindless yammering.

Nor (according to such Muslim journalists as Mona Eltahawy and Tarek Fatah) has the East:

"A Mountain Out of a Molehill Over Danish Cartoons"

http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2006/01/002971print.php

"What Would Prophet Muhammad Have Done?"

http://www.muslimwakeup.com/main/archives/2006/02/002976print.php

Or perhaps Eltahawy and Fatah are not "real" Muslims -- since the "real" Muslims always react with the kind of righteous rage that the so-called "Arab masses" do (which allows their apologists in the West to justify such actions in the name of oppression). Incidentally, most Muslims aren't Arab.

It's a wee bit more complicated than that. In fact, many Muslims routinely kill and torture one another in the name of internal religious differences. Like my Shi'ite friend who had to leave Pakistan before he was blown to bits by his Sunni neighbours. Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love,
that makes the world go round!

It's rather weird that so many so called adults start burnining things and threaten to kii over a comic strip. Muslim's as far as I ever heard are religious folks. Yet like other groups they obviously have lots of wing nuts. I downloaded the pictures and can't see the reason for what they are doing. Mind you I'm not a Muslim way off to one side who likes to wave a gun around as so may of that faith try to keep their ehads down and hope it all will go away. Maybe a lttle less TV coverage might quell the gangs. It now appears the took on a NATO base. Hope they got their asses shot off.

People everywhere do brutal things to each other. Again, this is not specifically a "Muslim" domain.

Remember Waco, Texas? The wingnut bombing of the Federal building in... Where was it? ... Oklahoma City?

I suspect your "routinely" killed and tortured is much an overstatement, but similarly folks are murdered, cut up, cannibalized (Damler), tortured and otherwise brutalized for all kinds of reasons and non-reasons save lust, vengeance or mere psychopathic/socipathic behaviours. The Greenway or Green River murders in the US.

Religious and other forms of murderous nuttery thrives everywhere. People do terrible things to each other all the time everywhere and for all kinds of reasons. Which does not justify it, but merely acknowledges that it exists as a "human phenomena" everywhere.

I repeat, these are not specifically Muslim behaviours, but human ones.

And again, it is not really about this or that cartoon. Sometimes it is necessary to see beyond the surface appearance of things, in order to get at the real and underlying causes of things.

Repeat. It is not really about this cartoon. That is merely what appears on the surface.

(Though it is interesting to see so many "left wingers" here enjoined with the right wing view of the world. And I accept that is probably an anomoly, but interesting nonetheless, on this issue of the Middle East and its people.)

I am feeling cast out. Like the adulterous woman being stoned. :-D lol

We are not talking about the arrogant, imperialistic west here. We are talking about one of the world’s smallest, most long-standing and most open and tolerant democracies, which accepted immigrants from a very foreign culture and tried its best to accommodate their every need, far more than Canada does for its immigrants. We are talking about a newspaper editor, who, appalled at free expression being threatened by thugs such as the three who beat up a professor at the university of Copenhagen, appealed to artists to stand up for that freedom of expression. And then we are talking about people showing their colors, which turn out not to be pretty.
I urge you to seek information on the background for this debacle, at Wikipedia; find it by googling ‘Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons’, then Wikipedia is one of the first on the list and has the most comprehensive coverage of any media I have seen so far.

Coyote,

Although your analysis of the historic context of imperialism in the Middle East is true, I can't take the extra step and say that this is the "true" cause of the outrage.

Yes, the Middle East is a tinder box right now. But when mobs take the streets & behave violently because, as they say in their own words, of the blasphemy of a cartoon, I think it is rather imperialist to suggest that these reasons are false, but we know the real, unspoken reason for these events.

Isn't this looking down on them by continuing to enforce our way of looking at the muslim world? Why not accept their own stated rationale? Although I appreciate your argument that context is important, I think your argument is a little too sophisticated ...

Just before the cartoons hit the press the western world proclaimed that they would not deal with Hamas because they were a terrorist organization. The west has had no problem dealing with Likud, a party born of terrorist groups. Menachem Begin, as a member of Irgun (Etzel), planned the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Over 90 people were killed including Arab & Jewish civilians. Begin was the first leader of Likud. Second Likud PM, Yitzhak Shamir, member of Irgun & Lehi. Lehi members assassinated Britain's minister of state for the Middle East and attempted to assassinate the High Commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine. Lehi was also responsible for the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, UN rep in the Middle East. Bernadotte had secured the release of 21,000 prisoners from German camps during WW II but Shamir thought he was anti-Zionist and an agent of the British enemy. How about Ariel Sharon? His first known attack against civilians was the "Qibya Operation". Over 60 Palestinian civilians were killed, 2/3 of which were women & children. He's seen as a war hero.
I'd say the cartoons are probably the proverbial straw.

We are talking about the Danish nation which has troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, acting in support of the US Empire. In the minds of the Arab and other Muslim peoples, indeed in mine, their hands are not as clean and pure as you would suggest Dorothy. The fact is they ARE part of the imperialist West. (It matters not how the Danes might like to see themselves.)

And what also tells you that there is more involved here than merely this cartoon is, were that so, it would be but the Danish embassies etc being attacked and receiving protests. Which is not the case. All western embassies and institutions are being attacked and receiving protests.

This cartoon was but the trigger. It is the straw that has served to break the camels back.

The reality is Dorothy, that the Danes are currently complicit with the US Empire in the current war for control of the Middle East and its people , as are the Dutch and a number of other eastern and western European nations, and of course, as is Canada.

It is not really about a cartoon.

“The protests in the Middle East have proven that the cartoonist was right,” said Tarek Fatah, a director of the Muslim Canadian Congress.

“It's falling straight into that trap of being depicted as a violent people and proving the point that, yes, we are.”

Not an overstatement but an understatement.

I think it is patronizing in the extreme to invoke these anomalous examples of murder and torture in the West with divinely sanctioned and socially acceptable examples of everyday violence in many Middle Eastern countries. A look at the penal codes and public policies of such nations as Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and the Yemen in relation to women, gay men, lesbians, and religious and ethnic minorities gives the lie to the notion that violence is anything other than a routine occurrence in the lives of many Middle Eastern victims of theocratic thuggery. It also diminishes the suffering that many of these individuals experience on a daily basis until they are fortunate enough to escape to an "opppressor" nation in the colonialist West. As much as I deplore the imperialist aggression of the West, I despise even more the self-righteous special pleading that apologists for religiously- and culturally-inspired violence indulge in: oh, they're just oppressed Muslims, they can't help themselves, nor should they be expected to.

Move to Iran. Then you'll get a taste of what it's like for real, on a daily basis. Have fun with that.

"Islam is not insulted by such bigotry anymore than it was by Dante centuries ago. Islam and Muslims however are insulted far worse when we allow the extremists to steal the banner of Islam and commit heinous crimes under its name and remain silent." -- Ayman Ashour, Muslim writer

As I started out in this string, I agree with Coyote. This has less to do with the cartoon, and much more to do with the over all oppression coupled with a clash of civilizations that has been culminating for centuries. Both camps appear to lack understanding, but our history has added so much fuel to the fire that indeed, any straw ignited will burn bright. Again, I cannot condone violence, but violence has been the business of nation states since their creation. The Muslim street feels repressed by their own governments, armed and supported by the West. They are fighting back from the street. They are rebelling against an unfair global economic order. One which divides economically along already fractious political and religious divides. All these issues must be addressed if we are to begin healing. Otherwise, this violence may only be a foreshadow of much much worse to come.

Coyote; If it matters not how the Danes might like to see themselves, then it likewise matters not how the murderers would like to see themselves.

In matters of crime, what the criminal thinks of himself or his reasons are not important, unless those thoughts are insane. That exemption only exists for the severely insane. All others are responsible for their own crimes.

Surely this includes others than just the imperialist west. Surely all criminals should be held to account for their own crimes?

I am not a pacifist. I accept the right of people to resist, protest, and war against foreign imperialisms and their occupations. I take that right for myself and my own nation, and I extend it to all others. I have said here, in Tyee and elsewhere, at the beginning of this Afghanistan/Iraq/Palestinian War against the Middle East, that before it is over the entire region and beyond is likely to be inflamed and rise up against western imperialism. It is and will happen and grow even more, in my view. It is still even yet early days in this process. The form it takes, or what formal sillinesses are thrown up to set it in motion, even issues of religious nuttery on both sides, matters not a twaddle.

(And in the background, watching and hoping for the defeat of the US Empire is Russia and China. It is what at back of these events is laying down the ever increasing possibility of a Third World War. Indeed Russia and China are already engaging in joint and ominous military exercises again.)

And the reality is, if Canadians were really thinking about it, and the greatest threats to the independence and sovereignty of their own nation and the peace, we ourselves have a real interest in seeing that the Empire Coalition is defeated, tamed and sent fleeing from the Middle East with its tail between its legs, as occurred in Vietnam. It may make them easier to live with and less threatening even here for awhile as well.

I don't give a damn how that rising against the Empire in the Middle East manifests itself. That is secondary to me. (And like I say, I think all religions are rooted in a kind of nuttery.) I just want it to be ended quickly with the defeat of the Empire, before it escalates and draws wider circles of participants into it, igniting as I say, a much wider and more globally dangerous war.

The sooner the Arab street rises up and defeats this current coalition of imperialist interests, the better for me and, I think, in the end, Canada as well. And the better for the Arab and Muslim masses too. Indeed, better for US citizens also.

Cartoon, shmartoon. Utter, complete hyperbole. That is not what is at work here. That is pablum for the Western street.

"The Arab street" has already risen up and imposed its own views on non-Arab countries, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Malaysia to Nigeria. All Muslims bow to Mecca, but Arab imperialism bothers you not at all, does it Coyote?

You reserve all of your indignation for the West, especially the dreaded USA.

Coyote, I'd never argue that the Moslem world doesn't have issues with the west. I'm pro-Palestinian which doesn't mean I'm anti-Jewish. Just that I don't think you can kick people out of their country to make way for a new country.

But on the Danish cartoon issue I think freedom of speech trumps all. On a US blog I'm on the religous right has agreed with the Moslems that the "liberal" media has gone too far and Mohammed, Jesus and Moses should be exempt from ridicule. I disagree. They're historical figures and we should have as much right to ridicule them as we have Louis XIV.

Allowing any religous group to get an exemption from scrutiny is a slippery slope. Allowing it because they might actually kill you instead of just protesting you makes it even worse. The European media can't give in in spite of the wishes of European gov't and corporate interests wishing them to do so.

.

I knew damned well I wasn't the only one that gets what is really going on and in play here, Satyricon. Good to read you.

I'm just a tad surprised we appear to be in a minority here on Tyee. :-D lol. Though dj2 above, also certainly sees through the smoke and mirrors being thrown up here. Pleased to read you as well, DJ2.

And there will be others, maybe a tad on the shy side reading here as well, of course.

But now, I really must go and do something actually physically practical and useful for awhile.

It's been a pleasure, folks. :-)

I don't excuse anyone's imperialism or religious nuttery. But in practical and dangerous realities, it is always important to know who your own main enemy is.(Assuming you are unfortunate enough to have one. And Canada at least has a really dangerous potential one it has itself invited into its own yard, as it stands now.)

And my country's main threat does NOT come from the direction of the Middle East. They have no way, yet at least, of getting here, in a way that poses any significant threat to me or my own country. Indeed the main enemy of the Middle East is also my own, as I perceive it.

And who was it that said, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." ? :-)

Sounds like something Machiavelli would have said though.

If God is going to be invoked as the justification for political murders & terrorism (i.e. Allah promises 99 virgins for the martyrs, etc.) then that particular interpretation of God is fair game. They brought god into this.

The response we're seeing among Muslims is totally out of proportion to the original cartoons. We seem to forget that this is only the latest in an odious pattern of fatwas and intimidation against writers and artists in the West. I'm referring to everyone from Salmon Rushdie to Madonna (who once had a verse of Koranic poetry embroidered on her dress during a fashion show appearance...they wanted her beheaded too!).

The string of Islamic apologists now doing to rounds on my t.v. set berating Western "insensitivity" as they promote their own ideological agendas makes my stomach turn.

Islam is responsible for its faith being used to justify murder in the name of God.

Hey, if Christians can forebear patiently while secular humanist fundamentalists toss everything from the Inquisition to the Crusades in their faces (and usually in a very scornful & superior tone, as though today's Christians were personally responsible), then maybe Islam needs to acquire the same studious patience with non-believers.

The travesty of all this is that historically Islam used to be the most tolerant of all three monotheist Occidental faith traditions.

Good grief:

Belgian town bans 'Saddam shark'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4688402.stm

Secular humanist fundamentalists were so brave & bold when it came to defending the taxpayer-funded display in NYC of that painting of the Virgin Mary using multi-hued elephant shit.

Where oh where has all that chutzpah gone....?

"The travesty of all this is that historically Islam used to be the most tolerant of all three monotheist Occidental faith traditions."

A long history of foreign occupation and oppression will do that to people.

God is always on everybody's side. In my days in the military, He was on our side. "Gott Mit Uns" on their belt buckles even soothed the Nazi war fodder.

Evem US troops daily gather to pray to their God in Iraq, that He will defend their righteous cause, as they go out to scour and "sanitize" the landscape and people of Afghanistan and Iraq, and their Israeli allies steal the land of the Palestinians.

More pablum for everybody's masses, Nightbloom, East and West.

It's mostly just that the Christian God has been replaced within Capitalist Countries' by The God of Consumerism and Endless GDP Growth, with the Divine Right to consume all the resources of the Earth, upon whomever's homeland territory. He even eyes our North.

The whole world is getting fed up with this Gluttonous God of the West cartoon caricature that is all too real and threatening to us all, including the planet.

The other things that strikes me about this dilemma (it is a moral dilemma for the West) is that it has caught the liberal-Left between its particular orthodoxies, which for once seem incompatible with each other. It sets up Freedom of speech/artistic expression against multicultural sensitivity, and pits anti-Imperialism vs. the Left's traditional anti-Religion prejudice.

It think this is why the response has been so conflicted in the West...the liberal nabobs of the mainstream media can't decide which way to cross their legs. Their fallback position of "being intolerant of intolerance" isn't washing this time.

The media is also probably ambivalent about accepting that it - not George Bush or the U.S. imperialism - is responsible for these outbreaks. More particularly, it's the oEuropean media, while the American talking heads are taking a much more circumspect line.

Coyote wrote: “The reality is Dorothy, that the Danes are currently complicit with the US Empire in the current war for control of the Middle East.”

Danes are not ‘complicit’ with anyone. They are in Iraq, because the UN passed – was it 18 or more – resolutions telling the Iraquis to disarm in the wake of the Gulf war. The UN waffled endlessly in taking steps to enforce its own resolutions. Denmark has before been on the receiving end of the fallout from an international community becoming toothless (1972), so they saw the danger of this happening again and were motivated to act along with the U.S.

Control of the Middle East is only an issue, because the Middle East refuses to control itself. North of the Caucasus, northwest of the Dardanelles, and north of Gibraltar is Europe. It has always been in the sights of the Islamic Middle East as a direction in which to expand. Sometimes they have been successful, then been beaten back again. The crusades were a long time ago. Europeans have evolved. We cannot afford everyone having their turn at being complete idiots; it must be possible to learn from the experience of others, even those not belonging to your own tribe. There is population control and social organization. Look it up.

As for them ‘not being able to get here’, Coyote, please review again the videos from 9/11. See the faces of those poor devils on their way down, who had exercised the only choice left to them, how to go, splashing themselves on a sidewalk rather than being fried alive. Yes, they can ‘get here’.

Did the Hundred Years War teach anybody anything? Do we really need a repeat of that hideous historical period? I'm becoming more and more apprehensive that we may be getting close to kick-off for its sequel....

I'm having more fun with the American Fox News types. On the one hand they hate everyone in a turban yet on the other hand they hate the "liberal" media. Basec on anecdotal evidence their hatred of the media and cartoonists seems to be winning.

Yes, don't invade France unless you're German. Also, that war really can pay for itself if you put your back into it. Oh, and longbows trump knights. And finally, if a hundred years plus of war isn't long enough don't you think it oughtta be?

"Danes are not ‘complicit’ with anyone. They are in Iraq, because the UN passed – was it 18 or more – resolutions telling the Iraquis to disarm in the wake of the Gulf war." Dorothy.

Ahhh, off to see the land of the Wizard of Oz, I presume, are we Dorotht. :-)

No, she is merely either a red state US citizen or one of our own bootlick Neocons using the same Goebellesque justifications for the Iraq War of imperialism as the infamous Herr Colin Powell.

These Bushtit arguments have since been so thoroughly discredited dear, that I feel no real need to reply to them here. Folks here, most of them know better. And a red state Neocon or one of our own BootlickBraunshirts is certainly not likely to be convinced by anything I might say anyway. They are their own kind of religious nutters.

By the by dahling, have you any idea how many UN resolutions have been passed instructing the Israelis to cease their aggression against the Palestinian people?

I just counted 86. (From the web site Jews Against The Occupation.)

http://www.jatonyc.org/UNresolutions.html

And so far as I know, there is no US military action against Israel planned, to force its compliance with UN resolutions, only more guns, cash and subsidizing of the war for them. Indeed there has been nary a peep of complaint against Israel come out of their mouth, out either side of their face, only US vetoes of all these resolutions.

Tell ya somethin' darlin'?

Nah. That went sailing right over your head, right?

Don't hold your breath: there is no so-called Muslim street. This is wishful thinking, a fond thing, vainly invented, by frustrated leftists who see a revolution in the making behind every bush (no pun intended). As Nadia Yassine has admirably pointed out, "Islam is neither a monolithic ideological bloc nor a single sociopolitical reality," much to the chagrin of many armchair revolutionaries who wish it were so, the easier to manipulate it and impose their own expectations upon it.

"They" are often the same ones who claim to be aggrieved whenever "their" fathers or brothers or husbands etc. are tortured or imprisoned or executed. "They" are also the same ones who believe that mutilation, imprisonment, and execution is perfectly acceptable for women, homosexuals, religious or ethnic minorities, etc. And "they" are supposedly the ones who are "fighting back" and "rebelling." Give me a friggin' break. It is a completely different mindset, commonly referred to as "hypocrisy." In the words of the Pakistani writer Badruddin Khan, Muslim extremists are among the biggest hypocrites on the face of the earth.

Smoke and mirrors? Trying to read the actions of some Muslim extremists who are manipulated by their own imams and encouraged by their own corrupt governments into a call for revolution has to be the ultimate exercise in deception. But, by all means, dream on.

Interestingly, images of the Prophet are not strictly forbidden in Islam: Shi'a Islam has a particularly rich tradition of iconography. It is forbidden only among the extremist Sunnis, who seem to be the darlings of the media at the moment.

And Dorothy, the only degree to which we are at risk from the US Empire's Middle East enemies is, the degree to which we are seen to be standing too close to you, and one of your bumboys. It is we who have put ourselves and our homeland in harms way there, as have Spain, Great Britain and the Danes and Dutch.

How to end the danger to us?

Get the fuch out of there and bring our troops home to focus on the defence of our own territory, such as might be posed by "any and all comers". Let Amerika stand on its own in its own pile of camel shitt. End of problemo for us.

This column is running out on a tangent and need to get back to the issue. To make Muhammad with a bomb in his turban has a lot do with proper critique of a religion. Let us establish that. As we all know Muhammad was easy with his sword, there goes a straight line from him to his followers who, with him as an example, commit acts of terror using, among other things, bombs. The drawing of him with a bomb in his head is therefore a proper expression of a justified critique of a religion.

Jyllands-Posten has made use of everybody’s right to freedom of expression and has been handed threatening phone calls and demonstrations from Muslims living in Denmark, so the actions of the newspaper have not been without cost. The Muslims have not been denied their freedom of religion; though as they feel their feelings have been hurt they demand the freedom of expression curbed. There is a lack of logical connection in that. Freedom of religion and the feelings of somebody are not in the same league.

I feel violated in that the Muslims are not acknowledging Jesus as Christ, God’s son, though this does not prevent me from believing that they do have every right to commit heresy as long as they do not disturb law and order. Nevertheless that is exactly what they do, disturbing law and order, when they try to limit everybody’s right to free speech by threatening Jyllands-Posten, yes, and their prime minister. And, when has the degree of a citizen’s outrage started to be conclusive when you have to decide what you can think and print in a civilised country like Denmark. If this is right, then the legal system is in severe danger of breaking down.

In a country dominated by Muslim thinking, pork, beer and girls wearing short skirts will be outlawed and because of the lack of right to free speech, we will not be allowed to quarrel about that. This will be the consequence of the crusade for respect for the ‘feelings’, the one some people are on now. And that would be a shame.

Coyote! I notice you are not really contradicting anything I say, so besides not liking 'my kind', it looks as if you have no argument to offer. Unkind reflections on someone's intelligence, merely because they are not in your camp, tsk, tsk. I thought this was supposed to be an instructive and friendly kind of forum. I still think the Middle East could take a lesson from the Northerners in how to live within their means. Are you familiar with the nine noble virtues? Just the wastefulness of burning a flag! A good piece of fabric, which you could find a frugal use for, if you were the least bit constructive...

Brownnose,

Just another neocon wingnut waste of time. Anyone that would betray his own nation's interest would betray anyone, and is beyond the pale.

It is not a "proper critique" of religion. It is infantile and banal. It is malicious and provocative. It is insulting and degrading to depict the founder of a religion in such a way as to arouse the ire of his most extreme adherents. It is also inexcusably stupid.

It is evident that your knowledge of Islam and the life of the Prophet is nonexistent. These are ridiculous statements. You should actually study the historical legacy of Islam and its diverse expressions in many different cultures. You should actually get to know some Muslims from different nations around the globe. This is not a critique -- it is propaganda.

Coyote, here is some help with the dictionary:

'Fuch' is incorrect. It is spelled '****' and is an acronym for Fornication Under (the) Consent (of the) King.

Individuals who are clearly incapable of addressing those with whom they disagree in a respectful manner on this forum must have their swollen heads shoved so far up their puckered assholes that the smell of their own shit has driven them insane. Just a thought.

Nahh. Not for me. For me it's an anti-neoconservative/anti-fascist, defeat The Empire, bring our own troops home and strengthen the independence, democratic and progressive character of Canadian society kind of forum.

I serve Canada. I have no truck with anyone who would serve a foreign power that has designs on my own nation, and is dragging our society into neocon ruin, and is increasingly impoverishing its working class women, children and men.

You and your kind are my enemy darlin'. I have no desire to be friendly with you or your other pals here at all. Not whatsoever in the least.

As you also now know darlin', it's a way around the Tyee censor. :-D LOL.

You only thought you knew everything.

'I serve Canada. I have no truck with anyone who would serve a foreign power that has designs on my own nation, and is dragging our society into neocon ruin, and is increasingly impoverishing its working class women, children and men.

You and your kind are my enemy'

Now I think you must explain exactly what kind you think I am, what 'foreign power' it is you believe I am in cahoots with. My limited intelligence, you know...I believe i have taken on myself explaining the concerns that made Denmark put in a presence in Iraq; how does that add up to plotting the ruin of Canada? As far as I know, these two countries are allies. Or is it not Canada you are worried about, but only some Canadians, while the rest can go to Hell?
'everything' is a tall bill. There are probably one or two things I don't know. Your way is not 'getting around' the censor, but bending to it. My choice, from now on, will be to not use words that are turned into little stars on auto-pilot, because I don't play.

Coyote,

are you ascribing this to be the conscious motivation of the masses or is it simply the issue du jour used by their leadership to motivate the current protests? I agree that the whole issue about the cartoons is largely window dressing, especially given other depictions of Mohamed in Western culture (South Park being one example). The timing of this so soon after Hamas defeated Fatah at the polls provides lots of TV footage of "unruly Arabs" to discount the disconnect caused in many minds by the failure of "democracy" to put in power leaders favourable to the US & Israel.

No, she is merely either a red state US citizen or one of our own bootlick Neocons using the same Goebellesque justifications for the Iraq War of imperialism as the infamous Herr Colin Powell.

You used a "Goebellesque" technique yourself to discredit an opinion contrary to your own, although your choice of language is more Moscow than Berlin.

You sound like more of a "Socialism in one country" type than a "permanent revolution" type. The only Soviet or Maoist cliche I haven't seen from you is "capitalist running dogs" but "bootlick" is in the same propagandists dictionary. I bet you have or had one of those poster that proclaimed "class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you are on; class analysis is knowing who is there with you."

Bluenose

I have been told that the book about Muhammad and his life is out and it has his picture, a new one, on the front. I hope it will be translated soon, so I can learn more about him. Until then I will claim that the problem the Islamic world has is its failure to adjust, not to the worse, but to the better living conditions it could have. I believe they need a new prophet, one that is not so much of a type-A personality.

Actually Gerhardius, I am merely who and what I am, nothing added and nothing taken away.

