So, Rune, your plan is to fight stupid with stupid?
I must say, you are uniquely equipped for the undertaking.
I love the way the cartoon is being reprinted. Because it was such valuable, important speech. It has to be heard. Why do so many people equate “free speech” with some imagined imperative to be as offensive as possible?
I don’t know, but they now have a chance to stand behind their commitment to First Amendment offensiveness by reprinting a (quite tasteless, IMHO) cartoon about wounded US soldiers.
You’ll get my Danish butter cookies when you pry them from my cold dead hands. 
I’m not going to boycott any products from the Middle East (except for the occasional pistachio I don’t think I actually use any anyway), but if it makes the OP feel any better I’ll be happy to eat a danish pastry every morning for breakfast.
I don’t know any Arab products either.
I don’t have a car, nor do I use much plastic, so that’s out.
I’ll buy more Danish products, though.
Did I tell ya I bought a Bang & Olufsun TV? [well, I needed a new TV anyway 
]
Tonight I’ll make a sauce of Danablue cheese. Yum.
I’ve found some other Danish products here: WebDeals.be – Best Belgium Deals
Forza Danmark!
;j
|/
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/|\ <------Mohammed
The link is down, so I don’t know what image you’re referring to. But you do know that there’re a fair number of cartoons in circulation which are falsely atributed to the Newspaper - some of them, which are indeed very offensive, apparently drawn by a group of Imams themselve to stir up trouble. And yes I do find the original cartoons published by the newspaper to be fairly innocent.
I love it when you talk dirty to me. You are my secret lover!!!1
Allright, allright get a room you two…
To show my solidarity with the great Danish nation, I am now going out to buy a couple of six-packs of Tuborg.
(Actually, I always drink Tuborg. I just happened to run out).
I don’t personally see [http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000768.html] this cartoon in an offensive light…much like alot of American political cartoons, I personally think it has a grain of truth in it.
As for all the others that were linked…I’ll frankly just claim stupid, because I honestly didn’t get either the point they were trying to make (80% of them) or the offensiveness above and beyond your average American political cartoon.
As far as Middle Easterners burning the Dutch flag…uh…so? Far as I’m aware, they’ve been burning the American flag for what’s got to be going on generations now. I’ve never seen the need to get my tail in a twist about it. What’s that got to do with me, your average American?
Did I link that wrong? When I copy-paste it into a browser it works…
http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000768.html Anyways, in the event the re-link doesn’t work, it’s the one where the “image-marketers” are talking with “Mr. Mohammed” and commenting that a few Danish cartoons are the least of Islam’s problems. If that perception is wrong in general, I’m clearly not understanding what’s supposed to be “right”.
To foment the logical arguments, no, I don’t associate Islam’s looneys with Islam itself, per se.
In the larger spectrum of Islam, it’s tenets, and the acutal beliefs of it’s non-looney adherents, I am fully aware it is not what the “looney” branch would have you perceive it as. I’ve actually made made a broad effort to try and understand what Islam really is, as far as interpretations of the Koran, as well as thw writings of various religous scholars who do not necessarliy hold sway in the Middle East. (I just ordered Reza Aslan’s book No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam in a concerted effort to learn more, if that helps)
However I am also aware that the looneys have been some of the largest Islamic voices broadcast to the mainstream (i.e., non-Islamic world), so how can we help our perceptions? If the West has been exposed to Moderate Islamic Clerics who decry the fringe methods, I’ve yet to hear of them in the mainstream media.
Mind you, I’m not taking the Media at large’s word for it. That’s why I’m trying to educate myself.
Still. At the moment, my currently-largely-uneducated- perception is an atmosphere that is wholly against women as anything other than reproductuon machines (as long as what she reproduces is boys), very desirous of a theocracy in general, very anti-Western for whatever reason, very fearful of the influence of Western culture (maybe for good reasons, maybe not), and very intolerant of criticism or discussion of different ideals.
An additional (minority) small margin of that mindset are willing to resort to terrorism to try and not only maintain their belief structure, but promote it. (I don’t believe it’s the majority. I think the vast majority of muslims are largely like myself at heart. Just wanting to raise their families how they see fit, and trying to get by the best they can)
But on that basis, I don’t see how the comic I linked can be perceived as offensive, except for perhaps those who see a bit of truth in it, and aren’t willing to acknowledge it, and therefore perhaps see offense instead.
Sorry, I should have included this in my last post:
Regarding the section of my post:
To most of us in the West (or at least America, if not Europe as well) is it is as if Pat Robertson or Phred Phelps were the only voice of Christianity we largely heard of. If those were the only voices we heard about Christianity, could you blame the largely uneducated populace for perceiving it as a religion that might promote hatred?
I do know better, and I’m actively trying to learn more, but I still am not seeing the moderates as the over-riding voices of Islam broadly speaking. If the moderates do not have any voice in the media, they might as well not exist, as far as the average person’s perception exists.
If the Fred Phelps of the Islamic World are the sole voices of Islam who get the playtime, as far as general perception, the rest might as well not exist, in other words, and to the majority of the non-Islamic World, we will largely see the looneys as the ones “speaking to truth”, even though I don’t beleive that is the actual case.
