I’m surprised by the idea that “we” should teach 'them" how to be less offended by the things we do that offend them.
Try turning that around and see how it fits. Instead of saying Americans get to do this stuff so you shouldn’t be offended, how about getting used to the idea that this kind of free speech has real consequences including the deaths of innocent people. Then maybe we can focus those educational energies on teaching Americans to stop blindly hating Muslims.
If the idea is that we’re presumably targeting specifically those who are inspired to violence and anger at the notion of American influence on society, i’m not entirely sure turning up and volunteering to educate them on how they can be more like you is going to go down all that well.
Not quite sure that magellan’s answer of invasion or war is the correct solution either, to coin what might be understatement of the year. Unfortunetly I think the best that can be done is to a) distance oneself from inflammatory speech while b) making it incredibly clear that there’s no kind of inflammatory speech which justly calls for a violent response. Which pretty much seems to be the plan.
Nope, nobody expects “them” to be less offended by the things we do that offend them. They can be as offended as they want.
But they need to understand the concept that when one of us does something that offends them, that doesn’t mean that our nation or society as a whole is sponsoring, endorsing or approving the thing that offends them.
Consequently, it’s pointless and counterproductive for them to attempt to retaliate against our nation or society as a whole when one of us does something that offends them. Especially if their retaliation attempts take the form of violence.
While I’m all in favor of teaching American Islamophobes to stop blindly hating Muslims and to stop promoting hateful ignorance about them with dumb-as-shit offensive “artworks”, I don’t think that the motive for this should be simply fear for the lives of our own innocent people.
We as a society should work harder to be less ignorant and prejudiced about Muslims because it’s the right thing to do. But we should refuse to censor or repress free speech on the part of ignorant and prejudiced people in the meantime, because that’s also the right thing to do.
The problem is that Islam simply is not an ideology compatible with our wesrtern concepts of democracy, free speech and human rights.
Just take for example the saying attributed to Voltaire: “I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
To democrats in the west, this is one of the noblest ideals of the Enlightenment. I would bet that 99% of Muslims would scratch their heads and consider that sentnce as nothing but mealy-mouthed gobbeldy-gook.
By the way, Voltaire (whether or not he really said that) represents the beginning of anti-religious satire by free-thinking minds in the 18th century.
No, I believe decent people with common sense of any religion regardless of whether they live under oppressive regimes censoring their communications and limiting freedoms of all kinds fully understand the concept of free speech.
Hmmm, a massively sweeping essentialist generalization about the intrinsic and immutable nature of a single undifferentiated entity “Islam”, backed up by nothing but your unsupported guess about a tangential minor topic and an arbitrary statistic derived via argumentum ab ano for good measure.
Devastatingly persuasive argument, bro.
:dubious: Eastern thought is centered on maintaining communal harmony at the cost of individuality. How someone acts in that culture is not as important as the consequences of that action.
The western ideal of individuality is new and predominant but that doesn’t make it the only reasonable framework for society.
Turn it around again: riots and murder are not an acceptable response to offensive speech, and the threat of violence is not acceptable as a deterrent to offensive speech.
Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
If I may ask a tangential question:
Before the end of the 1700s, how tolerant were Christians of others mocking their religion?
Today, if Monty Python makes fun of Jesus, the most you’ll get is some protests. Do we have examples of people doing the same thing in Christian areas back when Christians were uneducated peasants living in illiberal nondemocracies? Perhaps it’s Islam that makes the difference or it could be the fact that most Muslims are living in undereducated, underdeveloped illiberal dictatorships combined with a possible inferiority complex among Muslim countries.
Aga Kahn IV, for example, thinks gov’t censorship and violence shouldn’t be used in response to religious offense.
Were there any violent protests in Turkey over the cartoons?
Oh, sorry. Argumentum ab ano means an argument pulled out of, er, thin air.
I suspect the answer is “not very,” but it’s not the 1700s.
AFAICT, it varied considerably from one region to another. In that period before large-scale global communications, of course, what most Christians tended to get upset about in that regard was other Christians mocking their religion, since their encounters with non-Christian societies were limited.
A case study involving blasphemy trials in Zurich in the early modern period was published by Francisca Loetz about ten years ago. This review summarizes a few of the findings:
I’m not going to pretend that freedom of speech isn’t for the greater good, but for all you ‘Freedom of Speech is the inevitable conclusion of an enlightened society’ posters, I bet you don’t have neighbors that have the freedom to turn their property into a tire incinerator or pig farm. And I bet that doesn’t keep you up at night.
I guess that’s kind of my point, acceptable to whom? I think the people who are responsible for the recent violence in Libya would say it’s a perfectly reasonable response and not care one bit that we strongly disagree. I also believe that the U.S. has taken violent actions against other nations for what, to me, were completely unacceptable reasons.