I have been influenced by many schools of ideas and passed through many experiences, doubtless including Marxism, Christianity, Anarchy, up close observance of nature and the world around me and more than a small dose of insistant free thinking, indocrinated and jailed in the Canadian military for insubordination, time in solitary on bread and water, and more than a few years spent in poverty, supporting a large family, and working as cheap agricultural labour, trade unionist, sleeping and living in cardboard boxes as a youth on the streets of Regina (in winter), driving a bus for many years on the streets of Vancouver, and almost a half century of marriage to the same woman. In random order, these are the elements that shaped my ideas and loyalties. No university learning of life here, bub. All very real. Though many books I have studied as well, on my own. And that's not to discredit the "paper" value of a formal education.

Oh, and some weeks in Vietnam after the defeat of the French at Dienbienphu, throughout Asia, western and eastern Europe, Asia and some street crawling in the Middle East in search of "a good time" as a very young seaman.

I apologize to no one for what I am. I am become my own man, beholden to no party or ideology. I am a natural and instinctive despiser of capitalism. And I remain a student of life and real experience.

In short, kiss my asss. I y'am what I y'am.

And I have a natural affinity, in case it doesn't show, for those of all lands I perceive to be "oppressed", a hatred for bullies, the lily assed privileged, and ruling classes everywhere and in all systems.

And I know which side you are on, Bub, And it ain't on this side of the fence with me or my kind.

Read "Islam: A Short History" and "Muhammed," both excellent books by Karen Armstrong.

I also recommend Raymond Lloyd's "Cross and Psychosis" article entitled "The Ministry and Crucifixion of Jesus: A Study in Enthusiasm, Envy and Manic-Depression," which you can read here:

webzoom.freewebs.com/shequality/ A%20Psychodynamic%20Study%20of%20Jesus.doc

"Their prophet says 'submit.' Jesus says 'decide.'" -- Princess Sybilla of Jerusalem

The problem the Islamic world has are crooks on the inside and thieves on the outside.

Coyote, your reasoning so far is the purest I've seen on this issue.

Of course this isn't about a mere set of cartoons. They are flashpoints clearly meant to belittle and provoke and now that they have, everyone is wondering why.

Give your heads a shake folks.

But what really amazes me are the number of so-called enlightened ones who pop up here to blame everything on the Muslims as though Christianity, the west major religion was anything more.

I'd suggest a whole lot of people who are getting quite strident about the dangers of Islam ought to take their own deeply embedded blinkers off before venturing out onto this plank.

Until very recently Christianity had far too much influence western thought. In fact, it still does with GW Bush and his cronies playing up to the fundamentalists Christians, who just so happed to have a pact with fundamentalists Jews in Israel.

It startles me to think people in North America are so insulated they don't even see that for the past five years western nations have been involved in a crusade against Islamic nations.

Oh, yes, I forget. We are just bringing peace and democracy to the middle-east. Funny how it always takes these big friggin' weapons to deliver the peace package though.

The most bizarre part of this mess is that media in other European countries have had the stupidity to reprint the cartoons arguing that it's their contribution to free speech.

There never was any official effort to censor the cartoons. Of course individuals and clergy were demanding it, but if you read any newspaper in Canada or the States you'll find dozens of articles daily where people are demanding this or that.

What I have never experienced in the past is the dumb response by other media to replay the stuff lest someone think the editor is a softy.

It's my understanding the editor of the magazine tht initially published the cartoons has since apologized.

Wake up folks, most of the battles ongoing in the middle east are the product of lies, lies primarily pushed by the west in a pathetic effort to justify murder and outright theft of land and resources and it doesn't matter if its by the most powerful nation in the world or one of it's dependant clients states.

So did the prime minister of Denmark, But apparently that's not enough. The Middle East wants them skewered with hot rods I guess.

There was also the jounalist in Lebanon I think it was (or was it Jordan?) who said Moslems bring this on themselves. He was fired.

History doesn't enter into it. For every Crusade there was a Moslem conquest. The Moslems were at the gates of Vienna a few hundred years ago, we aren't refighting that. Nor are we refighting the days of El Cid in Spain, the brutal destruction of Byzantium, the siege of Malta or the conquest of Syria and Egypt. Islam spread at the point of a sword. That's the historical record. Today, even before Iraq, the Middle East was ruled by tyrants. Anti-western tyrants in many cases. Their papers were full of anti-Jewish and anti-Christian cartoons, again, its the historical record.

If the Arab street had exploded in the aftermath of Abu G I would have sympathized but in the wake of a Danish cartoon? It only proves the cartoonist was right.

Illustrators for a children's book should not need to work anonymously just to draw Mohammed. He's a historical figure.

No doubt you parrot Chomsky to the smiling nods of those who have accepted your version of reality as some type of "informed mythology."

Bravo! You have fenced yourself in with a few other narrow minded people who can't imagine why the world doesn't just agree with them. Naturally, given a chance, this select few would love to show the great washed masses how things ought to be. The only difference between your ideology and that of the Neocons is that they are better organised and relevant. Tell me, were you one of the "comrades" disillusioned by the Soviet rape of Hungary or did you stick it out until Czechoslovakia? Did you turn to Mao, only to find yet another idol with clay feet and then decide that Anarchy really holds the key? Or did you go from Marxism to Christianity in search of a "god" that works before settling for atheism? It sounds like you swallowed many "party lines" that all crossed into the man that is Coyote today.

Yes, a "free thinker" who still spouts the language of Pravda in the 1950's with a few nouns changed here and there. May I suggest "death to the fascist beast" as a slogan to protest all things Western?

Throughout all of this remains the reality that the West is acting against the interests of the Middle East: what a shock! The Western governments act in the interests of the ruling elite, just like every other government in the World. The West differs in that it has the ability to project economic and military power anywhere on the planet, while China remains a local military power and is becoming a world economic power. The Middle East will continue to be a flashpoint as long as West remains fixated on resources. The West is not so monolithic as simple thoughts would leave one to believe and it does fracture into further sub-groupings when there is no exterior threat, but pump up Islam as a threat to "Western Values" and from DC to Paris their is unity of message. When the West shifted from creating markets to controlling resources the number of hotspots was necessarily diminished to those with resources of interest. New markets were found by the expansion of consumer credit and the very effective efforts to market items to parents for children or market to children directly. There is no interest in the people near the resources, it is simply about feeding a beast.

Does this suggestion apply to Muslims as well? Or is it reserved for Christians in the West?

Naser Khader is a liberal Muslim MP in Denmark who thinks the episode has helped extremists on both sides. "The campaign against the caricatures is a clear manoeuvre on the part of Muslim radicals," he told the German newspaper Die Zeit.

But maybe Naser Khader and other progressives are just colonialist spies who are trying to destroy Islam from within under the guise of liberal ideology when in fact they constitute a right-wing fifth column rather than a left-wing sixth column. That must be it: since it is impossible for Muslims to critique their own religion and culture, let alone exonerate the West of any significant blame, those Muslims who blame Muslim extremists rather than Western imperialists cannot really be Muslims.

Uh-huh. Sure. And the reasoning of Tarek Fatah and Mona Eltahawy and Ayman Ashour and Nadia Yassine and Badruddin Khan and Abu Fatoush and many other Muslim commentators I could provide comments from is impure nonsense written by imperialist co-conspirators who don't really know what they're talking about, or who do know what they're talking about but don't want me to know that they know what they're talking about. Thank goodness the Left has kept its intellectual credibility intact over these many years. Now I can rest assured that I really know the truth about the matter, because Leftist commentators know far more about Islam and Muslim culture than Muslim intellectuals ever will.

Bluenose and Coyote

I got hold of Karen Armstrong’s ‘Islam’. Thank you, though it has 222 pages, small letters and no pictures.

I am told the author of the Danish book wrote it for his two teenage children and their Danish classmates so it would be easier for them to understand and therefore get along with their numerous Islamic classmates.

It has no ‘cartoons’. It has high-grade illustrations of that kind that can make children read the text and therefore get the message. A friend has given me the URL to ‘Koranen og profeten Muhammeds liv’ by Kåre Bluitgen.
Or: The Koran and the life of the prophet Muhammed.
http://muhammed.hotserv.dk/bluitgen/

It makes me wonder why this minority of Danish Muslims, it is less than 10 %, do not like the book. If it were me who had those ideas, it would be to prevent a bonding between my foreign children and the Danish. That would constitute racism in reverse. But racism is Racism no matter what way it turns.

If this had happened here in Canada I would write my MP right away. How do we know if it is not? Political correctness and all that stuff.

I love Canada! I think I will go and write my MP!

Bluenose, I write from the perspective of a Canadian whose country is being drawn needlessly into a dispute for all the wrong reasons.

One of those reasons is distrust and ignorance over the aims and wants of others.

I really don't need to compare myself to people of other cultures to determine if I am right or wrong.

Here are supposedly intelligent people essentially screaming "well they did it first" or something as appropriately childish to defend their own actions.

Frankly, it sounds a lot like hate to me. Hate of biblical proportions.

BTW, Bluenose, it certainly isn't nor wasn't the Left that put us in this current nightmare.

No this was strictly a right wing screw-up based on lies and greed and now sold as 'the only right thing to do.'

I have little interest in learning the intricacies of various religions including things such as who's god is responsible for the most enemy deaths in recorded history.

There are more interesting mysteries in life
like why people such as yourself fear so much in life.

Put plainly, anyone who can't take a "dull barb" at their religion isn't worth the ground they worship. Freedom of expression trumped moral propriety many years ago in the west (thank God?). Fundamentalists are all the same, Christian, Judaic, Muslim or whatever.

Cartoonists are a personal taste issue. I rather enjoyed the Danish 'toon about the angel telling the suicide bombers to turn back because heaven ran out of virgins.

But our diplomats need to talk to Iran's leaders about backing off the anti-semetic rhetoric (please don't send Stockwell freakin' Day!). Iran has enclaves of Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews who are not being subjected to persecution for one, and for another Iran has the potential to come around to sanity.

Bluenose writes: "...And the reasoning of Tarek Fatah and Mona Eltahawy and Ayman Ashour and Nadia Yassine and Badruddin Khan and Abu Fatoush and many other Muslim commentators I could provide comments from is impure nonsense written by imperialist co-conspirators who don't really know what they're talking about, or who do know what they're talking about but don't want me to know that they know what they're talking about."

Thanks for that. I'm always heartened by the anti-imperialist left when it attacks American adventurism abroad, and disappointed when it is curiously reticent about what can only be called extreme right-wing behavior in the Islamic world.

Check out this editorial by "Ibn Warraq":
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398853,00.html

kurt, I actually think its very sane of Iran to want nuclear weapons. If I was next door to Afghanistan, Iraq and a nuclear armed Pakistan and just a stone's throw from a nuclear India, a nuclear Kazakstan, a nuclear Israel and a nuclear Russia and was on the hate list of a nuclear America I'd want them too.

And I agree on the cartoon versus fundies.

Islam's difficulty adjusting to the last half-millenia of global history & development cannot be blamed on U.S. policy or George Bush.

Sorry to break it to you, guys.

Someone mentioned the 100 years war, which is an interesting historical reference. The West went through centuries of painful & bloody evolution to get to where it is today.

And where are we today?

We're at a point where the established faith traditions are actually the most effective and outspoken defenders of the separation of Church & State. Lutheran, Anglican (Episcopalian) and Roman Catholic branches of the Western faith tradition have all adopted this principle virtually as an article of faith. What's more, the only reason the Western media is able to relentlessly lampoon Christianity is because - for the most part - Western Christians are so damn civilized. Secular humanist fundamentalists on the liberal-Left are confused by the Islamic response because they've been so spoiled with the evolved Christian tolerance of dissent & public "blasphemy" against their belief system.

For example, Pope Benedict's first encyclical (Deus Caritas Est) all but enshrines the necessity of maintaining a secular and religiously "neutral" public space in which Christians must not proselytize but rather "let their love speak silently".

Now, when are we ever gonna hear the mullahs take that approach, I wonder.

We in the West are on the receiving end of a religion that is only just now approaching its painful adolescence. Hopefully, their development won't take as long as ours did, but I think what we're seeing now is something we're going to be stuck with for a few generations to come.

No this was strictly a right wing screw-up based on lies and greed and now sold as 'the only right thing to do." Allan

Indeed Allan, it is not the left that has created this world situation, though we may be left to clean it up as these rightists really screw up everything everywhere, here in the West as well as there in the Middle East.

I care not a fig more about "Muslimism" than I do "Christianity". In my own personal view, they are both equally problematic to the modern world and an objective understanding of things, here and there.(On all the issues of women's rights to control their own sexuality, separation of Church and State, keeping religious instruction in place of scientific understanding out of the "public" school system, and a whole host of other practical, moral and ethical issues rising up out of the the neocon bowels of current capitalism-, again in the West no less than the Middle East. (And many religions and ethnicities have co-existed side by side, as well in the Middle East at least as the West, for very much longer. And the West has its own history of really severe intolerances no less, which is the fundamental reason for the Jews in Palestine in the first place, that is at the very root of this West-Middle East conflict. It is a European problem foisted off onto the Palestinians.)

But as CNN and CBC are both acknowledging this morning, finally, as troops and bases of both the Danes and Amerikans are coming under increasing attack by armed demonstrators across both Afghanistan and Iraq, the issue is NOT this silly cartoon business at all. They do not go this far in offering an alternative explanation of course, but I can and will: it is a skewered, convenient trigger reaction, as not infrequently occurs in social and political events, to Western Imperialism generally and the US Empire particularly interfering in the Middle East.

Continued next post...

From previous post...

And the rise of Muslim fundamentalism itself is no more a "cause" of Middle East radicalism than the rise of "Christian fundamentalism" is the cause of militant imperialism and retrogressive social and economic development in the US or here in Canada. They are both but mere indicators, particular manifesatations of a causal chain set in motion by rising rightist/quasi-fascist forces, particularly within capitalism in the US, which in its manipulations and interferences in the Middle East has set off equally and matching aggressive nationalistic and fundamentalist forces in the long suffering post WW2 Middle East. As these same rightist political forces, which arise out of the system's ruling class and its "resource secutity" concerns, are in the process of setting off a causal chain of reaction to economic and general social decline and inequalities, class and racial divisions within western capitalism itself. (Observe the drift to the ever more extreme right, with its disasterous consequences for the working class, going on throughout capitalism everywhere, here and in Europe.)

The Middle Eastern world is rising up in reaction to this phenomena as it impacts them, not really the silliness of this cartoon issue. That is but symptomatic of the deeper underlying malaise at the very heart of the capitalist social order and the conflict it is generating everywhere, that is rooting itself here, only marginally lagging behind the events of the Middle East. They are about to, however, indeed are already, feed into each other, in my view. And I don't need any goddamned airy fairy "ruling class apologist" intellectual, east or west, to spell that out for me. (And that is not a general assault on all intellectuals.For there are many progressive intellectuals coming to similar conclusions as myself as well, such as Chomsky. :-) I have eyes with which to see, and my own brain to draw my own conclusions for me.

It is ye lily ass and privileged intellectuals who are the real devotees to rigid ideologies, and are frightened by independent, objective and non-apologist analysis.

We may disagree on what lies at the root of this "cartoon issue", but we are fundamentally agreed, I understand this. And no less on this issue of nuclear technology for Iran.

With our own asses parked alongside an aggressive US imperialism, if Canadians can ever muster their own courage to strike out on a trule independent course, we might well find ourselves cornered like Iran is. Hopefully not. But one should never say never.

Actually it IS the left that created this situation. Its we on the left who have pushed for things like women's equality, a free press, the right to vote and freedom of speech.

Without the left none of these things would have existed and we'd all still be living under the same political-social conditions as those found in the Middle East. Its the left that created what the Moslem leadership calls the "decadent west". I see no reason to apologize for it, in fact I'm quite proud of it.

The Moslems are attacking the wrong groups. They should be attacking their own corrupt governments. But then we in the west for a long time did the same. The lower classes were directed to conquer hundreds of other groups from the Irish to the Iroqouis from Morocco to Tibet. We never won any rights. It was only when we rose up against our own governments that we received the vote and public education and became real citizens instead of expendable pawns under a crown.

The Moslem street is being turned against the "decadent west" using gov't supported protests and newspapers. Its all being stage-managed by their own leadership, both political and religous. No different than "pressing" London youth into a navy used to conquer India. The Moslem leadership is simply directing the masses at a foreign enemy to maintain their own positions.

And that foreign "enemy" is a western world-view that left medieval inspired attitudes behind a hundred years ago. The Moslem leadership doesn't want a left-wing world-view to infiltrate their countries. They don't want democracy, don't want mass ownership of the oil and don't want freedom of speech and assembly.

The fact is, many on the western right would be quite happy to let Moslem leaders issue kill orders against Dutch film makers or Danish cartoonists. You don't have to go to Damascus to find assaults on freedom of speech. You can find it right here at home where the right discovered the best way to fight a free press was to buy it. The best way to fight freedom of speech was to make sure the opinion leaders were bought and paid for and spouting the party line.

The left should be standing with the Danish cartoonist, with the Dutch film maker Van Gogh, with all those in the world who are fighting for real, not manufactured, freedom.

Thanks for breaking it to us, Nightbloom. Where would we poor working class slobs be without you enlightened one's to "break it to us.".

Western Christians, the "traditional" organized "establishment" churches you so fawn over, are so "civilized" 'cause they've got no damned choice in an increasingly secular west anyway. They have to take our lampooning. They are barely clinging to life and relevancy as it is anyway. And they are the better and more reasonable for it. (Though, as around the Neocon Repugs in the US and the Neocon Conservatives here, the protestant "fundamentalists" that are increasingly overwhelming the "traditional" churches, these latter in decline as they have been for awhile, are making a grab for influence and power. And getting a sympathetic hearing from the political servants of the ruling class they are, who find their "Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" view of temporal reality, of some usefulness to be spread amongst the lower levels of society :-)

And once they get over this period of conflict with Western imperialism and are left to their own independent development, and can hopefully secure a prolonged period of non-interference, I predict, possibly following a period of social and economic upheaval, and the gradual growth of a sence of security and secularization, as it was in Iraq despite Sadaam, that the fundamentalist religious loonies of the Middle East will also be tamed in time. Certainl it is not our job to do it. (And I think it is still too early to presume that all religious loonie tendencies within Christianity have been "civilized", for we still see to much such as Buchanan, Falwell, and Roman Catholic right extremists (anti abortion, anti women priests and rampant pedophilia et al.) Unless, of course, as might such as Nightbloom, the people of the Middle East be considered some kind of inferior "untermenschen" because they are not "traditional" establishment Christian "believers".

That "tamed" traditional Christian, Nightbloom, is in fact in decline, closing churches and unable to find enough priests. Check out the average age of their parishoners. The youthful and more vigorous part of Christianity is the protestant fundamentalist coo-coos.

Talking about airy fairy, "apologist" intellectuals...

Yeah, teach us something alright.

This is exactly the smug, superior attitude of the West....the kind that inflames riots because it so totally and thoroughly discounts and misunderstands the Moslem world. (And Christianity is not medieval?)

No, I'd say this is more about how you wound the human soul...how you make a whole people feel insignificant and not worthy of respect...the cartoon like one of those seemingly innocuous remarks that can end long standing friendships because it defines so clearly how the Other views you... and how you have been continually viewed by the Other through your shared history.

And that is a painful realization.

And the riots are an expression of that.

The Moslem world is saying yes, we see now how you see all of us, even how you see our God...all of us fanatics.. terrorists... animals... medieval... unenlightened beasts.

You discount us...you make us feel like nothing.

Yammer wrote:

The Ibn Warraq editorial says all that needs to be said. Many commentators would rather give credence to the crowds who chant "death to Denmark" (manipulated by their mullahs) than to reasoned voices from within the wider Muslim world. Golly gee willickers, I wonder why. This will all die down within a week if not sooner. There will be no "revolution."

Allan wrote:

.

No, of course not, though I do seem to recall the forays of a certain Soviet state into ... oh wait, they weren't "real" leftists, were they? "Real" leftists wouldn't have done that, therefore they couldn't have been leftists! Ah, the piercing logic of the revolution!

Far more interesting to me are your incredible powers of clairsentience, such as your ability to know that complete strangers whom you have never met "fear so much in life." Have you ever participated in any ESP experiments?

Poor Abu Hamza Al-Masri! The pure sweet voice of the oppressed Muslim street silenced and imprisoned by the imperialist aggressors! Maybe you and Mr. Al-Masri can engage in interesting thought experiments together.

Coyote - Several of your statements are totally counter-factual. Established Christian churches are seeing massive growth in those areas of the globe with the most people and the highest birthrates (which is just about everywhere other than North America and Western Europe). Your statements are simply contrary to the demographic reality we've been observing for some time now. Just look for a moment at the growth of Roman Catholicism in China, Southeast Asia and Africa over the past two generations. What's more, look at who's filling the seminaries in West (young foreign postulants from the developing world - Vietnamese, Thai, Philippino, Chinese & African). Moreover, this growth is (arguably) fast-tracking the developing world through such Enlightenment principles as the separation of Church & State and other hurdles that caused us quite a few historic hiccups. The irony is that armchair progressives in the West are actually leaning on the very religious institutions they mock & denigrate for the transference of civil society values in the developing world.

Your reference to untermenschen is just silly - that has never been the tone of my argumentation.

Also, you take the nuttiest examples of "new" U.S. evangelism (Falwell) or crackpot revisionists (Buchanan) and then lump everyone under their banner. You forgot to mention Fred Phelps (of "God Hates Fags" notoriety). Since when does "Roman Catholic" and "extremist" go in the same sentence...the Roman Catholic anti-abortion lobby (a vocal minority in their own congregations) in North America are so tame compared to the hard core. Canadian pro-choicers in particular can't complain. R.C. congregations (outside of the conservative Lower Mainland congregations, that is) are so pro-gay, pro-sexEd, pro-divorce-&-remarriage it hurts. Besides, you can't take responses to hot-button issues (like abortion or gay marriage) and derive definitive ideological categories from them. Hot button issues like those brings out the silliness on all sides, and there's so much cross-pollination & floor-crossing it makes Belinda & Emerson looks like Steady-Eddies.

You are correct that a hard-core U.S. style evangelism is nudging out traditional (moderate) creeds among some constituencies. For example, latin america is flocking out of the R.C. into rigorous evangelical-style "new" churches.

The mass appeal of hard-core literalist charismatic movements is problematic and many-layered. As I've said on other threads, I believe this is partly due to a failure of secular liberal-capitalist society to meet the needs of the poor (which is who we're really talking about), as well as a decline into colourless and enemic formalism on the part of traditional churches (Anglican, Lutheran, Catholicism). There's lots of need out there that isn't being addressed, and people are looking for solace & answers & certainties which secular humanism and traditional faiths are not addressing. The liberal-Left has exaserbated this problematic search by continuously ridiculing & tearing down the those moderate & traditional manifestations of the religious impulse which served to stem the radical tide.

Always the humanist and humane perceptiveness I much appreciate in you, Lynn. A good piece of writing.

Well, first Nightbloom, I was, as you must be aware, talking about precisely "the west". As for the growth of Christianity elsewhere, assuming even that it is true, which I have no real knowledge of and am not prepared to take your bias at face value, means not a twaddle to me. Give it time. Scientific education, economic development and the rooting of a sense of security amongst "the mass" of all societies tends to work its reality based magic on religious superstitions. This religion or that is neither here nor there to me, as I've said. They are all more or less equally problematic and faith rather than fact based. I have no more special fondness for Muslim, Buddhist or Christian etc faiths as ideologies per se.

It's people that are the thing, and they are constantly evolving and improving their real understanding of the real world. At least I like to presume. :-) (No, it is true. Just very slowly most often.) And I generally accept at face value and work in alliance with all peoples, without any particular consideration of their ideology or predilections, be it religious or materialist. Indeed, unless they say it, I typically do not even know what their private view of life, love and death, and the hypothetical hereafter may be. It depends upon what we otherwise agree about the real world that is important to me. (Though I have my own view of just about everything, and will rise if provoked. :-D

So, when it is raised, I never hesitate to express my view of religion. Which is generally that Muslim, Christian or whatever, they are all rooted in notions and fantasies of faith and superstition, having served mayhaps as early explanations of life and reality that are no longer relevant really, save to the extent they continue to motivate the actions of "believers" that impact on my world.

I am an atheist, generally more amused by religion, though typically, for the sake of peace and convenience, I try to avoid it becoming "an issue" between me and other folks. One seldom wins an argument where "belief" is what underpins the other side, and is the ever present fall back position. :-D

I'd like to see what kind of a reaction the western world would have if, say, the Globe and Mail were to print a cartoon depicting Jesus performing anal sex on an altar boy, perhaps as satire over all the recent sex scandals in the catholic church. Then, imagine the New York Times and the Independent picking up the story and reprinting the cartoon. In contrast to what happened to the Danish newspaper (nothing), subscribers would cancel, advertisers would pull out, offices would be vandalized, and Harper and Co. would be quick and vocal about how this oversteps the bounds of freedom of speech. Perhaps new laws would be passed. And yes, I do believe we'd see the Canadian flag burning in the American south, and perhaps elsewhere, if only for a short while because of the quick domestic condemnation of a predominantly Christian population.

I'd like to find out where the average Dane, Swede, and Norweigian stands on this issue. I've met many, and I'd be surprised if they'd find satisfactory the half-apology offered by the Danish newspaper or Rasmussen's response to the issue.