Cerri, the cartoon you linked to wasn’t one of the original ones, though it contains a depiction of one of them, but they are linked from the page. The problem here is that any portrayal of Mohammed’s face is forbidden by most sects of Islam. So printing pictures of the Prophet is “offensive” in the first place, but printing cartoons mocking him is extremely offensive.
I find this rule dumb, but then I find most religious rules dumb (though “thou shalt not kill” is a good one). And I don’t think that theocratic loons should dictate what our secular society can or can’t do - but one should probably avoid incitement too.
I’m glad you make the distinction between the nutters and regular people. The impression you have of Islam as a whole, while often sadly true, focuses on the Middle East and places like Iran. It neglects places where large numbers of Muslims don’t behave in a particularly oppressive or dreadful manner, such as China, Malaysia (though they’ve got a growing bunch of fundies trying to impose Shari’a on them at the moment), Thailand, Indonesia to a certain extent, etc. I’m not claiming that these societies are as liberal as the West, but they seem no more or less oppressive than those that surround them, which might be Buddhist, secular, or Taoist.
Setting aside hysterical posts about Muslims in general, good questions to be asked would be a) why are Islamic fundamentalists quantitavely and qualitatively worse than those of other religions? and b) what on earth can be done to counteract them?
I have no answer to a), but I’d suggest that b) can be achieved by dialogue with moderates, and encouraging such groups as Rune mentioned, rather than shouting hysterically about the Islamic population as a whole.
Well, honestly, I couldn’t be exposed to Xtian religioius nutters like the aforementioned Phelps or Robertson without coming to the logical conclusion that Islam, like any other religion, has their nutters too.
And I think people willing to blow up not only themselves, but any apparent bystanders, willing, innocent, in agreement or not even a segment of the argument in question, are by definition, nutters. 
In any case, as I said, I’m really trying to educate myself about Islam at large, because how can I argue for or against the “realpolitik” of it when I am, at the moment, largely ignorantother than the perceptions of the media? If I won’t take the media’s ideas of OUR politics for truth, how can I even remotely think they got it right in the Middle East?
I do have a friend who majored in Islamic Religion (she actually just got her Master’s in it), who has been able to guide me towards some very good reading material, at least as far as the historical (her major really deals with the history/anthropology side of it, and not current Islamic cleric views, but it’s a good start) , and as I said, I just bought Reza Aslan’s book, and from the Daily Show interview I saw with him, it seems like some very promising reading. If you have any other reccomendations, I’m always up for grabbing new things to read. Further education in the nuances of the world we live in can never be a bad thing, imo.
(And as a broad grammatical apology, I’m sorry for the mis-spellings in my last few posts. I got home from work a few hours ago, I’ve been drinking a large part of the night, and it’s now 6 AM. I’m trying to edit out the ones I see in preview, but there’s some I’m only seeing after I’ve posted and it’s too late to correct them 
)
Yes, the existing boycott over a cartoon is Really Fucking Stupid. Why is retaliating in Similarly Fucking Stupid fashion anything even closely resembling a smart idea? I suppose if you’re three years old, allowances may have to be made.
Actually I kinda gave up on the idea. I was a bit riled up there and the whole fucking Middle fucking East could go fuck itself with a fucking baseball bat. But I cool down fast. And now the Middle East can sleep soundly knowing I won’t devastate them with an economic boycott.
Also I couldn’t really find anything to boycott besides Q8 - and I actually never shopped there anyway, so what good was that gonna do. Now I’m trying to stir up people to support Danish immigrant shops, since there’s has been a SMS trying to get people to boycott them. And what the fuck is all that about?! Taking hostage a group of people that have nothing to do with it, and even less influence over it. Fuck that. Here I come Muhammed! I even registered a Domain I want to set up in support, once I get round to it. Any day now.
Having a temper is such hard work…
Actually, I’m thankful for the Danes. They’re now more hated then the Americans. You can now go overseas and proudly say you’re American, and not worry about some nutcase trying to blow you up or kidnap you.
[sing-song]
You’re hated more.
You’re hated more.
Ha-ha huh ha-ha.
[/sing-song]
Actually, it is kinda cool to see 'em burning somebody else’s flag for a change!
Well, I suppose I have to ask the same question that many folks keep asking, but why does it seem that the Islamists keep coming up with these wackadola extremist behaviors? I mean it’s against Jewish law for someone to utter or write the name Jaweh, for example, but I can’t for the life of me imagine that if some newspaper editor wrote or spoke that name, for the sake of freedom of the press, that a group of fundamentalist Jews would come rioting, bearing arms, burning flags, threatening lives, etc. Christian fundamentalists have even stopped stonings for blasphemy, for god’s sake. Maybe it’s just the views we keep getting, but it just seems that a much larger proportion of Muslims are mired in an ancient way of thinking than these other religions. I know there are moderate Muslims but they seem to have so little influence and seem to be so ineffective against the masses of fundamentalists. Beheadings, for chrise sake? That stuff is so archaic. Isn’t there some basic tenet of civility that has live and let live as a part of it? Why does it seem that there is such a higher proportion of fundamentalist, extremist Muslims than Jews or Christians?
Our lab has agreed to join the boycott. Eliminating plastics was hard. Especially syringes. Fortunately we found some that aren’t made of plastic but rather glass, which is not made from petrolium but rather…fuck!