Isn’t there a point where we understand that this is the likely response whether we find it acceptable or not? And isn’t educating Americans to stop this kind of nonsense more likely to result in fewer incidents of violence?
Put it another way. Would Islam really be Islam if it suddenly subscribed to concepts of western rights and freedoms?
The truly ridiculous argument is that people like Osama bin Laden were simply ill-informed Muslims who somehow did not understand the “religion of peace”. We are absurdly asked to believe that they somehow missed a few classes in Koran school and got a very erroneous idea that Islam condones violence and conquest.
Bullshit! The point is that the late bin Laden and today’s Islamists know EXACTLY what Islam is about, and could probably argue a liberal, pro-western Muslim into the ground quoting chapter and verse and hadith without even cracking open a book.
It is essential to the very weave and fabric of Islam that it is a fascistic ideology of a religion whose purpose is world domination, the “world caliphate”. If a person can be persuaded to Islam, fine, If not, conquest and force will do as well.
Do you know why Muslims call it “reverting” and not “converting” to Islam? Because you and I and every human being are held to be ALREADY Muslims. We just have not realized the truth yet.
It is a world view in which the state has no legitimacy except as an appaendage in support of religion. The words “Sharia Law” are a tautology, because “Sharia” means “Law”. To Islam, there is no distinction between religious law (such as the Pope telling Catholics homosexuality is a sin) and state laws (such as the state in a “Catholic” country like Sp[ain or Porrtugal sanctioning gay marriage). As Muslims demonstrating in London express it, if you obey the laws of man, you are a slave to that man. You must instead be a slave to Allah and to Allah’s law.
This is a world view in which religion is not something that exists as an option within the state, something that citizens can take or leave like joining a chess club. In Islam, Religion IS the State. Apostates and blasphemers are killed because that is what the Koran and the hadiths say, and those perfect laws of Allah are immutable.
Now then imagine for one second the absururdity of introducing into such an ideology the idea that people in a state can join any religion or deny the existence of God, and mock the beliefs of others with impunity, that secular concepts of human rights trump religious laws.
It simply would not be Islam. Such a country might have mosquesand people who attend them and call themselves Muslims, but it would not be Islam as it is conceived and elaborated by their scriptures. And the Islamists bloody well know it.
Fair enough, but shouldn’t they care somewhat that their own government and fellow citizens (especially the fellow citizens who themselves have suffered as a result of this violence) strongly disagree?
Ultimately, changes in outcomes will be produced not by directly convincing the extremists, but by changes in attitude of non-extremists towards the extremists and towards us.
Depends what you mean by “educating”. I’m not generally a fan of chest-thumping “never give in to the terrorists” rhetoric, but it seems to me counterproductive to explicitly counsel Americans to back off from “this kind of nonsense” specifically because we want to avoid violence. Isn’t that just sending the message that the violence was effective?
And of course, if you’re suggesting any kind of hate-speech restrictions as part of this “education”, I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.
On what basis?
One is acceptable to people who will murder people who don’t share their faith or denigrate ideas they like, and the other is acceptable to people who think you have a right to your opinion even if they don’t like that opinion. I’ll let you figure out who is who. I don’t think we have to pretend these standards are equally valid.
No, what they would say is “Insult our faith and we’ll kill you.” Reasonability doesn’t enter into it. What we’re discussing are threats, not a disagreement about reasonable responses.
Everyone understands that large numbers of people are going to freak out at any Western action that is perceived to be insulting to Islam. Nobody is confused about that. At most that’s a reason for people who are trying to be diplomatic (like governments) to avoid needless provocations. It doesn’t mean private citizens have to censor themselves. And I think you are kidding yourself if you believe education would make any difference here. The people who made the movie knew they were going to get an intense negative reaction. Maybe they didn’t foresee murders, but none of them are all that surprised. Most of them are Christian lunatics (and I think some are from the Middle East). They set out to make a movie that was as insulting and provocative as possible to Muslims. They knew what the likely response was. So education in this instance would be useless. And in any case this kind of “education” seems to imply that you can’t criticize Islam because Muslims don’t like it. Religious fanatics don’t get to decide what the rest of the world talks about.
Not in the least. These people provoke their own incidents: the Muhammad cartoons didn’t bother anyone for months until some fundamentalist imams took them around the Middle East and mixed in some other (fake) offensive images. This movie was on YouTube for two months with no reaction before someone dubbed it into Arabic and made sure the Arabic media knew about it. Make no mistake about how these incidents happen.
**Should we be working harder to educate the Muslim world about free speech? **
No. We’ve done enough. We should be doing more to educate the leaders of these countries about the direct connection between killing Americans and drone strikes. And educating the citizens of these countries about the danger of being our enemy, or standing next to one.