Danish cartoons and journalistic responsibility

[Marley23]

@intention

Marley, I cited the poll which showed that millions of Muslims support suicide bombing of civilians, and gave the country by country numbers. If you don’t think that establishes it, I don’t know what to say. That’s what we have polls for, and at this point in history, although of course no poll can give “certainty”, they’re fairly accurate.

I made the mistake of skimming that post because it wasn’t directed to me. Here’s a link to the full study. While some of those numbers are alarmingly high, they are declining - sometimes sharply - in most of the countries in question. I’m not sure it comes to hundreds of millions, but in either case we’re talking about plenty of them and it’s not worth trying to find the Indonesian census.

I disagree with the posters here (and elsewhere) who have suggested newspapers should run these cartoons out of solidarity or in support of free speech. I’m not opposed to papers running them, as I said, but I think doing so with words to that effect would be injecting themselves into the controversy in a way that isn’t appropriate.

[Garfield226]

They issued a press release and sent a letter to the U of I’s chancellor Friday denouncing the decision to suspend the editors of the paper.

The Press Release.

There’s a link to the letter as well. It reads, in part:

Up until this morning’s article about your university’s decision to suspend students . . .

BZZT. Thanks for playing.

[Marley23]

@Garfield226

BZZT. Thanks for playing.

What are you buzzing? Care to explain anything?

[Garfield226]

@Marley23

What are you buzzing? Care to explain anything?

The university didn’t suspend the students. The chancellor (as far as anyone knows, of course. . ) had nothing to do with anything.

A business’s employee did something the business didn’t like, and so they suspended him. The university doesn’t enter into it.

[lissener]

The extremists who are responsible for this violence need to GET THE FUCK OVER IT. They cannot dictate their standards of blasphemy and speech to the rest of the planet. If they want to set up isolated states where they want to impose such laws upon themselves, that’s tragic, but go to it. But to insist that their bizarre, esoteric little self-imposed limitations are now somehow international law, punishable by violence and death, is absolutely unacceptable in every possible way. I’m all for not throwing gasoline on a fire, and I’m all for consideration and politeness, so I think it was impolite of the Danish newspapers to publish those cartoons, but guess what? Impoliteness happens. Impoliteness is not only inevitable, in some situations it’s downright necessary.

GET THE FUCK OVER IT.

Some kind of smackdown needs to make this stop.

[GIGObuster]

@lissener

Some kind of smackdown needs to make this stop.

To be fair, most of the recent deaths were caused by a smack down by the local authorities, It is sad though that in Nigeria the extremists attacked Christians and burned churches. I shake my head at seeing “the new martyrs” as one yahoo leader in Libya called them for getting killed for a cartoon. A cartoon that the authors already apologized for and the Muslims in Denmark already accepted the apology, whoever is dying now is dying for a lie.

And I do think the original liars need to be made an example:

Newsday | Long Island's & NYC's News Source

The Associated Press protested Wednesday the misleading inclusion of an AP photograph in a pamphlet purporting to show images offensive to Islam.

The picture shows a bearded man wearing fake pig ears, a pig nose, and a pink embroidered cap on his head. He was wearing the costume while participating in a pig-squealing contest at an annual festival in a farm village in southern France last summer.

….

A blurry, black-and-white copy of the picture was included in a brochure that a delegation of Danish Muslim leaders carried on a Mideast tour to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey, in December and January.

…

The brochure purported to show examples of anti-Muslim images from Europe, said Ahmed Akkari, a spokesman for the group. Included were 12 controversial drawings of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, he said.

The group received copies of the AP picture in threatening anonymous letters last year, Akkari said.

“We did not find it ourselves,” he told the AP, saying he had been unaware of the origin of the photograph and said he believed it was sent to the group as an example of a provocation.

When told about the background of the original AP photo, Akkari said: “I have no comments.”

:rolleyes:

Cat got the danish imams’ tongue?

[Larry_Borgia]

@Menocchio

These cartoons are hate speech, and intentionally insulting even towards Muslims who oppose violence. If some African Americans riotted because of a reprinting of The Turner Diaries, would we then be justified in printing it in every paper? Should we ask papers to reprint Iran’s Holocaust cartoons?