There's already lots of cartoons about the Pope and Israelis among others printed in Middle East papers that are of a similar bent. Jews drinking the blood of Muslim children and stuff like that.

We don't riot over it.

As for the particular cartoon of Mohammed sodomizing a boy. That did not come from the Danish paper, in fact the origin is unknown. It is said by the Danish Moslem who took it to the Middle East that a colleague gave it to him and supposedly it was drawn by a Danish racist. Ya, maybe, who's to say. Regardless, the origin is unknown.

If you want to see cartoons of Jesus, Moses or Mohammed doing nasty things just look on the internet, print it off and run to the pope or whoever screaming you're outraged.

Frank, don't compare western media to that of the middle east. I'm not at all an apologist for Arab violence and oppressive Muslim governments. We all expect better from western media and western governments.

We don't riot over what's published in the Middle East because much of it isn't a free press. And besides, much of that kind of publishing is a reaction, not an instigation. I could see myself doing the same.

Perhaps I should've used a slightly different analogy. What if, instead of the cartoon depicting Mohammed, the Jyllands-Posten had chosen to print the above mentioned cartoon of Christ doing something naughty, refused to apologize for it, thereby enticing other papers to pick up the story and reprint the cartoon? I'm interested in asymmetry of the western response to such an offensive action. Print something that inflames "other people", no biggie. Print something that inflames your own group, something that offends even yourself, well, self-censorship would kick in before that would even happen.

The editor of the Jyllands-Posten must have known full well how fundamentally offensive a depiction of Mohammed would be to Muslims. If not, he would have apologized for it straight away, and Ahmed Akkari, a young Islamic scholar and Danish activist, would not have felt his only remaining course of action would be to take the cartoons in a scrapbook to Muslim leaders around the world, and inadvertently fan the flames (see http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060208.wxcartooncleric08/BNStory/Front )

No sarcasm here: I would truly love to see the editor of the Jyllands-Posten demonstrate his dedication to freedom of speech by printing a cartoon as deeply offensive to Christians. Or perhaps something deeply offensive to all Danes, something involving the Queen of Denmark.

Frank, think of the few things you hold most sacred (you need not be religious), see them denigrated in widely published newspapers, then have them amplified 10 times over by your own media controlled by a repressive government interested in consolidating its grip on society, and now you're standing in someone else's shoes. All because someone couldn't unconditionally say "I'm sorry".

Coyote - You're expressed your opinion very well. The fact remains that progressive society must accomodate religion in order to survive it. My preference is that it accomodates the evolved moderate manifestation of our faith traditions rather than allow militant secular humanist marginalization of religion create a vaccuum into which a new fanaticism will seep (a process we can already observe occurring).

To be clear, I wasn't articulating my belief system or my faith (I never have on any of these threads). My point is exactly what I've outlined above.

'I'd like to find out where the average Dane, Swede, and Norweigian stands on this issue. I've met many, and I'd be surprised if they'd find satisfactory the half-apology offered by the Danish newspaper or Rasmussen's response to the issue.'

No, you're right. He never should have offered apologies in any way,shape, or form. The people who choked on the cartoons went through the Danish legal means available and were not successful in that pursuit. To a Dane, that is the end of it, for they take the idea of the rule of law dead seriously. The notion of going out of the country to find some bigger bully boys to 'make' the Danes do anything really blew it. Why are they living there? Why are anyone living in the midst of a society, for which they house only contempt? You do not feel you belong among us? then go where you do belong!

mspacek, is not your argument the same as everyone would believe in capital punishment if it was their kid that was killed?

Now let's see, things that get me riled would be child abuse and the existence of Bountiful.

If I saw a newspaper putting in cartoons of children being raped would I be upset? Yes. Would I demand the paper be punished? Yes.

If it wasn't just cartoons but actual photos would I demand the people involved be prosecuted? Yes.

So ipso facto I don't believe in free speech right? Not exactly. Child abuse is a crime. People like Olson go to jail for life for it so of course its something we as a society do not condone pr promote and I would see the newspaper as breaking that law, it would be promoting child abuse.

This of course means putting Mohammed in a cartoon is on the same level as putting a child being raped in a cartoon. I don't think the two are equal. Mohammed is a historical figure. To me, he and his life are in the public domain.

If there was a cartoon where Mohammed was raping a child that would be wrong but only because of the act, not because it was Mohammed.

Although I agree with the Palestinians I don't agree with cartoons depicting Jews drinking the blood of Palestinian children. I find that offensive but I don't try to shut down the paper.

Mohammed with a bomb on his head is tolerable to me because moslems have indeed blown up other people in the name of Mohammed.

If the Vancouver Sun was to run cartoons of Jesus with horns on his head or counting money or something I wouldn't care. If the cartoon was Jesus abusing a child I would find that offensive but considering the problems with priests I would find even that tolerable. The same cartoon with a caption saying the kids were asking for it I would find unacceptable and would want the Sun punished.

In other words, I know my own line when I see it.

Check this out - the Danish editor is now negotiating with an Iranian paper to print the latter's Holocaust cartoons.

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=nation_world&id=3886997

Don't you just despise the media sometimes?

They say it's about being open & even-handed. But they're really relativizing the meaning out of two very distinct things....and selling lots of copy in the process.

Is there no end to opportunism masquerading as principle?

Dorothy, you misinterpreted my position. I'm disappointed that the editor DIDN'T offer a full apology. And I'm not so sure about your claim that Danes "take the rule of law dead seriously". I was in Copenhagen over xmas, and I saw with my own eyes the area called Christiania (sp?). This was an abandoned military base near the centre of town, taken over by a bunch of lefties in the 70s. People live there today. They have their own security dudes that check if you're a cop, no one pays taxes, and the main strip is called "Pusher street".

Frank: What if child abuse wasn't illegal? Would that fundamentally change what's reasonable or unreasonable to publish? Just because depicting Mohammed isn't illegal in the west (I suspect it is in Muslim countries) shouldn't mean it's fair game. The line of law is always shifting, and really shouldn't be considered a line at all, rather a gradient. Law doesn't tell us what's right or wrong, it just enforces it.

Speaking of which, does anyone know the legal arguments as to why this didn't fall under something like a hate crime in Danish law?

"Freedom, is not the right to do whatever pleases, but the right to refuse whatever displeases." -- J. J. Rousseau

I can't imagine my finding it tolerable whether it was legal or not. For example, I find Bountiful to be offensive 24/7 even though authorities don't crush it. Do I want Winston Blackmoor prosecuted? Yup. Am I in Creston threatening him with personal violence? Nope.

Quite simply I believe in the rule of law and I agree that the law sometimes needs to be changed as we move forward. I wouldn't attack Bountiful but I would vote for a guy who said he was going to investigate it and shut it down.

On a brighter note its nice to know the USA doesn't have a monopoly when it comes to leaders who stir up hatred and fear to cement their power.

We disagree on this point. To me, Mohammed is just another historical leader. No more, no less.

mspacek, what if Muslims were offended at Vancouver's Gay Pride parade? What if photos of said parade were distributed in the Middle East showing signs saying things like "God loves fags".

Just because they're offended do we have to squash one of our current freedoms or even care?

I don't believe it is even-handed or proper to print holocaust cartoons under pressure from a religion-monger, foreign or domestic.

The point is that the paper should be free to publish what it wishes to -- just like the Tyee, which often prints articles that are counter to mainstream opinion. I am occaisionally offended by what I read here, but I find it stimulating to hear contrary opinions (yes, I'm applauding your efforts, Coyote), rather than using them as justification for going on a murder spree.

If the paper doesn't wish to publish a holocaust cartoon, then fine. But, as an earlier poster intimated, perhaps they will consider it if they believe it will sell papers ... this isn't the most noble use of freedom of speech, but hey, as many Canwest papers & cable tv networks demonstrate, we are free to be stupid and tasteless here. The best part is that we don't have to read it if they do exercise poor taste!

"Just because they're offended do we have to squash one of our current freedoms or even care?"

Duhh. No.

And you especially Frank, know that is not what is involved here around the cartoon. I don't even question anyone's right to depict anything satiraclly-, though one should probably understand the effect it may have especially in an already war inflamed situation such as the Middle East.

As well, one should understand that this cartoon, repeating again, is really not what is operating here.

Indeed, I think it is probably useful for this cartoon to have been published by the Danes, a state like Canada doing the US bidding in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Canada, not as yet, in Iraq.) It is going to increase and further enrage, and resolve The Empire and its Coalition's enemies, thereby hastening the defeat of imperialism.

So while I think the Danes, from the viewpoint of their own interests were unbelievably stupid, given their bootlick role for the Empire in the Middle East, they have increased the risk to their troops manifold, and escalated the danger to US imperialism by a similar order of magnitude.

Like I say, which is a good thing really. :-) It aids the Resistance enemies of Amerika.

And go ahead by all means, as are the French media apparently, do it again. Really rub their noses in it. Please. Pretty please. :-)

US troops and the NATO forces, which include Canadians in Afghanistan, mind, likely even especially Danish troops may be a little less pleased that you have made life more precarious and problematic for them.

But again, Go Team Amerika, Go! :-D LMAO

We really want The Empire and its flunky minions defeated and the Resistance motivated over there anyway, don't we?

Maybe, but I can only go by what the protesters say its about. It could, and maybe should, be two separate discussions but for the most part I've only been addressing the cartoon issue.

In an earlier posting I said that if the violence is not about the cartoons then they should turn their attention on their own political and religous leaders who in my opinion are using them.

For example, I believe the oil wealth of the middle east should be shared, not limited to the royal families. We in the west have not, and are not, above being turned on foreign enemies, real or imagined, to deflect attention from bad domestic policies. Neither apparently are is the Moslem world. To me it looks like the average Moslem is simply being manipulated by his own gov't and religous leaders (who also get a decent share of the oil wealth thank you very much) for their gain. And the corporate west will happily force the editors to apologize or be fired in the name of not upsetting global trade.

Frank's right, obviously. The Mayan's got so stupid from being randomly summoned for human sacrifice by their clergy that they all just got pissed and walked away into the forest, leaving behind stuff that would have made the Egyptians jealous.

Advocating murder and beheadings for some drawings! Yeah, right. Talk about Duh.

Coyote:

There is a great memory in Connor Cruise O'Brian's "The Siege" in which he recalls his spell on Ireland's delegation to the U.N., during which Adlai Stevenson once stood up and read a prepared (not his own) speech about how Castro had "circumcized" [sic] the rights of Christians, at which point Abba Eban, the Israeli representative, muttered "I knew we were gonna get blamed for this."

I would remind you that over half of Israel's population originated in the Moslem world (and are in no way willing to go back) and that the European Jews who went there did so of their own volition... rather than being 'dumped on the Palestinians by Europe", while Europe in fact went out of it's way to prevent said exodus.... we can carry flagellation to extremes, but it really doesn't help when discussing an issue.

I agree with Frank: We don't riot over it.

An interesting read on the subject:
http://www.howestreet.com/articles/index.php?article_id=2005

R. Smiley

We actually have a point of agreement here, brother. :-)

Indeed, while they frequently pisss me off, and I fight tooth and nail with their reactionary views, I think it is important that the Neocons and even fascists be allowed room here and in society, with some "normal" provisoes to that around the issues of racial and other "lifestyle" tolerances etc. So long as they are not driven underground, though there are times and situations in which it is unavoidable, I know that, society knows exactly where they are and what they are thinking. They can be watched and monitored by us all. (The "surveillance state", over recent years anyway, since the collapse of so-called Communism has had the same attitude towards us more radical lefties, I know. Though every once in awhile... I know you spooks are out there. :-D

Democracy is important, in more ways than merely even currently allowed for within status quo capitalism. And to the degree that it is possible without threat to the lives and limbs of anyone, it is important that there be room for all views at the table.

What future history weeds out over time, of the normal course of development and events, is another matter. Culling goes on at all levels of social life, no less than it does in nature.

Mr. Duh also likes to talk about the Resistence.

Yes, let's cheer on the acid-throwers, the clit-cutters, marriage-arranging, women-hating, gay-killing, apostate-murdering, bow-five-times-a-day-to-Arabia suicide bombers! The enemy of my enemy is your...well, what are they, Mr. Duh? Heroes, I guess. (Shudder)

I would prefer to do some research of my own on the actual numbers, though I do know the majority Palestinians and the remnant Jew population that barely survived the great Roman "dispersal" did co-exist in Palestine for thousands of years together, and inter-married etc. (Though why would any rational Jew want to go back to a minority position in a Muslim society, however it was, when he can exist in a Jewish dominated society? Where they rule? You attempting to toy with my inferior gentile intellect, no? :-)

Nonetheless, while we could quarrel about Europe's, but especially Britains role in fascilitating the Jewish migration to Palestine, then under British Empire domination at the end of WW2, there is no question that the Palestinian population was not pleased, once they saw the numbers being allowed in/tolerated by the Colonial Admin. and was subsequently, of course, driven out of its homeland and turned into a diaspora of its own by illegal Jewish immigration and later brutal "terrorism." (And I won't get into the London agreements between the Zionists and Britain, which allowed for the turning over of Palestine to the Jews.)

Clearly, the Jews were anxious to flee Europe after WW2, and understandably so, to which Europe and Great Britain turned a blind eye. Say, for example, instead of setting up an independent Jewish State in say parts of Germany and Poland, even Austria where the greatest crimes of the holocaust were committed. And it did solve, for Europe, its long history of having "A Jewish Problem" by, however it was achieved, allowing them to slip into and take over Palestine, under the very nose of The British Empire.

That it created another "Palestinian Problem" and diaspora, of course, is another matter that was indeed left to the Arabs clearly, and was facilitated by the then UN through the so-called "legal" creation and sanctioning of the State of Israel, from which Jewish "terrorism", as I've said, drove the native Palestinian population. It is this creation of the State of Israel by the post war European state majority and Empire powers of the post WW2 that laid the foundations of the current war for Palestinian and Arab liberation going on now throughout the Middle East ever since.

To feign otherwise at this point is but self and world deception and an attempt to obfuscate the real history.

Again, like the cartoon, the issue here is not the exact numbers, but the overarching reality.

Frank wrote:

As he is to me, same goes for Jesus. That isn't the case for a lot of other people though, and since printing or not printing a pointless cartoon makes no difference to my freedoms (I don't care), but does make a difference to the rights of others to not have their religion ridiculed, why not err on the side of preserving the rights of those who are threatened by the action/inaction - in this case, by choosing to not print the cartoon?

Imagine all the 2nd generation Danes born to Muslim immigrants. How are they supposed to feel about their country now? This is a poor direction for what is supposed to be a multicultural nation.

Again, you've taken my argument that printing the cartoon and not fully apologizing (at the editorial or gov't level) for its printing was wrong, and mistaken it for support for a violent backlash. But given the volatility of the mid east, given their media and gov'ts, should flag burning, embassy attacks, and death threats be surprising? Certainly, they aren't justified, but certainly they shouldn't come as a surprise.

All of this could have been avoided by using just a teeny bit of common sense. If the editor wanted to bring attention to "local cases of self-censorship involving people fearing reprisals from Muslims" he could have simply written about and described the cartoon, as every media outlet I've come across has done, instead of publishing the actual cartoon. Freedom of the press would have been preserved, 9 less people would be dead today, and east-west diplomacy wouldn't have been dealt a massive blow.

Good to hear that the editor is hoping to publish a cartoon denying the Holocaust. His actions are reprehensible, but I applaud him for being consistent and balanced. I'd like to see the Asper media empire show similar qualities from time to time.

I wonder how the Danish courts will rule over a media outlet denying the Holocaust? Will they show the same balance and consistency? Or will they decide that their previous ruling was a mistake?

I'd really like to know how Scandinavians feel about this. Anyone know any Scandanavian blogs or newspapers with reader comments (hopefully in English)?

Ok, sorry about that.

From what I understand, and I could have this bass-ackwards, the editor is a right-wing racist now posing as a poster-boy for free speech. He would not have published the cartoons if they were anti-Jesus.

However, regardless, I support him just as I would Nazis marching in Illinois or Orangemen in Ireland even though I think they're both wrong to do it.

He didn't because he's anti-Moslem.

Look, I think the editor should have apologized when it was still a domestic issue in Denmark. The local Muslim leadership could have gone to him and said Moslems found the cartoons offensive and asked politely for an apology. Papers have been known to apologize and the Danish paper could have and should have then and there. A conversation could have taken place but it didn't happen because they're racist.

But once the thing became an international issue and an embassy is being burnt in a gov't sanctioned protest I say to hell with apologizing, don't give in to extremists. Don't be intimidated by the nuts or they'll force you to back down on everything they don't like.

Ripponfalls: I like the quote in that article you linked to:

"People have the right to be offensive but no one has the right to wide circulation or a public subsidy."

Frank wrote:

Oh well, I didn't know that. Too bad.

Um, speaking of right-wing: "Yes, everything is in absolutes, don't back down now, musn't show any weakness, no no! Apologies are for sissies!"

That's the kind of thing adolescent boys are supposed to get out of their system in 8th grade gym class. That also sounds a lot like Israel.

Do you really believe what you just wrote?

mspacek wrote: 'And I'm not so sure about your claim that Danes "take the rule of law dead seriously".'

We are talking about a situation, where a bunch of people living in Denmark, have asked the law to rule on their dispute, and then when it does, they are not stopping there. This is what I mean. You are talking about Danes don't take policing very seriously, as in Christiania, and that is true, they don't.

The legal argument was, most likely, what common sense can direct easily enough: Mohammed was and is not a God, but a man. He was both a religious and a military leader. Whatever perception you will voice of him as long as you don't tell lies which people cannot check for themselves, will fall under fair comment. It is a bit tiresome that we get told over and over (wrongly, as it turns out), that depiction of his countenance is prohibited for fear of idolatry. If what we have witnessed over the last little while is not idolatry, I don't know what is.

I did not misunderstand you. You had some assumptions about what an 'average Dane', if there is such a thing, which I much doubt, would think about this whole scenario, and your assumption was incorrect.

yammer:

That about sums it up.

Coyote:

Because, I suspect, many left-wingers are atheists or agnostics and would likely say to religions of all colors: "A curse on all your houses."

Good one, brother.

And don't let the heat here intimidate you. Keep speaking your mind. If we don't speak up, who the hell is going to give our unique point of view in the world. :-)

As the ladies in the cosmetics ads are always saying, "I'm worth it." :-D lol. And though the don't say it out loud, you know their thinking, "So eat your heart out ahole.", eh?

Being a minority opinion ain't so bad, especially if your convinced you've got it right, eh? :-) Fug 'em.

The Koran doesn't forbid his depiction as far as I know, but Islam does indeed forbid his depiction, and has for a long time, hasn't it? Do you have a link for your claim? Are there Muslim groups that dispute the ban on depiction?

I'd like to verify for myself what the balance of opinion currently is in Denmark. If anyone has any links to Danish opinion polls or letters to the editor, I'd love to hear about them.

lynn wrote:

Well said. Thought this deserved a bump.

?

Absolutely. If you back down to extremists it will never stop. You will eventually cancel the gay pride parade, you will eventually get rid of divorce laws and so on.

Just as you can't deal with people who kidnap and beahead other people.

After all, if you back down on free speech why not something else?

Why have elections, we'll all just protest until we get the government we want.

Protesting should not form the basis of public policy.

mspacek:

Reaction: a few clerics getting pi**ed off and not much else. Certainly no burning of embassies.

I have tried to look at the homepage to the URL I gave you yesterday:

http://muhammed.hotserv.dk/bluitgen/

All I found was an internal link to one more page ‘gamle’:

http://muhammed.hotserv.dk/gamle/

I had seen most of the illustrations before. A lot of the better ones are from Islamic sources; the letters give them away.

I feel I’ve been had, by a bunch of fundamentalists not much different from our own, the ones that lied to us and suppressed us using murder and genocide, the ones we subdued hundreds of years ago using lots of arguments leading to democracy. Maybe Democracy and fundamentalist Islam do not go well together either. The moderate Muslims are begging us to help them with standing up to the ‘jihad’ people and say no! By helping them now it will cost us less than doing it alone later when they have bred multiple generations of suicide bombers and cannot see the reason to compromise. The Koran commands them to make us infidels obey in any way possible. Maybe we could ask them to take that out of the Koran?

Why not?

But for now using the free word in the form of humour is the least bloody way to keep them on their heels so we can live here together with them!

the main article compares the satire of Swift in "A Modest Proposal" to this cartoon talk. And that's what satire is supposed to create: a forum for debate, create opinions, open things up. But what we've got going here is a topic for scandal, for in many ways there is little to reasonably discuss. It's picture, a drawing, so interpret it as you will - really there are no limits to what you want to say about it's deeper meaning. That is where the Swift comparison really falls apart. "A Modest Proposal" is very well structured piece of rhetoric, not just a queer cartoon. Swift uses vast amounts of irony, metaphors, and deductive reasoning to get his point across; moreover, he does it with a certain amount of tact, something the bomb-in-the-turban is lacking. While it is useful to introduce Swift as a segway to satire, it is really unfair to two very different forms of expression. Swift speaks with a profound sense of humanity, and reaches out to touch people with reason, the Danish cartoon does not.

mspacek, I know you've said you don't agree with the destruction being wreaked in response to the cartoon. But that is now happening. So what would your response be?

Another, more full apology from the Danish editor and prime minister I assume?

The firing of all editors at every paper that published the cartoons as in Jordan and Malaya?

And if that doesn't stop the rioting?

Camosun:

Your easy evaluation of the Danish cartoons shows exactly what we are up gainst here: The assumption, that we understand each other, when we really do not. How many Danish cartoons have you seen in the past? Do you realize cartoons are part of the culture, their style is unique, and they have an inherent language, which you cannot expect to understand unless you put a bit of observation over time, as well as thought process into it. See a buch of French cartoons next to a selection from the New Yorker, vast difference! You would expect that people opting to live in a country would be willing to put some effort into understanding their new environment and its culture, instead of just arrogantly superimposing their preconcieved notions and condemning everything they did not immediately grasp. Before we even discuss any of this, we should remember that it all happened on Danish turf. Ask me about respectful immigration, and I will tell you what I know.

Yes.

Absolutely not.

Then so be it. That has no bearing on whether or not it's the right thing to do.

Wow! A lot of heat in this one! To bad I missed it bashing ol' conflict of interest what's his name, Honorable Emerson.

Coyote: You've lived an interesting life. As a free thinker, I recognize my own, although it doesn't necessarily mean we always have to agree, brother. This religion thing... what we believe has a big part to play in it. My views are best expressed in the story of Daniel Pearl.

Outside of life's origins or conclusions, life still "just is". We either "believe" in human and life rights for ourselves, each other and the future to come, or we don't, God or no God. I'm not much on the empires and the individuals who support them, who have fudged the truths of the past to suit their needs...

But, as for your criticisms of what you called scripture... You really didn't think that old Christian and Islamic text was pure, did you? And you didn't think for one minute that it was complete or some empires choices of what was pure or not was accurate... Neither did I. But I'm not one to write off any book, especially a collection of books in its entirely, without giving it a look and testing its merits first regardless.

And, so while I still hold out for truths from the ancients who asked the same questions as we so long ago, I am perfectly well aware, as should anyone be, that any writer who uses analogies or dual languages to describe dual realities, especially in a complex nature, can very easily be mis-quoted, mis-understood and mistaken purposely to control the masses.

It should be no secret to anyone who has looked that the religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam along with many others, can be easily used to promote war and inequality based on mis interpeted analogies alone, without the additions and subtractions that have happened to the originals that had merit, along the way.

Its as easy as the substitution of natural death for a spiritual one in scripture; a sword made of steel for a sword made of truth. And there are many other religions who have the rites of death passage to the spiritual, with analogies of weapons of truth and sheilds of love to be mistaken for weapons held by the flesh in what some Gihad suicide bomber calls, Holy war. So, there is more than one kind of peace keeper. All one do to in certain circles is tell the truth.

My point is simple. We are products of our own environments and while your environments have been of a travelled, busy, and tested nature, mine has been spent moreso looking for these truths and watching them being butchered, or put to the test for me to see them sink or swim on their own merits, as real or fake, albeit often through the experiences of others such as yourself. (my life is boring, dude)

Nevertheless, my life has been enriched by the search for what many like yourself dismiss perhaps to easily, and it has held its rewards. I've been privy to experiences that are beyond any other explanation than the existence of spirit... and when you get to that level of awareness... men like yourself don't change my beliefs one ayota, other than to suggest that there are alot of good men with nuts in their sacks that are as worthy, perhaps even moreso than I, to have lived a fuller life regardless of the spirits who have tried to make my own less empty.

So my message is simple. I can tell you how to conduct an "experiment" to see it for yourself. But you would have to not only have the character to pull it off, the honesty... the exhaustive personal search... the hard work... and the courage... you would also have to look for it without expectations either way, and I'm doubtful that you are one who likes being told how or what to do. (works for me!)

In other words, as foolish as it is to assume, I'm assuming you are a man of character, and I'm assuming you haven't bothered to look past certain "limits". I'm most certainly assuming that you base your belief in no God on the behavior and words of humans alone. And, if that isn't in your chosen future to look for something beyond the pale, its no biggie. Time will tell all regardless, but in the future, please don't run down people like myself as being "nutty" because I have a belief built on experiences not quite like your own. And, if your quick to put me in my place, by all means, read my comments in Daniel Pearls story first. I left a couple gems there.

