I see this claim a lot. Can you find me examples of where extreme (and by that I presume you mean Islamist or Wahhabist) Muslims are being tolerated on the SDMB?
Personally, I condemn them utterly.
But I distinguish between them and tolerant Muslims, who make up the vast majority, and I try to add balance to the broad-brushes that are constantly being waved - something I see a lot of people on this board unable or unwilling to do.
Too right. I’m as liberal (athiest) and tolerant as the next person but I’m sick to death of this shit. Islam offends me by existing and the cultural practices some mistake for Islam offend me even more. But I try and refrain from issuing death threats and boycotting dried figs.
I’m sick to death with fanatics imposing limits on free-speech, creating a climate of self-censorship with their ludicrous sensitivities concerning their bullshit religion and bullshit social practices.
Roll on the time we can cut ourselves off from the oil teat.
I did not see ‘‘fanatics imposing limits on free-speech,’’ I saw consumers choosing to spend their money elsewhere. Nothing wrong with that.
You know full well that fear of some nutter stabbing or bombing you is creating a climate of self-censorship. It’s been going on since Rushdie, through the Dutch film-maker and up to the bomb threats against the Danish newspaper.
And I include the curent kowtowing to religion that is the UK’s Incitement to Hatred Bill, tond down but no killed by a Parliamentary revolt yesterday.
It is disengenuous in the extrme to see this as an isolated incident. Anyone not think that at some point one of these cartoonists will not end up on on the unfunny end of a beating or worse?
So something is wrong with a bunch of people spending their own money the way they want? Why? It seems like this very effective grass-roots protest is very effective and very peaceful. It seems to me to be a mark or real progress over less-effective and less-peaceful means of letting one’s anger be known.
This part I simply don’t get. Why would anybody think it was a good idea to “build bridges” with Muslims by publishing a picture book about a person that many Muslims consider it offensive and even sacrilegious to represent in pictures?
It sounds kind of like a Dionysian hedonist cult attempting to reach out to Christians by holding one of their ritual drunken orgies in the name of Jesus Christ. :eek: Missing. The. Point, People!
No matter how well-intentioned you may be in your interactions with another religion, you can’t expect its followers to appreciate or condone it if your outreach involves something that they consider actually sacrilegious.
(And I’ll repeat for those who haven’t been listening: no, I don’t approve of the boycott of Danish goods or of threats against Danes. Yes, I do support free speech and think that people should tolerate even gratuitously offensive and sacrilegious satire for the sake of freedom of speech. However, I also think that people who disseminate gratuitously offensive and sacrilegious satire are rude tasteless clods, and although I support their right to do so, it’s with one hand firmly clenched over my nose.)
What is wrong is such bullshit sensitivity and the self-censorship caused by the climate of fear the full spectrum of Islamic intolerance has generated.
You can’t just isolate the boycott element of even this single issue from the bomb threats, the call for the cartoonists to be punished and at the extreme end the fatwas, the honor killings, the assassinations and the people in permanent hiding all for saying or doing something that offends Islamic sensibilities somewhere.
The default response to all hurt religious sensitivities, whatever the religion, should be ‘tough shit’.
OK, I was misled by the thread title. I thought we were talking about the boycott.
Better they are boycotting that being violent. Can we agree on that?
We can agree that some are being non-violent and that everyone backed down damn quickly but not quickly enough to stop it escalating to bomb threats.
Is Calsberg beer, Danish?
Good on them.
Perfectly within their rights to do it.
(They do realize Mohammed is a person, God is God, right?)
I wonder how that Eurofighter deal is going. Just asking, that’s all.
I’m sure all the requisite bribes have already been delivered and the cheques cashed.
Originally posted by Paul in Saudi
Oh, definitely.
It makes them look like the silly buggers they are, but we’re used to that.
What they CAN’T however do, is call for violence. Like this:
The offices of the newspaper which originally printed the cartoons, Jyllands-Posten, had to be evacuated yesterday after a bomb threat was received.
Saudi Arabia has recalled its ambassador from Denmark over the cartoons, and several Muslim countries have begun a boycott of Danish produce. Palestinians in Gaza yesterday burnt Danish flags and chanted “war on Denmark, death to Denmark”…
When I hear about a muslim in the UK who wanted to ban piggybanks, the muslims who forbid the play ‘Aisha’, the muslims who forbid a song called ‘The knife of god’, the muslims who vowed to kill Ayaan Hirsi Ali and several of our politicians who critisize Islam - and when a muslim beheads a Dutch filmmaker, then I think: “My, what a lovely, peaceful, religion Islam is” , but I do so with one hand firmly clenched over my nose.
Go, France!
I really wish Holland had the balls.
(I thought that was an urban legend about some local council wanting to ban piggy-banks in their offices, not some employee.)
Winnie the Pooh, the Piglet and The Three Little Pigs must be among every child’s favourite cartoon and comic characters, but workers at a council office in UK have been asked to remove all traces of pigs from the office, lest it offends Muslim staff.
Workers in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even tissue boxes featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.http://news.webindia123.com/news/showdetails.asp?id=126213&cat=World
It might very well be an urban legend, but is that the best you can do?
How about bomb-scares, death threads and murders?
I heard tell that the British Council of Muslims Who Make Press Releases called the action by the government agency silly. Of course I may be mis-remembering.)
I don’t think Paul is being combative, just a bit pedantic about thread titles and not seeing this incident in the wider context.
And to their credit they oppose the current UK govt attempt to protect religions against (a very nebulously defined) ‘hate-speech’.
It’s the ones that will kill you for making a film or writing a book we’re worried about and the dampening effect it has on free speech. It would be a very, very brave comedian who got up on a British stage and told the sort of jokes or performed the kind of sketches routinely done lampooning The Church of England.
You won’t ever see anything even as mild as The Vicar of Dibley.
That’s what I mean by a climate of self-censorship.
I do it myself as a would-be writer. I’m happy lampooning Christianity but I wouldn’t dare submit an equivalent story to a competition and I’d lay odds people would think 4 times about publishing it.
It seems that two of the Danish journalists involved with the pictures have gone into hiding due to death threats and bomb scares (I got that off Wikipedia so I am trying to find a different cite). I wonder, did the artist who created “piss Christ” ever go into hiding?
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Several Islamic groups are calling on the United Nations to impose sanctions on Denmark. In a vacumn, the boycott is a perfectly reasonable response to something that you find offensive. In context, however, of Islam’s general intolerance of other religions and cultures.