I agree that they should be shown so people know what we’re talking about, but they have to be handled very carefully. Not because they could cause violence, but because they are deliberately inflammatory and insulting to Muslims.

An aside, but you can’t possibly be comparing the turner diaries to the cartoons. I can only assume you’ve never read the diaries. They actively and joyously celebrate the murder of Jews. The cartoons are, at worst, merely criticizing Islam for a tendency for violence. They in no way call for the death of all Muslims worldwide. To compare the diaries to the cartoons is like comparing a pot smoker to a child raper on the grounds that they’ve both broken the law.

[intention]

From the Boston Herald …

" … the lack of support for the Danish newspaper by much of the Western media has shown we are willing to accept limits to free speech, if going beyond those limits provokes a clash with the most violent voices of the Muslim world.

The key question is: where do we place that limit? How far must we compromise to respect other peoples’ feelings? Last year, for example, two Scottish Muslim organizations tried to prevent a Glasgow restaurant from obtaining the authorization required to sell alcohol to patrons sitting outdoors, claiming it was offensive to Muslim passers-by. 

Are we going to reach a point where no alcohol will be served in public places, as that could offend Muslims? By the same token, some Muslims are offended by mini-skirts and other revealing clothes. Are we going to implement a culturally-sensitive dress code for Western women on our own turf? The question is not so preposterous, given the acts of kowtowing that abound in the West. 

Indeed, the Academy Award for self-imposed censorship goes to the city council in the town of Derby, England, which sent out a directive last year to all its employees informing them that, after complaints from Muslim workers, all pig-related items were to be removed from their desks, including stuffed animals and coffee mugs representing the impure animal.

It’s enough to make me want to buy a piggy bank, just to put it on my desk …

w.

[Garfield226]

As he expected, the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Illini was fired Tuesday. His cohort, the opinons editor, was offered reinstatement, but declined.

The former EIC has hired a lawyer and plans to sue. For what, I’m not sure, exactly.

[tagos]

@Sam Stone

My thought is that as soon as people started using violence to crush freedom of expression ever paper in the free world should have published those cartoons as a show of solidarity, and as an example to the Muslim world that we have our own values and that we will fight to defend them.

It is a scary road you go down when you allow other people to define what they find offensive and then prevent you from expressing yourself. This is the path that leads to religious police and blasphemy laws. It worries me that when we express one of our most basic values, freedom of expression, and another culture says it conflicts with theirs, our gut reaction is to grovel and apologize and offer to throw our values out the window in appeasement. That is the sign of a tired culture in decline.

Okay. That’s the final Islamic Fundie Straw. The bastards have made me agree with every word Sam said.

Damn them, damn them all to hell. :mad:

[tagos]

[QUOTE=intention]
.

They can follow their religious rules if they want to, but they can’t threaten me with death for not following their religious rules. That’s not on.
/QUOTE]

I agree with the gist of your post but would expand on this. They can follow their rules only insofar as they do not conflict with either the law or values (assuming here we’re talking about immigration derived minorities in a western democracy) of society.

I don’t give a damn what their dreadful books and murdering terrorist of a prophet says.

[tagos]

@lissener

The extremists who are responsible for this violence need to GET THE FUCK OVER IT. They cannot dictate their standards of blasphemy and speech to the rest of the planet. If they want to set up isolated states where they want to impose such laws upon themselves, that’s tragic, but go to it. But to insist that their bizarre, esoteric little self-imposed limitations are now somehow international law, punishable by violence and death, is absolutely unacceptable in every possible way. I’m all for not throwing gasoline on a fire, and I’m all for consideration and politeness, so I think it was impolite of the Danish newspapers to publish those cartoons, but guess what? Impoliteness happens. Impoliteness is not only inevitable, in some situations it’s downright necessary.

GET THE FUCK OVER IT.

Some kind of smackdown needs to make this stop.

Oh for crying out loud, now they’ve got me agreeing with Lissener too. Will this madness never end?