Coyote:
Otherwise, I like your angst! Later...
;-)

Heat? Not at all brain. Coyote, lynn and allan are my friends that I agree with most of the time. Not my fault they all woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. (I'm kidding of course)

mspacek, I hate repeating myself but I agree with you on the apology thing but that should have happened last October. If the paper apologizes, again, let's say more fully this time I'm fine with that.

But from the prime minister too? I'm not so sure about that. That fails the smell test but I think he will anyway because he's a corporate lackey and if the Danes are losing too much money he'll fold.

I'm also completely against the firing of editors. I think in return for a Danish apology the editors in Jordan and Malaya should be reinstated. The Moslem world needs a few independent voices.

Frank wrote:

That's the misconception of our time. If you remove all semblance of legitimacy of the actions of extremists by maintaining the higher moral ground, by recognizing when you've wronged and by ammending those wrongs, while at the same time truly defending (with words and actions) what you and others living freely think is right, then the extremists will evaporate. Their support will vanish, as will their raison d'etre. Undoubtedly, it would take a while. But then again, it took decades of wrongs to cultivate beliefs so strong that they induce people to fearlessly blow themselves up for.

Ask me what kind of actions I think the USA, Israel, Great Britain, and Australia, among others (including Canada), should take to undermine current and future extremists.

Unfortunately, the immature adolescent boy mentality of "no compromise" currently dominates many western gov'ts. Embarrassingly, sometimes it makes the axis of evil nations look like havens of reason in comparison.

I don't see how apologizing for an inappropriate cartoon that was obviously going to incite anger, division, and violence, has any bearing on gay parades, same-sex marriage laws or divorce laws. Western women don't cover their heads, and you don't see flags or embassies burning in Muslim countries in protest. Your argument makes no sense.

Frank wrote:

Yup, that would be cool, I like that idea.

mspacek wrote:
'Imagine all the 2nd generation Danes born to Muslim immigrants. How are they supposed to feel about their country now? This is a poor direction for what is supposed to be a multicultural nation.'

-where did you get that idea? Multiethnic, yes, multicultural, no! Are you not aware of Denmark as the original place on Earth, where the phrase 'resistance is futile' comes from? In Denmark, you do as the Danes do, you will get help to get there, but that is the end goal. You should know, that 'educated' or 'bred' in Denmark is called 'dannet', i.e. 'made into a Dane'. If you choose not to, but still want to hang around the vicinity, you may face the prospect of having to be 'underdanig', i.e. 'subject to the Danes'. I have this from a Dane, who has travelled the World and seen much, including Hong Kong, London, amd Brazil.

mspacek commenting on apologies:

I think the situation is summarized quite nicely by Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

"There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient. It is depressing to have to restate these obvious precepts, and it is positively outrageous that the administration should have discarded them at the very first sign of a fight."

http://www.slate.com/id/2135499/

Coyote: This reminds me of "Two solitudes"...

The life of a dhimmi... any dhimmi, not just jews... under moslem rule varied from tolerance to massacre. What happened to Jews over the centuries (up to and including their use in the Iraq Iran war, along with Bahai) was very definitely a 'sometime thing'. You might be interested in "From Time Immemorial" by Peters. It little avails us to examine one side with a magnifying glass for faults if we aren't going to apply the same standards to the other... which your rhetoric clearly shows that on this particular issue you are not.

You may do as much research as you wish as to numbers, but again, this whole thing is beyond rhetoric, and while some may say that this post is very definitely off topic, the unfortunate reality of the situation is that it is not. I personally don't know if Lewis's 'clash of civilizations' could be avoided, but I strongly suspect that it will not be. That being the case, a little realism would be welcomed. Advocacy journalism may give it's partisans cheer, but it does little to calm partisans, and any position that begins as an apology for one side or the other only adds to the conflagration.

Not that Christians didn't have their Albigensian heresies and hundred years wars and St Bartholomew massacres... they did, and still do... Humanity definitely has it's mountians of skulls. I think I would suggest that if that is the rules by which this latest thing is being played out, well then 'dir balak', because at some point in the future that is exactly what we will see.

For my part, I would never submit to being dhimmi, nor I suspect would most of the West.

No they will not. The extremists were already there before the cartoons. They are familiar with the concept of free speech, they just don't agree with it. Rewarding extremists with success is not going to end extremism, it will encourage it.

After the Danes apologize and agree to write anti-hate laws that don't allow media to go after religous symbols why not demand more? After all, if all one has to do is protest and you get what you want, why stop? Why not make sure media can't lampoon current Islamic religous leaders? Why not force the Danes to amend their anti-hate legislation so that criticism of suicide bombers or beheaders is considered hate propaganda? If you know they gave in once you know they'll give in again.

The time for reason is not when you're facing the business end of a gun. If someone wants to engage you in conversation they can put down the tools of intimidation first.

Hussein, Iran and North Korea are havens of reason?? I assume this is a typo?

It does. Our women don't cover their heads right now, the gay pride parade goes on, women divorce their husbands but what's to prevent these things coming to an end? What if 1.5 billion people protest and burn embassies and boycott our goods? What if a million or so march in our own cities, clash with police, and torch cars?

Will we feel any pressure to compromise a little? Of course we will, people need jobs, kids need to be fed, business leaders will apply pressure and politicians will find a compromise that erodes our rights.

Just want to add, if this protest thing cashes in how long will it be before the scientologists and the JWs are torching cars next to Ambleside Park?

Tread softly dear friends, the next time you try to close your door you may be committing a hate crime.

(For the smiles and sunshine challenged my tongue is firmly in cheek)

And now this.

http://www.godhatescanada.com/

ah well, if anyone wants to get in touch with me I'm at

123 Cherry Lane
Gomorrah

Turn left when you get to the pillar of fire and then its straight down the road past the demons of hell on your right.

Now I better get back to the sodomizing or the boss will be pissed. work work work

Too many posters are generalizing about Muslims as if they're some kind of homogenous society. They're not. There are radical, extreme fringes, who are exploited by evil, power-mad mullahs, but then that is also true of Christians and Jews — most are quite normal human beings but there are a wacko and violent minority in every religion. The trick is to keep the fundamentalists or whatever you call them out of all governments.

And there is no ban on pictorial representations of the prophet Mohammed; I've seen plenty of frescos of Mohammed, beautiful ones, from very old to very new, in Iran, for example.

And Frank, I wasn't referring to Iran's nuclear program when I talked about Iran's potential for sanity, but rather the hope of many Iranians for a more secular government. You can thank Bush and his axis of evil talk about North Korea, Iraq and Iran for Iran's nuclear weapon program. It's a calculated madness (mad as in mutually assured destruction) because Iran saw the US invade Iraq where there are no nuclear weapons and stay out of N Korea where there are plenty of nuclear weapons — inevitably Iran will develop these weapons for that simple reason, irrespective of whether this is sane or insane.

Maybe this is the time to go back and speak to the original question.
The cartoons were created, not as an attempt to satirise or 'lampoon' anyone. In a situation, where an artistic enterprise had stranded on the fear of artists, based on real incidents of thuggery and murder, a group of artists were asked to 'draw the prophet Mohammed as they saw him'. The drawings reflect the fear these people felt and still feel. attempts at evaluating them in any other light are not to the point.
I can only repeat: Denmark has a long-standing record of welcoming and successfully integrating a very wide spectrum of people notoriously rejected or persecuted in many othe European countries. I believe the Jewish community in Denmark, if you can actually find it today, will testify to the fact, that once you have become a Dane, no matter your origin, Danes will look out for you as a member of the tribe.
Now this culture of community and openness is under attack from so-called immigrants (read: invaders), who want it 'their way or the highway', and who are, obviously, prepared to back up their demands with firepower and worse.
I think it is time for us to remember the observation of Martin Niemoeller: When they came for the Jews, etc...
And, in this context, quit dumping on our neighbour. The difference between what the extremists dare here and what they dare in Denmark is due to the respective closeness of 'Big Brother in the West'. The reason Wreck beach hasn't been 'cleared' by zealots waving the Koran is what's South of the 49th, and where we are relative to it.

dorothy:

True.

And I find it curious that some of the most notorious events involving Euro-Muslims have occurred in the Netherlands and in Denmark. Arguably, Denmark and Holland are the most tolerant of all European societies. Few provide as much comfort to their refugee populations. Few are as small "L" liberal on both economic and social issues as these two nations. Keeping in mind the mantra of small "L" liberals: "to tolerate just about everything except intolerance", perhaps it's small wonder that these tolerant societies are experiencing a reactionary, seemingly intolerant, backlash.

I'm put in mind of the current TV cookie commercial (Peek Freans?): The guest exclaims that the hostess' cookies are very good. The extremely gracious hostess says: "Take as many as you like", whereupon the guest takes the entire bag of cookies and puts it in her purse.

I'm sure the Danes and the Dutch must feel much like this hostess. Their very gracious liberalism has been abused by those who would try to change the rules of the game. Of course, changing the rules of the game is legitimate if done through the legitimate channels available. Threats and blackmail are not part of those legitimate channels.

So, what do the Danish-Muslims reap? Instead of greater tolerance for their values, they get general and increased intolerance.

Moral: when a guest, mind your manners and don't take all the cookies.

Maybe grub has hold of a central point, about reaping what you sow.

What if the whole point of the exercise was that some interests were unhappy with the admittedly infant successes of those who have been trying to create dialog in this situation.

They made a big shout over this cartoon knowing that it came from a place without thought or reason because thought and reason are the enemies of violence, and violence is the source of their power.

Seems to me in all such sectarian conflicts power is held by those willing to go most extreme. If you're extreme enough in your actions all reasonable people will run from you, leaving you free to act out alone at center stage. You own the whole show then.

As long as nobody starts talking reasonably together.

I call this principle "Biggest ******* wins"

I do notice that whenever someone arises with real influence who disavows violence, both sides attack with greater violence than they use even on one another.

Oh, dear. I've been Buied.

That should read "Biggest a s s h o l e wins"

I don't know. Everything is open to being contested, of course. I have merely concluded, based on the material and hypothetical evidence, that there is no God. It is not so much "a belief", I don't think, but an understanding and interpretation of the body of scientific body of evidence.

Which does not mean that I or anyone else is capable of understanding everything. There are many things about the complexity of life that we may never understand, or even get an opportunity to view and/or interpret. Which does not lead me to the conclusion that there must be a God who has created and is guiding it all.

Other than that brother, I have no problemo whatsoever regarding your choice of belief in a Supreme Being, an essence or any manner of spirituality. It's one of the few I have detected, in terms of real, living life that we do not agree upon.

Big deal. :-)

And a good day to you.

And ehh, Frank. Of course we are going to have our disagreements from time to time. I do not make 100% agreement a precondition on our friendship. You are a good man. I know that.

Now, I would love to continue this particular discussion, but I have much to do today. My timer just went off to tell me that my bread should be ready for its final rise before going into the oven, for one thing. (It's two whole wheat and white, oat flour and bran, and flax meal loaves. Mmmmmm. Love homemade bread! One of my favourtite acitivities.)

Hopefully later today, my friends. Aye, and enemies. :-D lol

Coyote:

Hear! Hear!

And on that note, something I came across during some aimless surfing that fits your thread, I think: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” — Stephen F Roberts

, wrote mspacek.

There is no such right as the "right" to not be ridiculed, especially the "right" to not have one's religion ridiculed.

Free satire trumps!

Crawford says that "some Danes don't have much respect for Islam."

I can sympathize, because I don’t have much respect for Islam either. Or for Judaism or Christianity. I’ve studied the Torah and come to the conclusion that all the religions based on it (i.e., Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are fundamentally perverted by the fact that the God of the Torah is a psychopathic control freak.

Speaking of respect, in A Complicated Kindness, this is what Miriam Toews has to say about the revered founder of the Mennonites, Menno Simons:

“Imagine that the least well-adjusted kid in your school starting a breakaway clique of people whose manifesto includes a ban on the media, dancing, smoking, temperate climates, movies, drinking, rock’n’ roll, having sex for fun, swimming, make-up, jewelry, playing pool, going to cities, or staying up past nine o’clock. That was Menno all over. Thanks a lot, Menno.”

And in the next paragraph:
“At times I find myself imagining Menno as a delusional patient in an institute off some interstate in a pretty wooded area. Shuffling off to group, hoarding his meds. That I belong to the frightful fresco of this man’s dreams unnerves me.”

If we give in to fundamentalist Muslims’ demands that we respect Mohammed, what will we do when fundamentalist Mennonites demand that we respect Menno. Take away Toews’ Governor Generals Award?

Respect is something that is earned ...

I take it Miriam Toews is a disaffected ex-Mennonite...?

Adolescents usually rebel against their religious upbringing, and then work their way back to a more moderate outlook once they're more secure & comfortable with themselves. Some people never make it over that hurdle. I've met a few Mennonites in Southern Ontario, and the ones I met were all fantastic, happy & open people.

Somehow I just can't see all those laughing, sweet-faced, clean-living Mennonites trying to convert us all by the sword...

As a cradle-raised Roman Catholic who went through a long 'spiritual detox' process after I realized I was gay, I've taken my share of gratuitous pot-shots at religion, holy books, repressed gay priests, elderly men in flowing skirts, yada-yada...

But even I knew from an early age that the ancient texts describing this "psychopathic control freak" (your words) were symbolic narratives not meant to be taken literally. There's far more meaning in them than is conceded in the glib backhanded criticism of postmodernists, secular fundamentalists, gay activists or feminists.

I haven't taken religious narrative literally since I was about 10 or 11...but the three texts you mention should be recognized as foundational historical artifacts that tell us things about ourselves we'll never find elsewhere. They are literature & poetry of a unique sort. That "psychopathic control freak" is a human representation of something that lies outside our understanding & perception, and therefore is a reflection of our own nature projected onto the unknown.

Having said that, atheists are justified in combating what they see as lending the imprematur of the state to any one faith tradition (although attention-seeking attempts to excise God from symbols like the national anthem, national currency, etc. can get pretty tedious...they should grit their teeth & bear it for the greater good ;-)

I'm all for free speech, but I don't recommend standing underneath the world largest hornets nest taunting them...

Coyote:
Appreciate your views. Catch yah on the next one. ;-)

Nothing better than a toasty warm discussion among friends, Frank. :-) You are always interesting... and funny to boot.

clubofrome's

is most apt.

But if a child is poking at the hornets nest in my eaves will punishing the child keep the hornets out of my kitchen? and if I have been blind to the problem doesn't the child's poking actually serve a useful purpose?

Wikipedia tells a little more about what is going on in Denmark than I have got from any North American source. Under the heading: ‘Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy

I guess //en. stands for ‘Made in England’.

That Wikipedia page has many links like:
‘Danish radio broadcasts in English from B&NNS’

http://www.cphpost.dk/

‘Egyptian newspaper printed drawings in October’:

http://www.cphpost.dk/get/93798.html

Good news for all you Western Muslims who feel like you're under persecution for your faith - particularly those holding signs that say something like "kill anyone who denies that Islam is the religion of peace." It turns out that you don't have to put up with all the stress and strain of changing your host country into a Muslim country after all.

It seems that there are already places in the world called "Muslim Lands." You've heard this term before, and probably used it in a sentence. For example, "you infidels have no business being in our peaceful Muslim lands."

Too much press freedom keeping you up at night? Not a problem in Syria, where you'll sleep like a baby.

Someone hurt your feelings by wishing you a Merry Christmas? Hey, folks like that go headless in Saudi Arabia.

Teenage daughter picking out the wrong boyfriend? Just take her to Iran and pick out a rock.

Of course, if you'd prefer to stay here and enjoy the robust economies, political rights, intellectual liberties, freedom of expression, civil protections, and the benefits of open and accountable government that Judeo-Christian societies offer, then you might consider redirecting your energy into encouraging the Islamic world to adopt these principles as well.

Who knows, maybe someday Muslim countries might actually become places where Muslims want to live.

"Who knows, maybe someday Muslim countries might actually become places where Muslims want to live." birdshit.

Another braunshirt mindfuch.

I presume you are also thinking about all those Europeans who fled to these America's as well, nicht wahr, fleeing poverty and persecution in Old Europe to the Land of the "original" Native North Americans, and adapted so well to their ways. We adapted so well to their ways we practice their animist religion and languages to this very day, right?

Duhhh!

What ya talkin' about wingnut azzhole? The real and original North Americans are bursting at the seams of the concentration camps "we" drove them into. And clearly you are also mindful of the boarding school "Think White Conversion Centres" we forced their children through, where we showed them the Old European cultural tradition of butt fuching and beating their little boys, raping their little girls, and whupping one and all kid who dared speak original North American. Hell, the realy "native" inhabitants of this continent are only now just "beginning" to recover the European crimes of that great "liberating event". f

Crawl back under your fuggin' rock, you racist braunshirt goosestepper. You're talking out your azzhole again.

We have done so for millenia. It's your turn. :-)

Sorry Coyote for inflaming your P.C. sensibilities. I fail to see the pillar of peace known as islam acknowledging its mistakes, attempting reparations and condemning such actions on a universal basis.

Can anyone think of a single Islamic terror attack, including 9/11, that has caused Muslims to get as upset as they are now about Danish cartoons? Think of how much better the world would be if Islam inspired the sort of outrage against shooting, stabbing, burning, stoning, and blasting innocent people into pieces that it does over cartoons, rumors of Quran "mishandlings," or a French headscarf ban.

Why punish the child alpqr? It's not a judgement, it's an education. The child may only have to poke one nest and the lesson could be self explanatory, or you can lead the child away explaining why. Education should lead to tolerance and consideration and hopefully one day respect. Although you'd have a hard time presenting that case this day and age. Too much anger, angst, fear and mistrust out of pandora's box now. Chaos looms and now even the peaceful are being pushed aside in the name of power and profit. I used to think that 99% of humans just wanted to live in peace, but now so much of the consummerism ideals have filtered down. And why would't they? We've been bombarded with commercial content overload for 50 years now! The fruit is bound to spoil. No, I don't see any fairytail ending to the problems ahead.

Unless.....The Dolphin Party is able to rise to power and save the day! They will be there to help us navigate the shoals and reefs ahead. To teach us the most important lessons in life! Right Frank?

I'm inclined to agree with moderate educated Muslims living here in the West that Islam has a huge cultural & social learning curve ahead of it. Secular society is correct in digging in its heels on this one. Since they created such an overblown flap about it, Muslims are now going to have to put up with the same provocations that Christians have in terms of public mockery: Internet T-shirt Vendor Profits from Mohammed Cartoon Conflict
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/2/inktomi343238.php

I remember my sense of personal offense the first time I saw a "Bad Religion" t-shirt. I got over it. I also remember the flap over Hitler t-shirts in the early eighties, when upset WWII vets stepped up to defend the right of free expression while virulently (often tearfully) condemning the content and the gratuitousness of it.

And just to flog my oft-stated point about the difference between literalist evangelicals and the more matured, established faith traditions (like Anglicans, Lutherans & Catholics), which secular humanists should see as the best hope they've got to stabilize the religious pendulum, take the Pope's statement of the compatibility of scientific revelation and faith: Science no threat to faith, Pope says
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyid=2006-02-10T181257Z_01_L10652640_RTRUKOC_0_US-RELIGION-POPE-SCIENCE.xml&rpc=22

The day the mullahs & the Falwells evolve towards this kind of viewpoint is the day the world will become a lot more peaceful.

For those interested in what one well known former-muslim has endured after criticizing islam, i would give this interview a read. This is not about whether or not the cartoons are offensive; its about the fundemental right in a free society to speak one's mind; no matter how distasteful your opinion may be i will defend your right to say it.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,399263,00.html

The deafening silence in Hollywood over Theo van Gogh's murder was astonishing.

For a propaganda machine that cries 'free speech' at the slightest non-aesthetic substantive criticism, or at the merest infringement on its efforts to make a buck, or its moralistic anti-downloading beratement of the movie-going public before every feature, they were notably mute over this one.

birdstomach:

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/int...,399263,00.html

Thanks for a useful link.

As you know I've already requested my Dolphin Party t-shirt and I'm ready to join the party as soon as the Dolphins fill out the necessary forms with Elections Canada. Their cabinet has got to be more intelligent than Hapers but that's damning with faint praise isn't it? Go Dolphins! Swim like.. like... fishes...or whales!

Lynn, thanks, but don't think I haven't noted you left out words like "right" or "correct" :-)

I dunno Frank, I just don't like the ring of the word right, somehow, :-) but I do agree with you most of the time... just not on this one. :-)

There is a rumour going around the inlet I live in that the Dolphins have just received a phone call from John Reynolds. :-)

I have walked out where I have not been before thanks to what you write about here. I need your help if to tell where I go wrong if I do? But first I have to state some new findings and restate some older.

Some time late last fall I saw on TV and read in the papers that man has far fewer connections in-between the two brain halves than the women have. This has resulted in that we are slower than women are to react purposefully when presented with a lot of new information at the same time. To keep up with the females this has resulted in that men have to try to pre-process possible output in small packets of fast answers to complex situations. One of men’s brain halves has evolved to be bigger so that it can store all those small packets.

Those of us who live with women know that they can put a lot of unprocessed stuff into their heads and do a lot of nice global thinking with it and with not much delay. What I say is that they can make our heads spin. If you have lived along with them you can develop enough small packets to, when you get a wife of your own, you can deal with her with a smile, no beating, no circumcision of her would be necessary.

I believe we have evolved this handicap long time ago as it minimizes inbreeding between siblings. Men stop growing for a year in the pre-puberty years and our brain-bridge will never, after that, get as many nerve connections as our sisters will or female classmates have.

That is why we men need religion, and a good one!

You sure you don't mean, "Hashguy"?

Which is something else I haven't done in a long time. :-D

That said, your piece is outside the range of my experience, brother. Love the ladies, and the older I get, the more highly respect them, but I've never "knowingly" encountered this problem or facet of them. And they do have a great many of them, facets that is. :-) No doubt.

I've always felt capable enough of "processing" whatever the ladies throw at me, and one or two of them have indeed thrown a thing or two at me. :-D lol

Bless 'em all. :-) ('cept for the ones, like about an equal number of males I never liked.)

Coyote,
you must have had a good mom. She must have shown you how a good Lady looked like. My mom was a Lady my father could respect. I have chosen a wife that loves to talk and are just as outspoken as myself (or more). I sometimes have to think pretty fast. You have to care for them to do them right. When the Muslims get to the power here in Canada you will be counted as a freak if you respect your Lady! In all the demonstrations you se pictures from do you ever se a Lady? Do you ever see a Lady in those countries say anything. I like to have my wife also as my best friend, and I show it to my children. We have something good going on. Let us protect it.

birdstomach
good story:
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/int...,399263,00.html

Why do we men need religion?

Because of the evolutionary handicap in our brain, I wrote about a couple of hours ago, we men have had to invent methods to think fast enough to be competitive enough, to win over nature, animals, microbes, neighboring tribes and be on the level with our female partners. We produce and remember in our heads a lot of small pre-packed solutions. Long time ago maybe three to four thousand years ago or more, we only needed a clever man or woman to remember all the good stories and advise so they could tell them to and give them to the young men, so they could be well prepared for life. People then had a shaman and the Sun was their God.

Then we became more and we got more tribes competing for the best lands and life became more complex and there were more to remember of successful experiences to live by. We got heroes; when we had forgotten what they looked like we called them gods and we got many of them.

That went well until the Romans forced more tribes to live within the same area in bigger cities. More gods became too complex for the male brain to deal with to have fast enough answers to all the problems of people-compression. Instead we got one God that told us that we were not guilty in being unable to understand, and to protect ourselves our family and our tribe; at least we should not spend time on speculating on that. Concentrate on work and the church will take care of choosing the right packages to give to our children. There was Babylon, but it was so long time ago and its successful solution was only for the Jews.

600 years after ‘Jesus’, it became the turn for the tribes in the countryside to be over-compressed. A young man, Muhammad, with a horse could not be enrolled in a successful tribe of his choice (it was Jewish) so he got inspired to improve on his own tribe’s relative position by improving its religion by making it monotheistic.

Jesus had his roots in a group that was pushed all the way out to the edge of the desert to the worst part of Israel. Jesus was given no horse and no sword’ so he talked accordingly. He talked out from his own experience using the small packets his mom and teachers had given him that did not include a drive to win. He was teaching submission driven by fear.

Muhammad had a horse and a sword and had learnt to use them both. Compromise and working peacefully cannot have been an essential part of the small packages Mohammed was presented with in his upbringing. I see Mohammed as introducing a model where achieving honor was essential and was based on the number of heads chopped. A decapitating of infidels and Jews based on envy, as reflected in ‘Jyllands-Posten’s drawings, who’s cartoonists, by the way, is good Christians and as such driven by fear.

The Christians have for many years worked out from the idea that everybody who could be born should be, I guess it was soldiers our rulers wanted, to fight Muslims I guess. Later the rulers decided that the landowners and farmers no longer could testament all their belongings to one son, but had to split their property evenly between all the children leaving too small portions for them to manage profitably. Result being that we the people got smart and propagated with less than replacement-rate.

Those low replacements–rates do not please the rulers of our governments, the illuminati, they have got the bright idea to replace us with some with a higher replacement-rate than ours seemingly build in to their religion, and that is the way it is going to be. All political parties want the emigrants.

I have been told that the first learned is the last out. If we, the people, must live with the Muslims, we have to demand that they fully integrate with us. And if they do not want to or cannot because their small packets has been sitting there too long, then we must ask our government to send them home to where they came from.

Men must have Religion to survive. Which one, can we still choose?

Am I alone in thinking that the Danish cartoon caper was cooked up and whipped up by none-of-the-above, for the easy plausibility for creating a wider war?

I keep thinking of our Canadian troops going over to "take command" of the armed forces in Afghanistan, while the U.S. forces slip away home. We might think ours are Peacekeepers but in fact they will be in on a very dirty war, fighting Afghans who will get more hostile, the longer foreigners occupy their land.

91% of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan and the Canadian forces will be "in command" of that too.

So, I think it's a situation which already couldn't be much worse ... we're covering the U.S. withdrawal, it's a war nobody can win, and we have little hope of getting our guys out of Afghanistan ...

Therefore, wouldn't it help if the "enemy" seemed louder, wilder, more inflamed, more threatening ... thus proving how plausible and necessary it is for us to be Fighting Terrorism? Over there?

Someone from the U.S. wrote to me last week saying, "It's all there in Revelations ..." See what I mean?

ashguy. I have to wonder what you've been smoking ;-)

But really, as you go on about the two prophets, you suppose that those two guys in the desert are the only two holy guys who count. What of the Viking gods? The Haida gods? etc etc.....

How is it that the Vikings, for all their supposed ferocity, were able to cobble together a "Tag" -- parliament -- in Iceland, elect chieftains, and develop, by ancient standards, respect for both genders. What "packets" were these guys and gals running around with?

BC Mary:

Perhaps.

But there's no denying that the "Muslim issue" is a real issue for the Euros. First, the Euro nations, unlike the "new world", have never really had to cope with in-migration and to consider either American-style assimilation or Canadian-like multiculturalism. Their populations are much more homogenous and recent waves of refugees create fear of the unknown.

Second, and related to the first, the Euros have different conceptualizations of "citizenship". Rightly or wrongly, citizenship to most Euros is a matter of blood, not birth or "passing a citizenship exam". Thus, neither you nor I (well, not I, because I'm a Euro immigrant in Canada) nor the Euro-Muslims have much of a chance of attaining citizenship. They thus remain on the periphery of public life.

Third, look at the numbers of refugees taken in by most Euro nations. On a per capita basis, the numbers are staggering. As such, the impact on indigenous Euros is overwhelming.

So, BC Mary, you may be right, but I think this is also very much a Made-in-Europe problem.

On Die Welt’s ‘The Free West’s Weblog’ you can find Ayaan Hirsi Ali's speech in Berlin yesterday ‘The right to offend’

http://www.welt.de/z/plog/blog.php/the_free_west/the_free_wests_weblog/2006/02/10/the_right_to_offend

The Right to Offend.
I am here to defend the right to offend.
It is my conviction that the vulnerable enterprise called democracy cannot exist without free expression, particularly in the media. Journalists must not forgo the obligation of free speech, which people in other hemispheres are denied.
I am of the opinion that it was correct to publish the cartoons of Muhammad in Jyllands Posten and it was right to re-publish them in other papers across Europe. …
…
Berlin, 9.02.06
Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Grub wrote:

“First, the Euro nations, unlike the "new world", have never really had to cope with in-migration and to consider either American-style assimilation or Canadian-like multiculturalism. Their populations are much more homogenous and recent waves of refugees create fear of the unknown.”

Now, I don’t know what part of Europe your experience comes from. As far as Denmark is concerned, it is, just like Canada, a land built by immigrants. Over many decades, possibly centuries, the per capita immigration into Denmark was equal to that of Canada. There has never been much doubt about what model to use: Denmark is most emphatically not multicultural, but highly tolerant of all ethnicities, as long as they behave with decorum, which, admittedly, is a tall bill for some; Danes detest rude people. Denmark has one important experience to its name, which Canada has not: That of fighting bloody wars on its own turf to defend its freedom. There are no freedom fighters in Canada. On the contrary: we embarrassingly had to have our independence crammed down our throats, because the Brits were utterly fed up with nursemaiding us. Danes are very conscious of how dearly freedom is bought, and how judicious one must be in defending it and using it.

So, the degree of shock in Denmark has nothing to do with the innocent village suddenly being invaded by people from the great scary world, it has to do with the inability to imagine the arrogance of coming to someone’s country and peeing on their rug, to quote a stalwart American. The bottom line for the assorted outraged people is that no one held a gun to their heads and made them go to Denmark. If they don’t like it there, they can go home.

BC Mary wrote:

“but in fact they will be in on a very dirty war, fighting Afghans who will get more hostile, the longer foreigners occupy their land. ”

- What Afghans are we talking about here? The ones depicted in the two TV shows ‘Kandahar’ and ‘return to Kandahar’, who thought they inhabited a mildly progressive country with good prospects for the future, and who dearly wish to re-create such a state of affairs, or the Taliban, of whom not very many qualify as ‘Afghan’, who took it all away from the first ones, to create their own dirty little control-freak culture, taking their grudges on life in general out on defenseless women and children, not to mention Bamiyan Buddhas? As far as I know, the latter are the only ones who are hostile. They themselves are foreign occupying forces, from all over the Islamic world, mighty miffed because they had a good thing going, and now ‘the party’ appears to be over.

Afghanistan is a difficult undertaking for those who wish for a modern-style democracy. There is no long-standing tradition for such. For the longest time, the tribal system was in place, ‘democracy’ represented by a warlord council, when things were best and warring factions when they were bad. In the years before the great trouble with Russian and American interference, there were some signs the country might have moved forward to something better. It is now trying to get on that track again, but needs help. Those who would rather see chaos, from which they believe they can seize power again, perpetrate what dirty war there is.

The above is from an article on prison riots. It may seem obscure but I think it relates very much to the issue being discussed here - "rioting on a global scale". Just as in a prison riot the actual incident itself is only the spark to a fuse on a powder keg...the real reasons (issues of overcrowding, staff brutality, food quality, lack of programs etc... well, you name it) ...and their undercurrents of discontent, run much, much deeper.

Riots tap into a history of outrage... I would think it's a pretty good guess that for anyone to place themselves in the center of that dangerous, emotional storm, they have been angry for quite some time...their unaddressed history of outrage, their loss of human dignity and respect - fueling their fury and finally breaking through.

Tasteless mashed potatoes may spark a prison riot but it would be highly superficial to call them the main cause of prison unrest. The same goes for the Danish cartoon...it's a lightweight distraction floating on a deep and heavy sea of human feeling.

Wow, people have been so prolific on this one - and me so late to the party. Hope it's not too late to put my oar in...

Look, it's very simple - you mess with the bull, you get the horns.

The Prophet Muhammed was insulted - think most people agree with that. The main point of contention it seems is whether the current sh-tstorm is justified. "Relax," many posters write "Jews and Christians wouldn't get in such a huff and so Muslims shouldn't either." (Frank, BTW, it's "Muslim" and not "Moslem" - though I suspect that you're the type of guy who still calls the Inuit "Eskimos").

This may be right, it's likely Christians in general wouldn't be out destroying embassies if Jesus were depicted throwing bombs and sowing terrorism - but they would be insulted and angry and that's okay. We all have the inherent right to be pissed-off at being insulted, right? Of course it is. It's just that our reaction to the insult is what is moderated by law.

So why deliberately antagonize Muslims with this cartoon? To make a point, perhaps? And what is that point? That the Prophet Muhammed encourages violence and terror? A courageous claim that needed to be made, or just plain stupid?

Just because extremists invoke the name of God, whether s/he's called Jehovah, Allah, Gaea, etc. doesn't mean that the God really sanctions the activity. . .what really strikes me is the insistence in the Western media to ascribe the violent tendencies of certain extremists in certain states as being inherent to the Muslim faith. This is wrong.

Yet strange how when most Muslim terrorists strike, they claim a blow against the USA and its Western alliance partners rather than against Jesus. They understand that their enemies are secular and not Christ - but for some reason we in the West have a hard time making this distinction. The Prophet does not sit in a cave with Osama Bin Laden plotting the downfall of Israel and the Great Satan. Neither does Jesus sit on school boards in Kansas fighting evolution - though many Christians might like to think so.

Finally, back to the "mess with the bull" scenario. Coyote is right(never did I imagine that I would write these words) - the cartoons are not the issue. Just like Tonkin, the Maine, et al. they are pretexts for action to address other -um, priorities.

Wow, Dorothy. . . how very tolerant of you but one small point. Ahmed Akkari, the Muslim scholar who brought these cartoons to the attention of clerics in Muslim countries was a Danish citizen. He tried to act Danish when he saw these offensive images printed in his national newspaper and appeal with the editors. He tried to rectify the situation domestically but frustrated when stymied and ignored, tried to raise awareness of the situation by appealing internationally. Simple concept, not getting the desired results? Escalate. This is a standard mode of political action (and used in business as well) without which apartheid would not have ended, more of the amazonian rainforest denuded, whales gone extinct, et al.

So, the genesis of this whole issue was that a Danish citizen(though an immigrant) thought he might try and change his country's thinking instead of leaving it. He was NOT a guest pissing on the rug - unless immigrants are guests in Denmark. In Canada though, I'm sure glad that I'm not considered a guest though being born elsewhere and immigrating to this country might make me so in your eyes Dorothy. Or maybe just in the eyes of that "stalwart American" you so cryptically quoted... tell me, Dorothy, since when does wearing a white hood make one so stalwart?

Incredulous wrote:

”So, the genesis of this whole issue was that a Danish citizen(though an immigrant) thought he might try and change his country's thinking instead of leaving it.”

One does not change anyone’s thinking by threatening their life. If anything, that just solidifies positions. The other issues you mention won in the end, because there was valid rational argument behind them. The ‘rational’ argument here is: my norms should be calling the shots here. If your girls show their legs, in my book they’re sluts and I should be able to avail myself of the goods, by force if need be. If you dare to let a dirty jew read my koran in your university, to a bunch of infidels to boot, our boys will demolish him on his way home, and rightly so.

Danish muslims were not stymied and ignored. They went to court and were turned down, because the cartoons were not illegal. One does not always, in a civilised society, get ‘the desired result’, but it is what one does in that situation, that marks one as either civilised or the opposite. Calling in the bullies and thugs does not qualify. A buddhist would have asked what he could learn from the situation, and then set out to learn.

I believe that sitting on the fence is a precarious effort. Must it not be obvious, that if a religion, be it Chrisitianity or Islam, and, far enough back, Judaism, can time and time again be misunderstood and used as a basis for fascism and violence, then it needs fixing? Maybe there is a problem with monotheistic thinking, unless you think as the Sikhs, highly rationally, that there is only one God, so no matter how people label him – take your pick – we are in fact in agreement, we all belive in the God there is. It is when people start out with their God being jealous and different from that of the next guy, that trouble starts. Maybe this answers the question someone raised about Norse and North American native deities: They are inherently tolerant and don’t have chance in the face of the monolithic, militant desert religions. Desert people are not into living in harmony with and respect for nature, they are out to execise their ‘dominion over all living things’, as well as be fruitful and multiply. Zoological museum in Copenhagen has, as the very last item in its exhibits, before you hit the exit door, a sign on the wall saying ‘Behold the most dangerous creature that ever walked the Earth’. Above it is… oops I will probably exceed the word limit…next time!

Just as a further demonstration that real life is often more complex/convoluted than appears, my "mom" was actually a complete lunatic. :-D Which will confirm the suspicions of all the braunshirts here, no doubt, ehh? :-D (lol)

She was a gifted and trained classic musician, a poetess, a dreamer, and a complete paranoid schizo basketcase. But she was also a gentle soul who when push came to shove, in a time that was abysmally ignorant of mental illness, could dish out as good as she got.

Though it did get a bit much, and you always had to know where the scissors were. :-D And you didn't just leave a box of chocolates lying around, 'cause she could inhale the entire box in a walk past. :-D more lol.

Still, she was my mom,eh" :-) And I had a fantastic grandmother on my father's side.

Lynn,

Outstanding set of observations, Lynn. The best definition yet of the point I was trying to make myself, throughout this thread.

We are increasingly living in a time that is going to require that we be perceptive, and able to see beyond the mere surface appearance of things, if we are going to get through it, I think. And you do woman, for sure.

And I think BC Mary is looking in the right direction of things in a piece she does above as well. We are in a world order of surveillance, manufacturing consent, public manipulation and management of information, that is going to require we not be so quickly taken in or assume the correctness of what "official explanations" tell us so much. Assuming of course that we ever could or should have.

Incredulous,

And a really good and perceptive piece of writing coming from yourself, brother. (Never "right". "Three lefts" only.:-D

Continued next post...

From previous post...

The assumptions we have made about our own inherent superiority, we global "Westeners", has blinded us to our own self-deceptions and presumptuous arrogances. When the reality is, I think, that really many we assume to be the "lesser peoples" of the world understand us, what we are about and up to in the world, considerable better than we might appreciate or wish they did.

( I know the Natives I worked with on ranches and farms, taught me many things about my fellow Whites that they would be shocked to know they see and understand about us. They see us as such a problem that they have to study us, and understand us better than we do ourselves. Their continued survival depends on it. Which makes them smarter about us in very many ways than we are about them.)

And yet while we are so dangerous to them in very many ways, they, at least the ones who really study us, and there are more of those all the time too, also have garnered an understanding that the sophisticated intellectual rationalizations we set up for ourselves, and our complex globe straddling organizational constructs, but perhaps especially our lavish/decadent (appearing to many in the world) material/stuff/lifestyle dependencies make us in the first "civilized" world, also vulnerable at very many levels. We are very dependent on our "stuff".

The "Neocons" of the current day, almost as if sensing this themselves, attempt to hide this with their displays, we see even here, of excessive cocksureness and polical/cultural arrogances, and yes, military bellicosity and chest thumping. But ever since Vietnam, and here again in the Middle East, it is sounding increasingly thin and hollow, even to many of ourselves.

Are we and our US Empire Masters really ready and prepared for the Endless War it is going to take to continue to control the Middle East and, to our minds, the "lesser world" of Asia etc?

If there are doubts that we can really stand up to that over the many insurgencies, regional and other wars yet to come, to provide the junky Empire's oil and other resource "fixes", to which even George B. himself alludes, and to fulfill their megalomanic dreams of continued world domination and nuclear monopoly, then certainly we Canadians, with or without our neighbours, may want to think, talk, organize and quickly move our fat arses as fast as we can, in quite another direction-, to Hell and gone away from them, for bloody sure.

Time to get smarter and move away from being so slavish and lap doggish to The Empire. Time to begin to understand the needs and views of other folks than merely those in The Empire heartland, and carve out our own independent path in the world.

Roger Friedman of FOXnews.com reports that Michael Jackson, Bahrain's most famous celeb freeloader, has been told that his royal gravy train has come to the end of the line. Prince Abdullah has informed the locko Jacko that his account there is overdrawn.

Nor are sometime supporters in Dubai interested in providing welfare checks for the cash-strapped pop prince.

Shame on this Islamic Nation, if the endless wisdom and peace of Allah can't tolerate & accomodate Michael Jackson we are all doomed. Allah Willing.

Dorothy,

The Danes fell in WW2 in a day. It was not a war, it was simply an occupation. In WW1 the Danes stayed out of it.

The last war the Danes really fought was in 1864 when the German powers decided to wrest Schleswig-Holstein from Danish hands.

The Danes also fought in the Napoleonic Wars.

Canada was invaded in 1812. It was a real invasion. US army columns under crossed over from Detroit, across the Niagara and across the St Lawrence. Canadians and natives fought alongside the Brits in defending Canada for 3 years before the US threw in the towel.

Some Cdn regiments of the time were so good the Brits and US considered them as being equal to trained regulars. The Fencibles in particular were considered to be even better, elite troops.

Canada was invaded again after the US Civil War by the Fenians. These were quickly defeated before a real war could develop.

Britain did not force independence on us, our contribution in WW1 where we were widely considered to be the best troops in the world is what earned us a right to have a seat at the League of Nations and begin setting up our own embassies and carry out our own foreign policy.

It was the Canadians that held the line during the poison gas attack at Ypres. It was the Canadian Corps that took Vimy Ridge and it was the Canadian Corps, together with the Australian Corps (the only time we ever fought side by side) that attacked on August 8th 1918 and destroyed up to 8 German divisions on that day alone. Ludendorff called it the Black Day of the German Army and the day he himself realized the war was lost. Canada continued to attack for 100 days, spearheading the British army's advance into Belgium.

We lost over 60,000 dead. No one forced independence on us, we grasped it and paid for it. And our population at the time was less than 8 million.

In WW2 we paid almost as high a price as we did in WW1. With a population still well under 15 million Our military lost over 17,000 aircrew alone bombing Germany and defending Britain. Our navy and merchant marine lost thousands more fighting a grim war in the cold dark North Atlantic.

We lost thousands in a single day at Dieppe. We fought the elite German paratroopers at Ortona. We spearheaded the 8th Army up the Italian boot. We had our own beach, Juno, on D-Day. We left thousands of dead across northern France and Belgium and we liberated Holland.

Canada does not have to take a back seat to anyone when it comes to military sacrifice.

Guilty as charged. I also still say "Siege of Peking" and "the Burma Campaign". I'm happy to call people whatever they wish to be called.

I don't. He died over 1300 years ago, I doubt he's insulted by anything now.

You missed the posting that provided the Wikipedia link. The cartoons were part of an article talking about the fact that people were too scared to ever do anything that Moslems might find offensive. It is a point that needed to be made. You can't just kill Dutch film-makers because you don't like their movies. You can't intimidate artists in non-Islamic countries.

I think its more about the geograghic area occupied by Islamic countries as having violent tendencies. Its for the same reasons people think of the US as an aggressive nation. Sure the presidents change and the parties in power change but somehow American troops always seem to be where the invasions are occurring. I'm sure there is nothing inherent about living in Kentucky and going to church that makes you a reactionary prone to violence. Yet somehow most countries in the world have been impacted at one time or another by the US military.

ion.

Do we? I don't think we're blaming Mohammed and Allah for the violence. We're blaming the people committing the violence.

You're erecting a straw man.

Then they should say what these other priorities are. But if we hear its about the cartoons I think we should accept that.

Lynn,

But no one is arguing that the Moslem world doesn't have a reason to be angry about their lot. But rioting and burning the Danish embassy at the behest of their political and religous leaders is not the answer.

The answer is new political and religous leaders.

The oil in the Middle East wasn't worth anything 200 years ago and won't be there at all in another couple of hundred. They have a window of opportunity and its being squandered by both the political and religous elites.

Telling people their enemy is Danish cartoonists and Dutch film-makers instead of the Saudis, Mubararek, Hussein, the sheiks of the gulf etc is just deflecting anger that is only going to build as population and poverty increase.

Good bit of research and writing, Frank.

Which indeed serves to demonstrate, most importantly to ourselves, because it seem we are the ones who need to be most convinced of the value of our own warrior tradition sometimes-, but to the US Empire's Red Staters here and our own Neocon Quislings, that whilst thus far the Canadian nation appears to be asleep at the switch, and our leaders even in a knee bending, kiss ass mood, bowing to Washington like it is the New Mecca, that this wee sleeping giant too, once awoken and armed can account for itself as well as any in a serious conflict.

And really, in this world taking shape before us, especially given the ideological and "empire seeking/world domination" place the US head is in right now, and how the US is being too presumptuous and taking us too much for granted, under weak, ruling class beholden leaders in all parties, and tolerating their covetously eyeing our North, and the natural riches of the geography we claim, we need to begin to think seriously about reclaiming again that warrior tradition put to so much use defending the interests of others and their interests in the world.

It is already pasttime we turned it to our own needs, to form the defensive shield we might well need if this country is ever going to assert its sovereign self, and move away, out from the shadow of the US Empire.

It is time for the Empire to the South to learn that it is really not we who so much need them. We are still at population levels and a land base place that we can still be relatively self-sufficient, if we choose and their is the national will.

The only way anyone can defeat us really, here on our own home ground, is first that we are "convinced" that we are powerless in and of ourselves, and that we need some sugar daddy benevolent power to look out over us, and upon whom we are and should ever remain dependent. (Sound familiar, ladies? :-)

Which is about where we currently are. Even our own State behaves like a de-nutted eunuch.

It is bullshit. And it is a situation that screams out for change. All that is really missing is the courage and the will.

Frank wrote:

“Canada does not have to take a back seat to anyone when it comes to military sacrifice.”

Far be it from me to slam the bravery of Canadians, and their willing- ness to sacrifice for what they feel compelled to serve! I have several young Canadians in my own family, and there is no slinking in their attitudes, in case someone messes with ‘their town’.

I was also not trying to downgrade Canadian military prowess. I know we have some of the best soldiers on Earth, often seemingly doing the impossible, where others have tried and failed, and I happen to think they deserve better pay and far better tools, and, yes, it is one of the things I am willing to bleed tax-dollars for. A people that will not invest in guarding its gates sucks in my book.

Finally, my significant other served for 7 years, so if I ever entertained notions of deriding military men, I would quickly bee disabused of it.

You completely missed my point, man!

The history of Denmark’s precarious existence as a ‘ridiculous little country’ started all the way back in the late 700’s when Godfred, the then-king slammed the first ramparts across the neck of Jutland, abandoned the Saxons left on the other side of it, and posted a sign proclaiming this land was now officially part of Christendom, no reason to invade!

Ever since, the Danes have had to employ all their wits and staggering resouces to stay independent. There was, down through history, an alternating line of bloody wars and diplomatic endeavours, buying, selling, trading off and sneakiness, interspersed with bravery and defiance, and often terrible cost. This is a history many european nation-states share, in different versions. And I only mention it here, and did so before, to underline, that freedom is something Danes do not take, or treat, lightly.

Canada gained its independence, when its constitution became possible to amend within its borders, by ourselves and not needing any other agents for the process. Not before. Prior to that, we were, despite our size and impressive accomplishments, essentially a colonial outpost. It happened when it did, because it became obvious that Britain had interests in common with Europe, not with the more remote parts of its former empire, and intended to enter the EEC. The process, a private member’s bill, the kitchen conferences, etc., are a fascinating part of our history that I will always treasure.

ah, Frank but now you are making a fine distinction between the people and their political and religious elite...an elite often propped up by the West.

So now we have a pressure cooker because we have people oppressed on all sides...which is the danger here. How do you breath, how do you rationally think, when you are being pushed up against the wall on all sides? When even your so-called liberators are bombing your country to smithereens, mocking what you hold sacred... as well as the whiff of a nuclear threat now hanging over those mid-east countries who are considered misbehaving and not dancing in step with the west.

There are extremists on all sides here..east and west... they are making life precarious for all of us...that is why the cartoon was so foolish in the way it discounts how precarious the balance is...there is a western-chic glibness to the defence of freedom of speech in this case...like tourists on the Serengeti who don't quite get that they certainly have the right to get out of the jeep to snap a better photo...yeah, they got the right...but it's really foolish if you don't size up the the situation first... and tread this unknown territory with respect...so now you got a charging hippo or a burning embassy...because you refused to acknowledge that there is a dangerous and delicate balance at play here...a dangerous precipice that the west has played a large part in creating... it's self-righteous denial of its own complicity conveniently now including a coyly feigned interest in free speech...

No, we've helped to set up the riot conditions for quite some time now, if you want to tack a cartoon up to further test how dangerous the waters have become...I guess that is your right....just don't expect an orderly oh-so-civil response...because the hippo knows when his territory is being trepassed on, he knows the tourist trade better than anyone, what he has to lose in all of it and what is greatly at stake for his kingdom.... and in the end, he, too has a right to his response.

As Coyote says:

?

Motivated is the key word in the above.

I apologize for the all the mix of metaphors...it's how I think unfortunately.

And just so we stay good friends, Frank... I, too, still call Burma, "Burma". As you can see. :-)

..and a fine piece of writing on Canada's valiant and renowned war effort, Frank. There are many people who would benefit from reading your piece.

just in case I was unclear... (who moi?)...the question mark belonged to Coyote's quote. I agree with him that the Empire and its flunky minions need defeating. The sooner the better. Now I'm outta here.

Mein Gott am Himmel, doesn't one hear that "western-chic glibness" in the voice of the Neocons and many an "intellectual" here!?

Western chic glibness! Love it. It leaps off the page. :-)

I've claimed it as my own. You know that don't you , Lynn. :-)

Sorry Dorothy, I thought the military was being slighted. I was too quick on the draw.

Lynn,

As I said way up above I think Akkari and the Danish newspaper culture editor should have sat down in a restaurant and talked it over back when it first came up. The editor should have apologized for any offence but should have tried to get across to Akkari what I consider to be the main point and why I feel the collective "we" are arguing past each other in many cases.

You and Coyote and mspacek for example have taken the position that its not all about the cartoons. In a way, so have I. But my point is that its about the self-censorship being imposed on European artists which the cartoons and the article accompanying them was trying to discuss. Rushdie goes into an equivalent of the witness relocation program, the Dutch movie-maker is killed, professors are intimidated from discussing the Koran in classrooms and so on.

Your quote is exactly what I think is wrong. We should be able to freely discuss provocative subjects from abortion to gay marriage to pedophile priests to Islamic intimidation of artists.

.

Nuts, forgot to address this.

I do, I always have.

Why does the West prop up bad leaders? Because they get the oil out of the ground with as few impediments as possible. All those little western-created sheikdoms exists because its in western interests. Alexander the Great never conquered the U.A.E. It didn't exist. Its an old trick, set up the piece of ground that actually has the oil as a separate country so that the price becomes cheaper. They tried it in Angola too, trying to separate out Cabinda.

If all that oil wealth was going to the actual people of Egypt, Arabia, Syria and Iraq there would be a lot less problems instead of the ruling classes of the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, the Saudis etc

But the answer again is not in doing the bidding of the political rulers through the bought-off religous leaders, (Just as the Catholic Church used to support the divine right of kings) Its turning on those gov'ts and the religous leaders that support them.

As I said before, the sad fact of this whole episode is that a month from now the average guy in Syria will be scanning Danish papers looking for insults against the prophet instead of rising up against the dictator he lives under.

Frank, I should have put "fine and apt distinction" because I was agreeing very much with the distinction you made.

.

I agree, only freedom of speech also involves a freedom of response...always something to be weighed and considered.

.

Sometimes, though, by turning on those governments in our superior Father Knows Best attitude of western domination we confuse and complicate the people's own journey to sovereignty....not letting the politics evolve in a way that is true to their own culture.

And that's what I mean, the average guy in Syria is now going to find it a lot harder to determine who his real enemy is....the dictator he lives under or the Danes or the ever helpful west determined to bomb them in to democracy and free speech.

Just to make a more local analogy, this is exactly what Campbell and the neo-cons corporate elite are doing in their so-called co-operative spirit with First Nations in regards to their joint business endeavors. It is compromising aand blurring the First Nations sovereignty and land claims. Let First Nations be and find their own true way.

Coyote, it's yours...only I'd like to borrow it back now and then. :-)

Frank, Lynn, Coyote: Luv your posts, have since I got here. Keeps mine short and sweeter when you all say it best. ;-)

So, it looks like everybody here wish for dialogue, as it is more constructive than slugging it out.
_ _ _

The problem with this proposal is, it makes it sound as if no one has tried to do that so far. And that just ain’t so. Up till this point, the European countries that have experienced an influx of new people from the Muslim countries have tried to establish dialogue. They have tried to integrate, to accommodate, to adjust, to make room, until they’re blue in the face. Now they are down to drawing the famous, or infamous, line in the sand.

Where do we go from here? There is no amount of dialogue that can cross a gulf where one side won’t, or can’t, give. If it weren’t cartoons it would be something else, that much is true. We must wake up and understand that this is about lebensraum, and we are under siege. Our leaders in the West have based their wealth on continued growth, and if their own population (we) will not oblige, they just keep importing. Enough understanding! Why is it not we, who are crowding their cities and demanding our laws be respected within their boundaries? Or at least, why is it not even an equal situation?
_ _ _

The schooling some people get in some Muslim countries is confined to learning the Koran by rote. Except most Muslims do not allow themselves to query what it actually says, let alone suggest that the interpretations may be in error. We can freely do that with the Bible, and certainly the Jews have a long-standing tradition of doing it with the Torah. If we cannot get everyone at that table on an equal footing, and put everything on it and under debate, forget dialogue. Forget achieving any compromise. We may not have a choice about slugging it out, however prepared or unprepared we are, or feel we are. The one thing we must not do is go into the slugging match without having decided our objective, and what we will do with it, when it has been gained.
_ _ _

The Illuminati do not care about the color or beliefs of those who scrape up their wealth for them. They do not care, whether they got to the position of doing so instead of others by butchering those others wholesale. The only thing they care about is that there is enough of a surplus of workers that they can always keep the labor cost low and their profit high.

If there are any people we need to make terms with, it is our own leaders the Illuminati and the ones they speak trough, the Politicians, who are not willing to call a halt to their philosophy of unabated greed.

Which, as Lynn also points to Frank, is the aspect of this issue we seem to have trouble connecting with each other on. We're like ships on the open ocean passing by each other in the middle of a pitch black night.

I think Lynn has made it clear that she doesn't disagree with this statement of yours above, nor indeed do I. We are, as we should be, for it is a right won for us by the struggle of many generations of people, free to discuss whatever we please. (Though how free we might really be at some levels, we may yet discover to the contrary, in the new Homeland Defence North America. And eh, given the realities of our State leadership, if we don't think they operate fully up here with impunity, then you are living in some other totally different time-spave continuum.)

The "reality" is however, in the "new global universe", the "New World Order" of things"-, all different ways of saying the world of US Empire domination, and right now, a brutal conflict between that imperialism and the peoples of the Middle East, unless one is a total git, one really must understand and even have some "empathy" with the fact that these people are in a heightened state of sensitivity and awareness right now. They know what our Western States are really doing over there, in their lands, and they know very goddamned well what the "average" and "official" opinion of them, held by us, is.(They and their God all wear bombs for turbans. Bomber Ragheads.)

Certainly that is the simplistic Neocon view we hear time and again here, over and over like a broken bloody record. We-, we on the left however, better be capable of making finer distinctions and analyses with more depth of insight and understanding than these dolts, starting from the understanding that people's reactions over there, in an effective war zone which we have carried to them again, just may be a little over the top to some of the stupid things we exercise our over blown freedom of speech to say or draw, sometimes. Of course they have their reactionary and corrupt governments installed to rule over them, all protected and maintained in power by The Empire and its wannabes. But in the reality most of them have to deal with, we are the far greater immediate danger they have to deal with first.

The minute they attempt to take on those imperialist sanctioned regimes like the Saudi Royals, the Jordanian Royals, the sMusharaff and Mubaraks, and it is going to have to be done one day, no doubt, even many of them know that, first they are going to split their societies and fall into a war amongst themselves, possibly for years, they have to know that, and into which, in the current global geopolitical reality, The Empire is likely to intervene on the corrupt regimes behalf anyway.

So they have this foreign enemy to deal with first, to get off their backs, before they can get to the really historic and ground breaking work that is going to have to be done, to modernize, democratize and secularize their societies. And given the time, non interference and opportunity, the peoples of the Middle East are as capable of it as were say, Inquisition period Europe. For they really are not "untermenschen", but as capable of the attributes of civility and civilization as, at least, we. (Which ain't a hell of a lot sometimes.)

Continued next post...

From previous post...

In the meantime, they have to deal with the world and themselves as they are, and their regimes, The Empire and its Coalition as it is. Maybe you have a little difficulty understanding the height of the emotion and the anxiety and rage that these folks feel, but I do not, nor likely anyone capable of a modicum of empathy. Their reactions will frequently be emotional and seemingly irrational to us.

Though eh, we all have our moments in the dark border line area between sanity and insanity, fear and courage.

If you don't or can't understand that, then you simply lack the capacity to extend empathy beyond your own frames of geographic and social reference. And we are wasting our time even attempting to discuss this issue between each other. Then all things are but black and white, with no grey areas.

The issue here is really not all about us, though some are reacting as though that were the case. "It is all about us!"

There is a second party to this discussion in quite a different situation and facing quite a different set of dangers that is maybe not always going to see it quite the same crystal clear, pure way we do from our relative safety and material comfort. That's all we, such as Lynn, myself and others are saying. Cut these folks some phucking slack. Extend them a little empathy, rather than insults heaped on guns and bombs, and the insults and humiliations of their daily lives, fer fug's sake. We have little appreciation of the daily realities they face, while we amuse ourselves with intellectual sophistries and attempts to make debating points-, or as Lynn calls it, exercising our "western-chic glibness", where we alone get to define what democracy is and is not.

We are quite pathetic in other, no less contemptible ways ourselves, in our relationship to the Empire. We have our own problem with national will and courage. And I cut the folks of the Middle East way more slack than I do us. We afterall have this so-called right of free speech, too few actually exercise, but indeed all sound like the Fraser Institute-, and for what little it actually produces and good it does very, very often. We might as well all but be farting into the wind and call that feedom. We dare not test its real limits, ehhh? So keep it shallow and rhetorical. :-) Use it to poke fun at other people, different and more hardpressed than we.

Sometimes I think we might as well be out in the wilderness talking to the trees and the wind, for all that is really effected at the end of the day, by this so called "free speech". It is really action, not words that is the measure of it anyway.

I have a cartoon that needs to be drawn. It is of Uncle Sam walking off to war. There behind him in the first frame is Johnny Canuck following along dutifully behind, attempting to kiss Uncle Sam's ass.

In the second frame, there's Johnny Canuck with his head rammed up Uncle Sam's ass, with his fellows attempt to pull him free. Uncle Same is holding onto a tree and bracing himself, saying to John Bull, "These bloody Canadians, always trying to kiss my ass. If I'd known, I'd have come to a more gradual stop."

There's one we need to see on, oh say Al Jazeerah or the Baghdad media, as part of their exercising their right of free speech. Assuming the US and we don't jam their signal of course, as the US is wont to do.

24 hours ago I wrote at length about what males suffer from, I have now found some of my notes from last fall. Yesterday I was writing about the connecting brain structure called corpus callosum.
-
BBC news Friday, 4 November 2005, wrote:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4404682.stm

‘… The team, led by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, looked at research carried out into this "extreme male brain" explanation for autism.
They point to evidence that males generally have greater early growth of certain brain regions, and less hemispheric connectivity than females. …’
-
N.Y. Times - Published: August 8, 2005
The Male Condition - By SIMON BARON-COHEN writes two pages about the male sufferings:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08baron-cohen.html?ex=1281153600&en=497fba7d39bb5396&ei=5090&partner=rs
-
Normal Brain - Normal Anatomy in 3-D with MRI/PET (Javascript):

http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/cases/caseNA/pb9.htm

Choose:
Bone/nerve/Endocr, MR-T1 and
C Callosum genuï€*or C Callosum slenium

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen wanted money for his paper!
_ _ _

Just as the doctors have, I am sure Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad did know about those sex-differences. Muhammad the most.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali made the following statement in Berlin, 9.02.06
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Somalian born Muslim and current Dutch MP who has led campaigns against female circumcision and other aspects of Islam which she diagrees with, resulting in her living under death threats:

The Right to Offend.
I am here to defend the right to offend. It is my conviction that the vulnerable enterprise called democracy cannot exist without free expression, particularly in the media. Journalists must not forgo the obligation of free speech, which people in other hemispheres are denied.

I am of the opinion that it was correct to publish the cartoons of Muhammad in Jyllands Posten and it was right to re-publish them in other papers across Europe. It was their duty as journalists to solicit and publish drawings of the prophet Muhammad.

We have been flooded with opinions on how tasteless and tactless the cartoons are -- views emphasising that the cartoons only led to violence and discord. What good has come of the cartoons, so many wonder loudly?

Well, publication of the cartoons confirmed that there is widespread fear among authors, filmmakers, cartoonists and journalists who wish to describe, analyse or criticise intolerant aspects of Islam all over Europe.

It has also revealed the presence of a considerable minority in Europe who do not understand or will not accept the workings of liberal democracy. These people – many of whom hold European citizenship – have campaigned for censorship, for boycotts, for violence, and for new laws to ban ‘Islamophobia’.

Today, the open society is challenged by Islamism, ascribed to a man named Muhammad Abdullah who lived in the seventh century, and who is regarded as a prophet. Many Muslims are peaceful people; not all are fanatics. As far as I am concerned they have every right to be faithful to their convictions. But within Islam exists a hard-line Islamist movement that rejects democratic freedoms and wants to destroy them. These Islamists seek to convince other Muslims that their way of life is the best. But when opponents of Islamism try to expose the fallacies in the teachings of Muhammad then they are accused of being offensive, blasphemous, socially irresponsible – even Islamophobic or racist.

Why me? I am a dissident. I was born in Somalia, and grew up in Saudi Arabic and Kenya. I used to be faithful to the guidelines laid down by the prophet Muhammad. Like the thousands demonstrating against the Danish drawings, I used to hold the view that Muhammad was perfect -- the only source of, and indeed, the criterion between good and bad. In 1989 when Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie to be killed for insulting Muhammad, I thought he was right. Now I don’t.

I think that the prophet was wrong to have placed himself and his ideas above critical thought.

I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have subordinated women to men.

I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have decreed that gays be murdered.

I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have said that apostates must be killed.

He was wrong in saying that adulterers should be flogged and stoned, and the hands of thieves should be cut off.

He was wrong in saying that those who die in the cause of Allah will be rewarded with paradise.

He was wrong in claiming that a proper society could be built only on his ideas.

The prophet did and said good things. He encouraged charity to others. But I wish to defend the position that he was also disrespectful and insensitive to those who disagreed with him.

I do not seek to offend religious sentiment, but I will not submit to tyranny. Demanding that people who do not accept Muhammad’s teachings should refrain from drawing him is not a request for respect but a demand for submission.

I am not the only dissident in Islam..

Kurt,

You might want to spend some time in the old testament there, and see the Jewish version of Sharia Law which provides the founding foundation of Christianity. Which Fundamentalist Christianity and even more "traditional" orthodox and other Christian Churches in many parts of the world, currently in the ascendancy in Christiandom adheres to down to the present day. It has some fairly salient points to make about the "obedient" relationship that women should maintain with men, still widely practiced throughtout fundamentalist Christianity even here, and about the morality and punishment to be meted out to men who lie with men, rights of slavery etc. (It's been a long time since I read all that shit, but others, I am sure, will be able to point you in the right direction. Job? Ecclesiastics?)

Anyway, I've had about enough of this particular conversation. The salient points with me being, of course we have the formal right of free speech, and it is a critical one, perhaps the most fundamental to all the other freedoms. That said, I merely point out what I think should be obvious, when such said right merely becomes the backdrop for ridiculing people we have little or no understanding of , their real lives and situations, then we open ourselves equally to ridicule. And there is much this country and The West can and deserves to be held up to ridicule for, no doubt. It's hypocritical double standards not the least, say in relation to Iran having the right to nuclear technology, including nuclear arms. But on many other political and religious issues as well. All, or certainly the principal religions are founded fundamentally on a male defined and interpreted ideology and view of nature and social/sexual relationships. Similarly Christianity.

So while the ridiculars of Islam certainly have their right of free speech, and there is much to ridicule of them as Christianity, no less do we athiests and others enjoy the rights of our free speech to point out the harm one can do in people to people relations sometimes, when one chooses to make satirical ridicule the centrepiece of that right. (Otherwise, lets face it, we athiests could be teeing off on you Christians all the time, and with good reason, driving you to distraction. Whereas generally though, we do exercise a great deal of self-editing restraint. :-)

When one chooses to exercise their right to free speech however, something else concomitantly comes with that. The rest of us get the right as well to offer up our critique of that, the form it has taken, the context and the message. This is no less a right than one's to ridicule and blather.

Continued next post...

From previous post...

And I say, as a reaction to the depiction of "all" Muslims as raghead bombers is akin to depicting all Christians as arrogant wingnut and self-righteous Crusaders. Which is not to deny elements of truth to both depictions.

At the same time, I support the right of all oppressed people to defend themselves, overthrow oppressive regimes by force of arms where there is no other real alternative, and likewise take up arms against foreign invaders and occupiers, and those amongst their own people who support them. I similarly concede the right to attack and assasinate him in his/her homeland, where he is upon and warring on your home turf, and thieving the peoples natural resources and other treasure.

(911 was fundamentally an attack on the US Empire heartland, by Saudi attackers, in retaliation for first, US financial and war materiale support for the Jewish occupation of Palestine, for the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia and their arms and war materiale support for the oppressive regime of the Saudi Royals. and an extensive history of US interference and imperialist war making in the Middle East Region, from the time of the end of WW2, whereafter they began to replace the old British Empire occupiers.)

What is occurring throughout the Middle East and the Muslim Religion even, is a complex phenomena, not anywhere near adequately described by the depiction of a Muhammad with a bomb for a turban. That was designed simply to incite, and it worked.

(And like I have already said, to the degree that helps motivate the people of the Middle East to defeat US imperialism and the Jewish/European-US occupation of Palestine, I think it will turn out to have been a good thing. Which was certainly not its intention, I am sure. Thank you, Danes. :-D lol

Which is all I will have to say on this particular subject. Period.

Jesus was a dissident among the Pharisees; Mohammed was a dissident within the previous Arabic polytheism; Martin Luther was a dissident within Catholicism. All these three gave rise to new religions or churches.

The thing with being a dissident is, that if one means business, one must act on it. It is not something one can sit on, like a bunch of eggs, and only take out of the moth-bag, when there is trouble and one wishes to not be lumped in with the bad guys.

I am tired to the bone of having to distinguish between ‘radicals’, ‘moderates’, ‘classics’ and ‘lights’ in everything. In my book, these are children’s games. If you are a Roman Catholic today, and say so to the world, you are standing up for Spanish inquisition, pedophilic clergy, bloody wars, crusades, the whole package deal. If you are a Muslim and say so, you are standing for everything that has ever been done in the name of Allah and the Prophet, and if you are Jewish, you are endorsing all the way back to the wholesale slaughter of the neighbours done by Joshua and cohorts. You cannot pick and choose, and hope for others to work their laborious way through your fine distinctions. As the commissar said in Dr. Zhivago: we have no use for sympathetic doctors, who think they can sit on the fence; or words to that effect.

Trouble in this world is made by people, who think they can do one thing and say another, for they will invariably prevail on others to help them maintain that falsehood. It is up to the people within the ranks of Islam and other such monolitihic menaces, to clean house, and if that means becoming a new prophet, breaking things up, making a mess, like Luther and Mohammed himself did, so be it. This is how the World moves forward. Their fellow muslims are those who need to hear their opinions, not the rest of us, who adhere to other religions.

About the notion of jihad, being God’s soldier etc.: there was once, where that served a purpose in human development. The smartest, swiftest guys, the ones with the best marksmanship and the strongest sword- or spear arm won the day and got to have children, and so we effected eugenics that way. Today, even the scrawniest, dumbest specimen can wave around an AK-47 and reasonably hit something, so as a selective tool, war is obsolete. I believe the trouble we see is due to some parts of the world’s population not having realised, that now it is about best appying the 48 rules of power, being Machiawellian in your approach to life, that is what counts, and where they get confronted with that, as immigrants to the Western World, it makes them very angry that the rules of the game has changed, and they are not prepared. We cannot set back the clock for them; entropy cannot decrease. They must look to bring up their children for the world as it is, not as they wish for it to be.

I am not denigrating the courage of dissidents. I know it puts their life at peril, just to say a few words. But in order to effect true transformation, they must, as the runelord in ‘the last rune’, hold onto the stone of fire to the bitter end, or what they seek to transform will only become a charred, ‘undead’ husk presenting a menace to the entire world.

An interesting, reasoned and I think fairly even-handed view expressed in the article in the link below...especially interesting in light of BC Mary's comment below:

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=263804&area=/insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/

Coyote wrote:

'I similarly concede the right to attack and assasinate him in his/her homeland, where he is upon and warring on your home turf, and thieving the peoples natural resources and other treasure.'

Swift justice, eh? The shootout down at the OK corral...The only problem is, who's going to decide the question of guilt or innocence?

We all would aspire to take on the role of judge, jury and excutioner. The strictest penalty of the law does not come down on killers due to the crime being heinous, but due to how widespread it would be in the absence of deterrent.

It would seem to me, that those in other lands, who 'thieves' in your view usually pays the fair market value for the goods, while the thieves are to be found among those leaders, who are not sharing the wealth with their people, not using it to make their countries more competitive. But it is so much easier to go to a free and open society somewhere else and gun, or bomb, or burn. In one's own country, one would be killed or maimed for the same transgressions. Nevertheless, that is where the injustice is, and where the fight should be fought. Ask any Nicaraguan.

Someone mentioned the general European crunch in 1865, where Denmark lost a big chunk of Southern Jutland, which had been theirs for more than a millenium, and became a ‘small, poor land’, as one National anthem has it. Did the Danes plot someone’s death in London, or in Vienna? No, they had a society formed, to break new agricultural ground, the hardpan plains in mid-Jutland, under the slogan: ‘What is outward lost must be inward gained’. The leader of that enterprise was named Enrico Dalgas, clearly an immigrant, but with the right skills. Do you know why people like the Danes come out on top? Because they recognize vengefulness as a self-indulgent waste of time, they roll up their sleeves and get to work in the face of adversity. Others could learn from their example.

I have no patience with those who hit first and then whine, when they are being called to account, and try to shift blame. Each man is responsible for his own actions, no matter what preceded them.

I have been listening to all of you, but also to China with its one-child per family laws.

Normal men put together all that they take in, into long strings, and we have known that for many years. They do so, before they memorize the stuff and both of these, before they try to use it for doing any thinking.

Normal women can make fast and good decisions based on large amounts of new non-converted information. (Global Thinking)

Normal men can make fast good decisions based on finding the right pre-stored strings, ending in decisions. (The scientific method has a likeness to the male thinking patterns.)
_ _ _

None of the world’s religions display any will or directives to their followers to have fewer children per family. I see the roots of our present problem to be found with all of them. Their followers consist of mostly people unable to conclude anything. That is why their rules are so simple-minded and limited, they have to be. Though that is our problem now.

All of them should sit down and find a common policy. Good luck, they themselves are too much involved in the power structures and its kickbacks, just like our Mulroney, Chretien and Martin were.

To make a long story short: I will suggest that someone, one or two non-enraged thinkers, from each religion sit down and make a list of good decision strings or parcels to put into the heads of all the worlds children, from 0 to 8 years of age. And then include them into their teachings and basic scripts.

Fat chance!

What about that a group of people from all religions, atheist, the multi gods ones and communist too, all not very hung-up, get together and make that list.

When they are finished they should take it to a university that could use it as a base for a degree program in prophetry on line (dr.proph.).

I believe there is a good chance that all the religions will get a new successful Prophet fast, and that is what we need.

A role which Amerika, having picked up the mantle of the "sun set" British Empire,has been assuming for itself since the end of WW2. Time for it to end.

And your ladyship, according to the laws of capitalism and its "manipulated" and skewered "free market", set up by the threat of military power to serve The US Empire.

You are so goddamned Yankee Empire darlin', you are a waste of time for the rest of the world to even attempt to "dialouge" with. It's your way or the highway, so we give you the same fuggin' option.

Like I say, you are a waste of time.

Thanks for the link, Lynn. An interesting read.

I don't know what this day has been like out your way, but it has been fantastic here. (Though the near abscence of snow is just too wierd and ominous.) In any case, I hope you have been having a good one. I have managed to be out in it for the better part of the day.

Take care, good woman. :-)

.
Coyote

Dorothy is an example of what I am trying to communicate to you guys. She is a woman and therefore thinks in a global way, she never had to learn to think our way. For our sake she is trying to present her stuff on a string. I have trouble too; her global way she had used to arrive to her conclusions was maybe too complex to hide. Read her letters twice or thrice and make your own long string out of her four to five strings.

If you disagree with what she is saying, yahoo, we can have a discussion. Do not cheat us out of that. That is why TheTyee exist.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has all the credentials of a dissident.

The thing is, Akkari is not a Mid-East Moslem suffering under a US-backed sheik.

He grew up as a Dane. He's more into religion than his parents who immigrated to Denmark.

Countries like Syria and Iran do not have US-backed leaders yet that is where the worst violence was.

And strangely, its Moslems like Akkari that choose to live in Europe who seem very militant even though they aren't suffering at all.

If the heat from the cartoons generates so much rage in the Islamic world that they tear down their own governing structures then the cartoonists should get a Nobel.

The article Lynn linked to compares the cartoons to the Nazi treatment of Jews. Refers to the notion of "the enemy within" as something the Nazis also did.

This is a straw man. I refer to the Calgary School as the enemy within too, it doesn't make me a Nazi.

Europe is suffering from Islamophobia? I would say the Moslems are suffering from Europhobia. Over several decades millions move to western European countries. They intimidate artists and universities and media and even kill the odd member of one of those groups. They torch cars and hold large protests when they don't like a cartoon and yet its the Europeans who are suffering from a phobia?

Maybe 5 million Frenchmen should move to Islamabad and see how that goes over.

The article calls the Danes the most racist country in Europe? I expect the Danes will go torch the Syrian embassy in the morning for being called racist? They should.

The article trots out the old "How would Christians feel if..."

Well, we got over "Piss-Christ" among a thousand other unflattering artistic impressions of him so I doubt Christians would care about a cartoon showing Jesus with a crown of nukes.

Yet in spite of evidence to the contrary the article claims a double standard. The only double standard is that only the Islamic side is supposed to feel victimized.

I'm glad the article calls for people of all faiths to speak out against racism against Moslems. It would be nice if they also called for people of all faiths to speak out against those who kill filmmakers, or threaten professors who discuss the Koran.

(Thanks brain)

“You are so goddamned Yankee Empire darlin' “

---Not at all. The thing is: I don’t like empires at all. I really would prefer to have my own and call it ‘Dorothyland’. However, I don’t quite have enough money and guns to back that up, so I pay tribute to the empire of Canada. But wait – Canada doesn’t quite have enough money and guns to back that up, so we pay tribute to…Let’s see, we could choose The empire of Islam. Very attractive, no pork, no beer, no snotty women, and first and foremost, no cartoons, other than those of Jews eating babies. Or, there is the empire of commynism, today represented by that jovial guy in North Korea, and the happy bunch in Beijing, who have the handle on Human Rights. Well, maybe they’re overrated anyway. And then there are the boys next door. That option would win on practicality, I mean, they’re right next door and so on, but I’m a sixties child and so in the habit of screaming ‘yankee go home’. Maybe I’ll look for another planet. You sort of hinted that you would welcome that. Let’s see, coyote – how much would you pay into a ‘get rid of Dorothy’ fund, for my space adventure?

Let’s get down to Earth and grow up. A Danish, newly elected member of parliament from the boonies were being interviewed by to city slickers who thought to show him up as a bumpkin and asked him, according to what principle he had hung the artwork on his walls. He answered “according the the principle of the available nails”. Now, maybe we should think in that direction. What is on offer in the way of empires? I am looking for enlightenment here, coyote. Contrary to what you obviously believe, I do not have a problem learning from people I don’t like. And I haven’t even said I don’t like you. It takes more than a bit of name-slinging and male condescension to earn my dislike, I am a very serene kind of person.

I think the article was interesting for a number of reasons, first it was written by a Muslim, a Christian theologian, and an advocate for freedom of expression...who all recognized the dangerous role extremism on the part of both the east and the west were playing in this cartoon issue.

"Legitimate protest should not be allowed to be hijacked by dictatorial regimes whose primary agenda for jumping on the popular bandwagon is to deflect attention from their repression and denial of rights. Nor by the United States’s neo-cons who pontificate about the Danish cartoons when it was their theology of civilisational clashes, the new American century, Pax Americana and us-and-them polarisation that created the global conditions for such denigration to take place".

The article doesn't call the Danes racist, it says the European Union Commission on Human Rights has named Denmark as the most racist country in Europe. They go on that the 12 cartoons were published by Jyllands-Posten following its invitation to 40 cartoonists to parody Muhammad while in 2003 they refused to publish caricatures of Jesus...also including that this cartoon was published by Jyllands-Posten, a newspaper with historical ties to German and Italian fascism and which called for a fascist dictatorship in Denmark.

All interesting but not what I see as the main point of this argument which is that of situation which has reached critical stress because of western imperialism...people now so angry because of oppression by their own dictatorial regimes... as well as enraged by the intentions of an imperialist west to dominate them through war and occupation... amplifying their misery even more in the name of so-called democracy.

So when you say:

.

I say, "exactly", that is the point. Cultural difference is a real test of human nature. Now imagine it foisted on you...no evolving towards it , no gradual acclimatizing of your differences...your country occupied by a foreign force, bombed on, your historical and religious antiquities destroyed, your people killed and maimed. Your streets patrolled for your own good..your elections not really yours.

Let's put the above scenario in the streets of the American Christian south...no outrage then on the part of those ever so understanding Christians?...especially if with the foreigners came the asssumption they would convert you to their religion of Islam?

No, this is about how the establishment of the New Amercian Century...via an imperialist occupation/terrorist world view agenda of their own making has precariously altered any semblance of balance we once had in this world.

That is why there was so much violence in Iran ans Syria...they are next on the hit list...and they know it...they have even heard the rumblings of nuclear weapons being used by the US against them..all the while the US is determined to disarm them via "the old WMD trick".

And the International Atomic Energy Agency, the US pet, soon to make a decisive vote on Iran regarding this old WMD trick...the chairing country of this commision?... Denmark. Probably means nothing but it is interesting.

I don't think there is any question that Bush and Co. have used the notion of "the enemy within" to paint all Muslims as fanatics. It is in the interests of advancing their terrorist-dependent mode of imperialism to do so.

..that has precariously altered

...instead of disarm , (since that's the contestable issue), should read occupy them, bomb them to smithereens, steal their oil, and contract out the restoration of their damaged cities to american companies.

But Lynn, what does this mean? How do they determine that? Calling an entire country racist seems a little strange. The Danes have never struck me as a Scandinavian South Carolina or South Africa.

But in other articles it doesn't say parody, it says an invitiation to other artists to draw Mohammed as they see him.

Yes, I referred to that somewhere above. And I did say it makes it look like the editor is just hiding behind free speech now. In other words, not publishing the Jesus cartoons 2 years earlier means he fails the smell test now. No argument on that. I know how it looks.

But when did it do that? In 1941? Or sometime recently? The date would make a big difference.

But we have that now. Just insert Canada for Middle East and First Nations for Moslems. But the natives here are not rioting. They have lots of reasons to be ticked off but they are generally working within the system. Most Canadians love to see First Nations make good. Everyone in Vancouver loved Gino Odjick for example. We pour money into Indian Affairs. People are upset about the results, not the money.

But getting back to the Islamic world. The people that these cartoons enraged first were not in the Middle East. They were in Denmark. Their countries are not being bombed or occupied unless they consider themselves to be Lebanese or Syrian etc and not Dane.

In my opinion, no it isn't. This was a domestic Danish issue that some decided to turn into an international one to serve their own narrow purposes. Which is that only white Danes can be racist and that only European Moslems can be victims. Akkari chose to get outsiders to attack his countrymen because he didn't like his ox being gored.

The demonstrations in Syria and Iran are being staged. You can't burn down an embassy in Syria without government permission.

European Moslems are wanting it all. They want to live in Europe but leave their hearts in the Middle East. Their patriotism is not to their adopted country, its to the one they left. They protest that the Americans are changing their way of life by invading Iraq and Afghanistan and then demanding that the Danes and other Euros change their societies to suit them.

Mosques in Copenhagen calling for the destruction of Israel, protests in London with signs celebrating the blowing up of the subway, kill Dutch filmamkers, intimidate professors and complain that freedom of speech is too free.

There's a common thread here.

Danish society is most certainly not racist.

Did they not do everything in their power to foil the Nazi occupiers' plans to round up Danish Jews? (their 'record' is one of the better ones - much better than Vichy France's, which wasn't even occupied. Italy was an Axis Power, and even it managed to through up every bureaucratic roadblock and contrived incompetency in order to mitigate the implementation of the Final Solution).

Is the Danish Royal family not the first European House to marry non-white (their Crown Prince is married to a Philippino woman - Denmark's next Queen).

The problem in this particular case is not that Danes (and any other 'whities') are racist. It's not even a religious issue from 'our' viewpoint (we're "post-Christian" after all).

I'm with Frank on this one. The intimidation of artists, writers, politicians and clergy has to be resisted. We can't allow the issue to be obscured by misguided people who've read too much Chomsky and watched too much Michael Moore and listened to too much Jesse Jackson.

Incidentally, not much coverage in North America of the murder of that Roman Catholic priest in Turkey by an Islamist. Fr. Andrea Santoro was shot twice in his Church while the Islamist screamed Allah akbar ("Allah is great"). Santoro is the first Roman priest to be martyred (in the real sense of the word) in the 21st century.

What I am saying here is that the cartoon is carrying a weight, (though a seemingly lightweight one) that could still upset what little balance we have. It is acting as a trigger to the larger issue. It has provided a dangerous rallying point for extremists but also for the ordinary people themselves who feel so much of their power as a people has been lost... their lives controlled by both inside and outside forces...the riots a reaction to that the power of their feelings uniting them....which of course is true of all protests.

You would not have had that kind of massive response if you did not have such a precarious situation in the world developing, one of war and oppression, due to western, american-led imperialism. The dawn of the New American Century strategy and the threats it involve have caused the proliferation of extremism ( on both sides)...it is creating the terrorism that the cartoon mocks...and at the same time it is hiding behind some self-righteous pretensions of free speech, an illusion of free speech that often does not actually exist on this side of the pond...less so more and more now.

And the American Empire does not want it all? In almost every place on this planet.Their fingers on on everything in the mid-east they want control of their pipelines, they want their stamp on the culture of mid-east countries...on their religions, on their markets, on their governments... but they want to leave their hearts in America. Their baggage they are quite content to leave in the middle east.

What has to be acknowledged here is that under Bush and Blair and Co. the world has been pushed now to a dangerous edge under a real plan for a neo-conservative attempt at world domination...as the article says they can "pontificate about the Danish cartoons when it was their theology of civilisational clashes, the new American century, Pax Americana and us-and-them polarisation that created the global conditions for such denigration to take place".

I'm going to try to check out the fascist dictatorship allusion... I agree the date makes a difference. Though I think this article provided a different view of the situation in Denmark that is worth considering because I had not read some of the info anywhere else.

Anyway, I'm off to town for groceries and re-cycling la garbage. :-) Will have to get back to this later though I think we agree on a lot, Frank.... and on other issues we will just have to differ.

And brain, thanks ,too.

Coyote, yesterday was a grey, gloomy, gumboot kinda day. There is a reason they call this the raincoast.:-) Still a pretty good day, though... but today is all sunshine but still a long way from roses. ;-)

Nightbloom

Don't you know it is racist and imperialist to hold the Islamists to account for human rights? They can only be described as helpless victims of the terror of Amerikkka.

So let's get this straight. Muslim fanatics fly two commercial airliners loaded with innocent passengers into the World Trade Centre and kill thousands a third into the Pentagon and a fourth goes down in a field. No outpouring of grief for any of the thousands of innocents killed in fact there is cheering in some parts of the Muslim world.

A Danish newspaper publishes some slightly cheeky cartoons and that causes the Muslim world to absolutely go beserk and we're now supposed to feel all guilty and contrite.

Well stuff that nonsense. These Muslim fanatics are heading down the same ideological dead end as all fanatical movements do. And just like Communism and Fascism they will be relegated to the trash can of history.

Eventually there will emerge a more modern and secular form of Islam that is able to co-exist with Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists etc. We just have to way for the zealots to finish blowing themselves up.

Yeah, tell me about it...

It's disappointing to see so many people buy into the Islamist fantasy that this is all tied into the putative "historic humiliation" of Islam by the West, or the delusion that this is a manifestation of Western (or U.S.) policy.

Look people - the media produces scurilous shit all the time. Not all media...but there are certainly those to cater to a marketshare that is responsive to this kind of crap.

One of the hallmarks of a mature society is accepting that people are going to indulge in behaviour or self-expression that is personally offensive to you. Dealing with that is an exercise is compartmentalization. It's a necessary skill (not without its downside...i.e. a depersonalized & cold ambient social space, a weakened emotive attachment to our neighbours, city, country, what have you).

This is a bitter lesson that Islam is just going to have to learn. We don't behead, mutilate or torch everyone with a "Bad Religion" or a "Jesus was Gay" T-shirt. We just form our opinion & move on.

The liberal-Left needs to stop trying to piggy-back on explosive in public reactions in order to pawn its politics.

That should have read: "The liberal-Left needs to stop trying to piggy-back on explosions in public reactions in order to pawn its politics."

.
Lynn

What article?

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.asp...t_and_analysis/

When ever a professor in theology say something I always remind myself that such a person can have a vested interest.

He is educated to make and deliver big chunks of pasified people to the government and industry and he get paid for educating more people to do that kind of work. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with Christianity, or being a Christian, but putting blinkers on people is what the Church has been implemented to do.

The professor cooperates with people there is in the same kind of business (see at the bottom of the article). All these people have put a paper together that push the right believer-bottoms in us. After I had read the article I felt as if I had been exposed to propaganda.

It is not because I do not want to go to work everyday; to the contrary I get satisfied by working, but the enemy has not shown any signs of cease-fire. I do not want to come home one day, to find my wife and my children dead in my burned down house.

It is better to talk now than have to fight later. They make themselves into the enemy, as they show that they want to fight.
.

No, Ezra, you certainly ain't...

"I'm not Oprah Winfrey. My job is not to bring people together. I'm the publisher of a news magazine and I want my readers to have the right to judge for themselves."

Ezra Levant, publisher of The Western Standard,
defending his decision to reprint the cartoons.

There's always been something gratuitously irritating about Levant. Although I agree in principle with him (this time), it's unfortunate that the moral abdication of other Canadian editors has allowed this goof to step forward as a self-annointed standard bearer for press freedom.

The Crusades are a footnote in the history Muslim countries consider important. It's a fallacy for people to keep arguing that western empires have been oppressing Muslim nations since the Crusades. Muslim empires, such as the Moors in Spain and the Ottoman empire, which made bold inroads into Europe, had far more of an effect on Europe than the Crusades had on the Middle East. The Mameluks were far more brutal than the Crusaders ever were in their aggressive empire-building. The Crusader empire was fractious, tiny, a minor irritant to Muslim nations, who were more concerned with fighting each other, and barely lasted 100 years. The Ottoman empire, which grew after the crusades, was formidable, powerful, oppressive and lasted for centuries until it was broken apart after the First World War.

So why the history lesson? Because it provides context into why Muslims around the world are rioting about a few stupid cartoons. Too many posters react the way the rioters want them to: "Oh, the poor Muslims, they've been oppressed for so long, this is the final straw from the insensitive western capitalist empires."

Hogwash. Any western oppression of Muslim countries is a new development since the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. Certainly western nations have screwed Muslim countries over pretty good in the past century (Suez Canal, anyone?) but I don't buy into this victimization crap. All you have to do is go to Dubai and Saudi Arabia and see the Muslims there are not victimized by western nations. All you have to do is look at the power OPEC holds over western nations. All you have to do is look at the power Muslim minorities – which are growing – have over the governments of European countries.

The fear and intimidation being spread by the rioters is, sadly, working. The apologists coming out of the woodwork is proof of that.

And lastly, Islam is not a religion of peace. It never has been. Many of its followers are exemplary, peaceful people. But the religion itself has never been about peace. It wasn't when Mohammed was conducting military campaigns. It was thrown into conflict the day he died over who would succeed him (the Sunni-Shiite split.) That conflict continues to today, except now militant Muslims are finding a common enemy in western nations. By capitulating over these cartoons, we are only giving rioters what they want.

I haven't seen anything in this article or comments to acknowledge that Islam is no more monolithic than Christianity or Judaism — or Buddhism for that matter. The slow slaughter unleashed in Iraq today is largely Muslim-on-Muslim, Sunni vs. Shiite. It echoes, say, the Protestant vs. Catholic bloodletting in Ireland or, on a grander scale, thegenocidal internecine warfare among Europe's nominally Christian nations in World Wars 1 and 2. The values clash highlighted by the furor over the Danish cartoons seems momentarily to be about Islam versus 'the west' but more accurately it is about authoritarianism versus tolerance, a political dichotomy common to every society. There are good and bad arguments for and against publishing these cartoons. It is laudable to oppose the west's imperialistic legacy in the Middle East. It is deplorable, however, to dehumanize Muslims, rob them of agency in their own moral conduct, by repeating the simplistic — and ultimately racist — fiction that they are a unitary bloc of innocent victims. Anyone remember Uncle Tom, the one with the cabin? Reality is so much more complex.

Lynn, just out of curiousity did you get any snow on the ground this year? My youngest wants to know if that area gets snow that stays on the ground.

I think one of the areas where we're talking past each other is I'm talking about Euro-Moslems in particular and the general Islamic "world" in a secondary manner. You're focusing on the Islamic world.

In my opinion the European moslems have far less reason to be upset with their lot in life than the Middle East moslems. The intimidation issue, the killings, the protests and Mosque stuff and the wrapping oneself in the free speech cloak when it suits and damning others when it doesn't are all primarily Euro-moslem issues. If people in Iran vote for a fundamentalist state with little in the way of freedoms, then that's what they should have.

The European problem though is that moslems are a growing minority fueled by both immigration and birth rates and are bringing their issues with them. Denmark should not be turned into a mini-Iran through intimidation.

Oh sure the Americans export culture. Its one of the few things they have left to export besides weapons and financial services. For some reason they want Iraq to have McDonalds, 7-11's and use Windows XP. I may think that a world full of McDonalds is not a desirable goal, in fact I think its kind of pathetic, but if people in these countries wouldn't buy it, they'd leave.

The US also likes to own the companies that do the work. Like buy the pipeline and production companies. They do the same here. That's where a domestic gov't has to step in and say no. Campbell and Mulroney wouldn't do such a thing here, and US-backed sheiks don't there either. So of course it breeds frustration but the answer there and here is to put in power a gov't that will prevent that kind of takeover. If the cartoon riots spark that, great.

The thing is I just don't buy this. Because once again I'm looking at the people who killed the Dutch film-maker, who cheer the attacks on the London subway, who intimidate professors and artists and who preach hatred in the mosques. They're Europeans.

.
‘Just me’

I do not remember anybody saying anything nice about Christianity or Buddhism.

You forgot the 30-year war (1618 to 1648) where 30 million Catholics and Protestants lost their lives. The Catholics lost; Sweden ended the war with punishing strikes into southern Germany. The people in northern Europe could read and discuss the bible on their own in their own language.

And you could have told about the genocide on the 30.000 Saxons year 804 when they refused to be baptised.

Many of us feel the same now. We recognise the signs and say never again.

Our present ‘Illuminates’ is maybe not much better than Charlemagne or ‘der Kaiser’ and Hitler, but none of the later would have allowed us to think and talk the way we do now; neither will your local Mullah when we get one forced one upon us.

And then, what about the short skirts and friendly smiles?
.

‘Just me’

I do not remember anybody saying anything nice about Christianity or Buddhism.

You forgot the 30-year war (1618 to 1648) where 30 million Catholics and Protestants lost their lives. The Catholics lost; Sweden ended the war with punishing strikes into southern Germany. And the people in northern Europe could read and discuss the bible on their own in their own language.

And you could have told about the genocide on the 30.000 Saxons year 804 when they refused to be baptised.

Many of us feel the same now. We recognise the signs and say never again.

Our present ‘Illuminati’ is maybe not much better than Charlemagne or ‘der Kaiser’ and Hitler, but none of the later would have allowed us to think and talk the way we do now; neither will your local Mullah when we get one forced upon us.

And then, what about the short skirts and friendly smiles?
.

This cartoon has nothing at all to do with international interplay, leading to a breaking point (straw on the camel's back), anything else. It is about a large, international group of people, who are educated only in hatred and fear and motivated by religious leaders who abuse the Koran to find justification for their hatred.

Other indications or instances don't matter-the bottom line is, it is unacceptable to kill, burn, and destroy because of someone sharing their beliefs. Flat-out unacceptable. This is a dark-age phenomenon. This idiotic barbarism and stupidity should not be present in the 21st Century.

nightbloom:

After Frank has opined, there's little else left to say. There's no point in me reiterating his points -- less eloquently than he has already done.

Alcyon
I hear you, but you forget that most of these Syrians, Iraqis etc haven't been driving back and forth to T ball with their Moms for a century, they have been for centuries subjected to social and political strife that has left them in the dark ages. Poorly educated and monotheistic and monocultural they lack the chance for political and social stability that would produce a less medieval mindset.
Of course it is wrong to do bad stuff. It is also wrong to assume that Lord Balfour's folly isn't going to bite us in the fanny. These arguments that they are 'just plain bad' persist, it allows us to stereotype Arabic people, build hatred and resentment, then send in poor uneducated lower class people with weapons from imperialist nations to beat the hell out of them and bomb them while we get the advantage of taking their stuff which our Mom's put in the SUV to take us to T ball. We continue to save them from themselves while we rip them off. Read some books, too many authors to list.

Alcyon
Me again.
If you substituted "Koran" for "Bible" you would describe the southern USA.
Any Cambodian bombed and agent-oranged by Kissinger's orders or educated Nicaraguan shot by a Reagon-CIA trained militia in order to keep them in the 3rd world would agree.
It is in our interest to keep all of the 'thems' in this medieval state. Sure as heck can't let them have WMDs, thats the trump card.

DavidN:

You seem to believe and advocate, that everyone is the same, and it is only because history has wiped the floor with the people in the Middle East, that they have little in the way of open fighting spirit, taken as individuals, but do well with underhanded methods and/or running in a mob.

This reminds me of a family member, of whom it was always said: Ned turned out such a strange fellow, probably because six times during the war, he was on a ship, which got torpedoed. Ned was in the merchant marine and could have got another job, and he volunteered for the five bad trips to Malta and I felt exasperated that no one could see, that he already was ‘strange’ since he went back all of five times…

There are other people than those of the Middle East, who have had a hard time, and have been bulldozed a few times by an empire next door. But they are not all now insisting on taking their culture and mindset back to year 700. Maybe people are simply not all cut from the same cloth. It would be strange if they were, given the diversity of environments they have spread out into. So, maybe we should not fall into the trap of thinking it is all our fault, we must have done something to these people, seeing we seem to have the upper hand. Maybe it is just the way the cookie crumbles, given our respective mindsets. Is anyone familiar with the piece of research that was able to establish, that a male’s chance of falling into a criminal lifestyle is much closer related to his biological father’s sojourn in life than to that of his adopted father, even if he has never known or even known of the biological father?

This is thought provoking. Maybe in the human department, oil and water truly does not mix, and the idea of any number of ‘solitudes’, which interrelate with an air of armed neutrality really is the best we can hope for. The little swallows, which live on clayey riverbanks, will nest very closely, but in separate nesting hollows in the clay. If the often very thin wall between two nests breaks, the neighboring nesters will slug it out, until they suddenly get the point and take to helping one another rebuilding the wall so as to restore harmony. Let us not get arrogant and imagine we are vastly different from all the other critters in the Gardens of God. Allah, Yahve or Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva.
If we can agree to disagree, much will have been achieved.

Multiculturalism is not a realistic concept, but gets crammed down our throats, because if it could be imposed it would allow the illuminati to be lazier in figuring out the way of managing things.

Well, I love the snow question of your youngest one, Frank, but will save it for the end of this comment. :-)

I would just like to make a couple of points in regards to Just me's comment. First, even though I am well aware that there is much conflict between Muslim vs. Muslim, Sunni vs Shite in Iraq ...much has also been hidden by the US under the convenient definition of insurgency...in fact many so-called insurgents killed by the US have been Iraqis citizens fighting in defence of their homes and families. I've read enough on the WTI (Istanbul) site to realize we know little of the actual atrocities committed by the US in Iraq. Much has been hidden and the actual death count is staggering.

Also I don't think any of us on this side of the fence of this issue so to speak are excusing any kind of violent extremism or threats of violence in anyway from any side. Nor do I think all Muslims are a unitary bloc of innocent victims....only that right now the situation in the Middle East is highly inflammatory, almost close to igniting... and with the US posed to move on Iran, anything that further provokes that or especially that gives the US an excuse and more importantly permission in the eyes of world to move aggressively, (perhaps even with nuclear weapons) against Iran is highly foolish to say the least.

I understand the distinction you're making about the Euro-Muslims, Frank but it interesting (and I'm going to take my usual circuitous course now so hang on for the ride) that when I was googling the Jyllands-Posten, an ultra right wing neo-con newspaper ...anyway, it (the newspaper) was described as such:

“a newspaper with an almost missionary zeal, boasting that it has been successful in breaking the ideological and political grip of left-wing liberals over Danish society.”

And this is where it becomes interesting in relation to Euro-Muslims...because suddenly just like here we have we a neo-con press that is dominating all other political points of view and thus is propping up right-wing governments and their policies...hitting at vital liberal/social policies which have to be contributing to the divisions and stresses for all citizens within these countries. This is a world-wide phenomena that is creating schisms, fracturing social systems by a neo-con network that is vast and connected and raising tensions across the globe country by country.

This is not to let the violent threats or actions of Euro-Muslims off the hook , only that if you read just how this one newspaper alone has operated in the past you begin to understand how these tensions have been fueled through the paper's choices of what it will publish (should ring bells here) and how deteriorating social conditions are playing a part as well.

So this attempt to provoke, (just my opinion) by an agent of the neo-con network at a time of such tension in the world almost makes you wonder if as BC Mary says it has been intentionally set up to do so. That the attack on Iran will be seen as somehow deserved and validated...and the Muslims seen as one monolithic fanatical terrorist mass that must be excised. Long live the american new century.

Well... from the political heat to the snow... yes, we do get snow that actually stays on the ground. (I love that question). :-) We had a fair amount of snow in December, enough for snowballs, snowmen and snow angels.... and the hills across the inlet had a fair amount of snow lately...but the last week only on the summit. The snow on the summit also stays on the ground and is great for sleigh riding. There is an old worn logging road that winds its way along and will be glad to take you where the snow falls.. Over all it is generally very mild here but we have had snow as late as May. But that is a rare and special occasion. :-)

No disagreement there, ashguy. I'm not sure why your link isn't working but here's thelink again.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=263804&area=/insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/

Thanks Lynn, that's a big plus for that area in her books. We were at that inlet last summer. I imagine its beautiful with snow around it.

I know, I refer you to my earlier posting where I said:

However, regardless, I support him just as I would Nazis marching in Illinois or Orangemen in Ireland even though I think they're both wrong to do it.

I would much rather be taking the side of a left-wing paper in a freedom of speech debate but you gotta dance with the one you came with :-)

I refer you to nightbloom's post where he says,

I find Levant annoying when I don't find him strange but unlike the Danish moslems I find I have no trouble just ignoring him. I'd have more faith in Ezra's sudden conversion to freedom of speech if left-wingers weren't kicked off his debate forum when they stir the pot.

GJW, good summary.

grub, when the US takes us over I want you to be my running mate for the White House! :-)

There is a plot
The Qatar Emir, who owns Al Jazeera helps to spread it.

February 09, 2006
The cartoon intifada, continued
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/013089.php

In *Rent-a-riot ABCs,* Emir Taheri shows how *the whole rigmarole was launched by Sunni-Salafi [Wahhabi] groups in Europe and Asia, with Ahmadinejad and his Syrian vassal, President Bashar al-Assad, belatedly playing catch-up.* Taheri writes:
The [traveling group of Danish Muslim militants] found a more sympathetic audience in Qatar — where the satellite-TV channel Al Jazeera (owned by the emir) specializes in inciting Muslims against the West and democracy in general. The channel*s chief Islamist televangelist, Yussuf al-Qaradawi (an Egyptian preacher who is also a friend of Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London), was all too keen to issue a "fatwa" to light the fuse. He then mobilized his network of Muslim Brotherhood militants in Europe to attack the cartoons and claim, falsely, that images were not allowed in Islam and that the Danish paper had violated "an absolute principle of The Only True Faith.*

Thus the call for Jihad received its supposed *theological* green light. (Ironically, the section of the brotherhood headed by al-Qaradawi is financed by the European Union as a non-governmental organization.)

As the first rent-a-mob crowds appeared on global TV screens, Ahmadinejad realized that here was a cow worth milking.

For Denmark is set to assume the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council — at the very time that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is expected to refer Iran to the Security Council and demand sanctions. What better, for Tehran*s purposes, than to portray Denmark as *an enemy of Islam* and mobilize Muslim sympathy against the Security Council?
MEMRI has just released a dispatch on al-Qaradawi:
In a February 3, 2006 Friday sermon, Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, who is head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars (IAMS), and the spiritual guide of many other Islamist organizations across the world (including the Muslim Brotherhood), exhorted worshippers to show rage to the world over the Danish paper Jylland Posten's publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The sermon was aired on Qatar TV on February 3, 2006.
Read MEMRI's translation of excerpts of the sermon here.

Austin Bay begins his analysis of the cartoon intifada with Ayatollah Khomeni*s condemnation of The Satanic Verses and concludes that the uproar over the cartoons results from *information warfare.*

Minneapolis Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten covers the local angles on the cartoons. Kersten writes:
[M]any newspapers[] insist that the cartoons violate their standards. The Star Tribune described them as *purposefully sacrilegious* and has declined to reprint them. Many Christian readers will be watching to see if standards differ the next time a cartoonist turns his sights on evangelical Christians or the Catholic Church.
Let's just say that the appearance of Kersten*s column in the Star Tribune is the paper*s gesture toward the free-speech aspect of the cartoon intifada.

Finally, reader Paul Hornsleth, *a grandson of Grenå (in Jyland, of course),* alerts us to the English-language international version of the Jyllands-Posten .

[Peace and democracy are the arch enemy of any Emir*s absolute rule. Planned mass demonstrations that fuel hatred to destabilize Afghanistan and Iraq are a logical weapon for their purpose.

Silence and more troops are our best means to advance peace and freedom.

Time to stop shouting freedom of speech at any price and to stop pouting like spoiled brats and stop feeding the Jihadist fatwa frenzy. TG]

coyote

This is a tactic that has been perfected by the tightass reactionary right.

Tune in to o'reilly & limbaugh.

No need to see religious cartoons, just read the news;
Thu Feb 9, 5:31 PM ET

hundreds of Shiites and Sunnis clashed in the western city of Herat, hurling grenades and burning mosques. At least five people were killed and 51 wounded.
----------------------------------------------

Sectarian attacks have also often marred the annual rite in Pakistan, but rarely in Afghanistan. Two years ago, a suicide attack on a Shiite procession by Sunni militants in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta killed 44 people.

And well said, David N.

There is of course, another side to Tony Guitar's theory.... but already I can see the effectiveness of this painting of the Muslim world as one big homogenuous, devious fanatical mass...

As Arundahti Roy has said:

We expect an oh-so-pristine response from the mid-east, not devious, not violent...politically correct in every way.... pure as the snow like democracy, right? Like Amerika's non-violent, non-devious, oh-so-pristine bombing of Iraq... with its sights now set firmly on Iran...

As Arundhati Roy says about Iraq, (about our political definition of resistance...when it suits our purpose) and, in my view, (about our politically correct definition of freedom of speech ...when it suits us as well):

"Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct their secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allies government to withdraw from Iraq."

..should read "politically correct definition of resistance"

So, TonyGuitar; What exactly are you looking at there?

I seem to be hearing you proposing that there's a collaborative relationship between Danish racist fundamentalist publishers of Jylland Posten and the Islamic fundamentalist Emir of Qatar to use Al Jazeera and the western right to free speech to create artificial riots in order to accomplish what?

To prevent Denmark from assuming it's turn as president of the security council of the UN?

Or to prevent them from being able to bring their reputation as reasonable people to bear on the question of an Iranian bomb?

What would the European fundamentalists have to gain from an Iranian nuclear capability?

This cartoons are nothing more than hate, straight up. To all you Orientalists: Islam is growin, Muslims are coming, and we're comin to git you , suckas!

this is not a threat.

to nighbloom:

you are totally typically a JEW.

Here is a link to an article about the cartoon protests called "Hard Questions" which is highly worth the read...and defines the issue better IMHO than almost anything I have read on the controversy:

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20060210&fname=cartoons&sid=1

To Muslim

Those Danish cartoons are old stuff. Have you seen the drawings to the best selling children’s book about Muhammad, give us some input on those pages, please:

http://muhammed.hotserv.dk/bluitgen/

http://muhammed.hotserv.dk/gamle/

and about the book also if you have contacts in Denmark, it is not translated into English?

Can’t wait.

‘
Crawford Kilian wrote:

”The Limits of Satire - Danish cartoons are dull barbs, badly aimed.

… apart from the evident fact that some Danes don't have much respect for Islam. …”

It is a fact now that all Danes have lost all respect for some of their Islamic immigrants. The rest of the Muslim immigrants, the 90%, must have adjusted to be immigrants or become Danes which means, I guess, lost their faith.

Danes will be Danes and the truth is that there is not much respect for Islam in what we are writing here on The Tyee. We are all patronising all Muslims galore. There is good reason for that; is there not? We are ahead of them.

Kind of! I believe our high standard of living is caused by that a critical number of us can allow ourselves to think critically, thereby only pay lip service to the rules of the Church, that would like to groom us to be stupid non critical money makers for an elite. In all countries of the world, the ruling elite does not believe in their own gods, and never have, they made the religions themselves or their forefathers did or they imported it.

A couple of days ago I made credible that we Men crave religion to survive. I am talking about the strings ending in answers we men must have stored to be competitive. I will claim that most of us on this page have made our own religion or got our own set of brain-strings that is different from what the ‘ruling’ religion wants us to have. Our fathers started the process more than 500 years ago, initiating the process with taking on the job to learn to read and write. Martin Luther was instrumental in that.

So what are those rules?

Are there 9, 90 or 900, I do not know? I am not out to substitute the laws of the land or the Commandments of the Bible. I want to find those rules that we ourselves have made use of to be free and successful. With that list in hand we can export our success to others.
.

Hey Muslim, Abraham and Jesus were Jews too. So what?

Lynn, I just want to argue the points made in the article by Kishore Mahbubani.

What if one group just randomly threw some of us in the other group over the side now and then? Are we allowed to accuse them of having violent tendencies or is that also considered to be rocking the boat?

This man has never read the Vancouver Sun. He doesn't understand their job is to sell advertising, not inform. If it bleeds it leads and all that nonsense.

The thing is, newspapers are private enterprises. They have the freedom to be irreponsible. Or plain bad. Or even pathetic.

His article refers to the need for a two way street of information to occur. How will this ever happen if the Moslem world doesn't allow it? Our side of the fence does allow it. It just doesn't sell well. You have to seek it out.

Again this is fine. We will not draw cartoons of the prophet and in return try to kill and intimidate us less often in return.

Now this quote is downright scary. It implies that if Egypt or the Saudis had nukes the Danes would no longer feel that they were able to draw Mohammed. I'm glad the US didn't nuke us over Carolyn Bennet stepping on a George Bush doll. We don't have nukes yet the US, or at least the red states, were able to control themselves and not make us reap the whirlwind. The quote implies that if the Moslem countries were as powerful as the US and the west as weak as them that there would be no more cartoons because we'd be too afraid to allow one of our artists to stick a toe over the line. Scary scary scary.

And by the way, Mr Mahbubani, equating cartoons on the deaths of 6 million human beings in gas chambers with those of suicide bombers going to heaven is quite a reach for most of us.

Lynn, thank you for your link to the article in outlook India. Leading back to the Yale site and the Centre for study of Globalisation, there are a couple of other good ones to be found:

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6939

http://www.ycsg.yale.edu/center/index.html

You may also want to try to google these names, in order to see some more light cast on the situation, and some of the background for the situation in Northern Europe. Maybe the notion of 'unwarranted, irresponsible provocation' is not applying a wide enough scope?

Antonio Currá, Lee Pygott, Ross Parker, James Waite

Heard of any of these? If not, try to look them up, and then ask yourself, why we haven’t heard of them here…

hey kurt,

Actually, Abraham and Jesus are Muslims. Nice try though.

hey Ashguy,

Interesting. You know, there are tons of pictures out there depicting the Prophet (peace be upon him). Some of them are quite creative. I would like to point out that the rule against drawing pictures/crating images to resemble the Prophet(PBUH) applies to MUSLIMS only--that will never change. Of course it would be nice if people who claim to be civilized would respect that... But the question is HOW is he depicted? the cartoons are STILL the issue my friend, and they will be until and unless Muslims are allowed to step out of their written role as terrorists, backward-arabs and as normal multi-dimensional human beings who like to discuss the merits and drawbacks of laissez faire economics, sip a latte and play some hoops. I don't care if you want to fulfill some orientalist fantasy by drawing a picture of what you think Muhammad(s) looks like to prove that you are avant garde. I care when you insult me by mocking my religion and what it represents. That is what those cartoons did.
Step off, haters.

”..until and unless Muslims are allowed to step out of their written role as terrorists, backward-arabs and as normal multi-dimensional human beings…”

So, like, let’s work on that. Who’s not allowing them to do that? Is everybody not the author of his own fate? I mean, yes, some people have been handed a hard deal to start out in life with, but some have had the ability to overcome it. Just because somebody else ‘writes a role’ for you does not mean you must accept it. We grow up, and then we start writing our own script. Certainly Denmark is not a place, where people are not allowed to reach their individual potential. Given that, Danes have lttle patience with people who shift blame for the outcome of their lives onto others. If other places on Earth have these problems, like keeping people dumb and scared and brainwashed and suppressed for their own ends and their own security, wealth and comfort, maybe these places are where you should start fighting for the betterment of the arabs. You are kind of, like we say in Canada, barking up the wrong tree.

"Given that, Danes have lttle patience with people who shift blame for the outcome of their lives onto others. If other places on Earth have these problems, like keeping people dumb and scared and brainwashed and suppressed for their own ends and their own security, wealth and comfort, maybe these places are where you should start fighting for the betterment of the arabs. You are kind of, like we say in Canada, barking up the wrong tree."

Dorothy: whatever!

Your (typical) libertarian diatribe is pathetic and tired.

Nice rascist attitude.

By the way, using language like "THEM" doesn't fly, D. I am Muslim. You better get used to it!

Ron? Ron Erwin, is that you? Did you change your name again?

"Your (typical) libertarian diatribe is pathetic and tired.

Nice rascist attitude."

Your habit of slapping ugly labels on things you don't have a good answer to is pathetic and tired.

you are also not being truthful. I did not say 'them', any more than you did, in your previous post. You made yourself the spokesperson for 'backward arabs'. If you are one of them, you should have said so. 'Muslim' is a much broader label and does not necessarily place you as backward and downtrodden, just look at Naser Kader.

this is not a threat

Then what is it? A promise?

This guy is a racist troll.

MUSLIM, why are libertarian attitudes pathetic and tired? Please explain.

As a secular humanist, I find the the teaching of Muslims (and Christian, Jews, Sihks and Hindhus) pathetic and tiresome. However, you are entitled to what I percieve as your warped interpretations of reality.

Just note, I will not have you impose your pathetic and tiresome rules of conduct on me.

Frank, Mahbubani is as moderate as they come. He is a diplomat, Masters from Dalhousie, in fact he is quite fond of the US, well.. fond of their democratic founding principles. His main thrust has been that the confusing and conflictng strands of Western and American policies continue to de-stabilize the Islamic world. In fact, he is a shrewd fellow because he often appeals to the vanity of the US and the west to get his point across.

I want to write a little bit on his take on things east and west because it helps to explain the article. He sees the West as making a strategic mistake by assuming its long -term interests were best served by a world in which Islamic states were mired in poverty and backwardness...and as an off-shoot of that the success of Muslim moderates in Islamic societies was not encouraged...in fact the west has helped those who have suppressed the moderates. Also that the west has not encouraged modern secular education in Islamic societies and has instead looked away, even winked approval when $300 million per year of private Saudi money went into establishing Wahabi-influenced madrassahs which fostered medieval fundamentalism. These madrassahs were quietly fostered in Western supported states like Pakistan and became a ready pool of recruits for Osama.

As Mahbubani says: "It takes an enormous effort to take a mind already steeped in ten years of Wahabi education and re-educate it in the ways of the Modern world".

And so now you have the current European paranoia about the increasing number of immigrants but little understanding about the part they have played in instigating it ...as in europe also there has been a quiet consensus developed that an underdeveloped Islamic world would would pose a lesser threat to Europe than a successful Islamic world. We know now the opposite is true...as the article says:

"

".

So, rock away, accuse the others on the boat of violence in the name of free speech if you wish.. and allow them to respond in the name of free speech about the violence inflicted on them by western domination... rock on in these tight quarters...guilty passengers all.. but as one who knows boats and the hazards of treacherous weather, be prepared for the worst.

Mahbubani's entreaty is to ask for some honesty on both sides about the situation we now find ourselves in if we are at all interested in the long-term future of mankind.

Frank, you write:

"

But for the Muslim world to allow it it must establish the educational, economic, and social indices for a free press. And that is the catch-22, "those confusing and conflicting policies of the west", based on self-interest and greed are preventing the establishment of those very things. ( as we also see in Africa).

In reference to your "downright scary stuff", Mahbubani never mentions nukes. In fact, a careful read will reveal he is defining strength in terms of social and educational indices. And weakness as a lack of those necessary elements. He is defining strength in terms of respect which is a very eastern notion.

That's why this guy is a diplomat, he understands the different mind-sets between the east and west...especially the significance the ideas of respect and shame play in eastern culture. (and the power of taboo which is involved with this cartoon controversy). For a country to feel strong it must feel respected and worthy of respect. In himself and by the Other. This is where those educational and social indices come into play in defining a strong country...as well as miltary strength but military strength alone is not what Mahbubani is referring to here. He is talking about the necessity of shared respect....between equal foes or friends...the strength of that. And the taboo of making one feel shamed...not deserving of respect.

lynn:

Nonsense! Respect is a very human notion; there's nothing particularly "eastern" or "western" about it.

Sure, concepts of shame like; "let's kill our sister because our neighbor raped her and now she's brought shame upon our family...."

NO THANKS! There's a concept of shame that's medieval and which I hope we never give any credence to.

Just because so-called (by you) "eastern" culture have certain "taboos", doesn't make them right. Further, it doesn't mean the we have to buy into these taboos. Taboos and the punishments associated with them exist to keep people within a particular society in line. As we're not part of that society, we are under no obligation to acknowledge those taboos.

We have our own taboos. Those who would live in our society would do well to acquaint themselves with our taboos and to behave accordingly.

dorothy, yes, I know who they are. It is tragic and devastating...and as inexcusable as is the ever increasing death count in Iraq. 30,000 by GW's count (but then he has never been good at arithmetic or anything else for that matter)....187,000 is closer... with some sources now saying the actual number is double that. (So many of these being civilians killed as well).

It is interesting that we know few of the names of these Iraqis as well...and how they died. Though the World Tribunal On Iraq is a good starting point.

No remembrance pages in the "new york times", as we saw with the victims of 9/11...all about their dashed hopes and dreams...why they were such special people...how they lived and who they loved. Not even a segment on "60 minutes". No actual numbers... and no faces to go along with them. And nobody asking why.

I don't know how many pages it would take of the "new york times" to tell all the stories of the men, women, and children killed in Iraq, under the so-called banner of democracy. Not to even mention those wounded...and I don't men just physically.

How many pages would it take?

Thousands and thousands of pages, I imagine.

And that's not counting today.. and the days yet to come....

And then there is always Iran, in the wings, so to speak,...more precisely the Iranian people....

as well as....

All the rest of the people targeted by the American New Century list....

All still waiting...and still alive...

At least for now.

lynn:

No remembrance pages in the "new york times", as we saw with the victims of 9/11...all about their dashed hopes and dreams...why they were such special people...how they lived and who they loved. Not even a segment on "60 minutes". No actual numbers... and no faces to go along with them. And nobody asking why.

Well put! On this we agree.

On the cartoon issue, for me it's more a matter of exactly who should be sensitive to another's cultural mores, customs and taboos. Of course, ideally, we respect all cultural values insofar as those values to not clash with some of our own fundamental values. For me, however, freedom to mock religion (ANY religion) trumps the freedom to not have one's religion mocked. I suspect that's a value held by the majority of our society.

Now, as far as Denmark is concerned, we need to further note that, whereas some Muslims in Denmark are immigrants or even citizen of that country, most are not. Most came to Denmark as refugees. The question thus becomes: "do refugees have a right to insist that cultural values of 'host' nations be changed to accommodate the 'guests'?"

Do they have a right to basic human rights? OF COURSE! The right to not have their religion mocked? Of course not! Especially if/when ALL religions are routinely mocked in that society.

grub, I think the ideas of shame-honor/respect are deeply entrenched in eastern culture...I wasn't trying to say respect or any of those other qualities are limited to the east, only that they carry a bigger weight culturally there.

Where I disagree with you is that whether or not we agree with certain ideas or taboos, we had better try to understand them, yes, sometimes even respect them...it was the reason I liked the article...we are all in the same boat - taboos and all - whether we acknowledge it or not...and it is very close and very dangerous quarters ... the bridges that need to be built across our differences will not be built as instantaneously as the west demands or is used to commanding...now that suddenly it sees the benefit of doing so.

I just feel I'm argueing over the same old ground and I'm outta here.

Well said, grub:

“… what I perceive as your warped interpretations of reality. …”

and

… “The right to not have their religion mocked?” Is “Of course not!” … a
… “basic human right? OF COURSE!” …

But what did you tell and teach your children before they entered schools to bully-proof them? And what was told to you. To be a Humanist one must have gotten some protection implanted to stay humanistic. Human Rights are and could not be enough to protect one against the jerks and the teachers of the BC schools. Human Rights you only get if you demand it, to demand is too much to ask a six-year-old to do, without training? I have seen many parents train their toddlers to be bullies. Any child trained to be a bully would make another classmate a bully who is not prepared for the downgrading.

So what was told to you?

And how do you train your children?
Role-playing? – Telling stories? – Are there any fundamental guidelines?

Grub:
ooooooh big bold letters. You have no clue dude, about the "teachings of muslims". And, you can chill out, by the way.

Dorothy: whatever!

It would be interesting to know if you know any Muslims personally. DO you?

"Your habit of slapping ugly labels on things you don't have a good answer to is pathetic and tired."

I didn't know the word libertarian was so offensive. What do I have to answer to you for when you never asked me a question? I told you what I thought of your comment, as I am entitled to (Free Speech/ right to an opinion). Yawn.

"you are also not being truthful. I did not say 'them', any more than you did, in your previous post. You made yourself the spokesperson for 'backward arabs'. If you are one of them, you should have said so. 'Muslim' is a much broader label and does not necessarily place you as backward and downtrodden, just look at Naser Kader."

Uh, Ok.

I am signing off this thread. But it was fun guys!

Muslim:

I wonder, can Muslim really resist? Although his/her brief sojourn was perhaps tired and pathetic for sure, with no answer to libertarian thought.

ashguy:

I'm not sure I completely get your point.

As to the jerks and teachers of the BC school system; I didn't encounter many. Most of my teachers were terrific human beings who nurtured my curiosity and contributed to my desire to examine issues critically.

As to "protection", my parents taught me to be skeptical and to demand proof before accepting principles. I'm teaching my children to demand proof and evidence; and they do.

Lynn,

See, we agree at last :-)

I think arguing for more than a week on this one topic is enough.

MUSLIM:

Your (typical) libertarian diatribe is pathetic and tired.

Nice rascist attitude."

- Thought?

- Yes!

“So, like, let’s work on that. Who’s not allowing them to do that? Is everybody not the author of his own fate?”

- Those are not questions?

Lynn,

Our culture demands that an enemy that want to make peace with us shows that he can keep the peace. One does not show will to peace by flying airliners into three buildings in N.Y., bomb the Tube in London or gang rape 15.000 girls in Sweden. You take control of your masses, no matter where they live, and say stop to them. If you can inflame your followers you better be able to stop inflaming and stop the inflamed. If you cannot choose your battles you are bound to lose many and for sure the last one.

Our culture is built on that its masses are kept in peace so they can produce goods and prosper. If somebody disturbs the work peace constantly, do not expect peace with us.

It used to take 200 to 300 years for a country (longer for a religion or a race) to realise and correct its mistakes unless you have put your heel on its neck. Remember that Turkey we had beaten again and again for 250 years, they accepted the message after WW-I and kept the peace since then. Remember we were nice to Germany after WW-I and it took only 15 years before they started to beat their war-drums again. Neither were democracies before, but both are now.

‘‘“... the bridges that need to be built across our differences will not be built as instantaneously as the west demands or is used to commanding...now that suddenly it sees the benefit of doing so.’”’

Only the Gods know how many times we will have to return to civilise them people.

ashguy:

You'd better read your history.

Germany was a democracy (pre Hitler; how do you think he came to power?). At least Germany was every bit the democracy then that Britain was at that time.

It is the trustful cooperation that takes place between our males and females that makes the difference between the cultures.

It allows for at least a quadrupling of the available brainpower made possible by the exploitation of the combination of the male string thinking and the female global thinking.

This is the difference I have been looking for, which make us more prosperous. So how do we make this gift palatable and how and where do we hand it over to the Muslims?

I ask for cooperation especially from you MUSLIM?
_ _ _

Thank you for your answer Frank. And to Lynn, too, for your trustful dialogue with Frank, it made me realize what I should have known all the time.

England has had successful queens and so have the Scandinavians and Russians. One could maybe claim that these countries on an average have done better under their queens?

.
Grub,
I chose to not mention the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), as it did not function as a democracy. Germany had then more democracy on the books than Britain ever had, with its Upper House. It never worked for the Germans then, as it had no one else to bring the Glorious Traditions regarding democracy forward than the 30.000 Saxons Charlemagne eliminated in 805. The other German tribes had no democratic traditions like the Angles, Jutes, Friesians and Saxons had, who had left for Britain between year 500 and 600.

The foot on the neck was what worked for Germany in 1945, in combination with the bodily experience of what you get out of electing a dictator. Hitler chose ‘the total war’ and ‘the total defeat’ for his people. I would say that it was mostly Hitler’s foot on Germanys neck that made the new democracy work.

Now we must allow the Muslims plenty of room to make mistakes, to figure out on their own that democracy is barely tolerable, but also that it is the best solution to the problem of governing a people, better than everything else.

You can bring a horse to water, but you cannot force the horse to drink.
.

1 - Who benefits from this "orchestrated outrage?
2 - Why did the danish newspaper refused to publish cartoons about chritianity and jesus?
3 - American government agents have invaded canada and are setting up policy think tanks and re-arranging our health care system, our resource policies and dealing a blow to our sovereignty.
5 - What are you all doing to stop the take over of Canada by the economic hit men such as David Emerson, his buddy that is CEO for BC Ferries, Martha Pipe and the "calgary school" that supports Harper and his idiotic balderdash?
6 - The experiment in the middle east have started to come home in body bags and all of you that are for so much freedom of expression have been very quiet or mute?
7 - Now that we are fighting a proxy war for the US in Afghanistan and Haiti, how much freedom of expression is left in order to stop the mendacity in our politicians? Do you want to loose your job? Do you want to have the american security agents on your tail?
By they way... Paul Martin came and gave the country in a platter to the americans, that is why emerson is in... he needs to finish the job.... while yammer is asleep on the wheel and most canadians are too comfortable to care... beer, hockey and chips....we are canadians ... burph...LOL

It's official now!

Jyllands-posten had it first... They really have run out of virgins, for now they must offer earthly rewards to aspiring Jihadists. See this article:

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/658C2197-3E84-497C-B4DF-DF5E989FFC6A.htm