Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explores further the limits of free speech, exploding some common misconceptions in the process of replying to a commenter here:
A poster here at Jihad Watch has made the following absurd assertions, which are, unfortunately, widely held:1. Did publisher Rose [Flemming Rose of Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper in which that handful of anodyne cartoons appeared] have the right to publish those cartoons, as a matter of free speech? Absolutely.2. Did he act responsibly in doing so, knowing that homicidal maniacs would probably go absolutely nuts if he did, destroying property and probably killing people? In no possible way.
3. Did he act responsibly in deliberately extending the middle finger to Sunni Muslims in general, and not merely to those who attempted to intimidate him? Was his decision to do so any more tolerant than Islam itself? Absolutely not.
4. Could he have challenged the attempted intimidation of the Jihadists without deliberately and intentionally insulting the religious beliefs of moderate and Jihadist alike? With the greatest of ease.5. Did Rose's publication of those cartoons advance or retard the cause of pluralism? Absolutely the latter. Respect for the convictions of even those we disagree with is absolutely crucial to pluralism.
6. Does Rose have blood on his hands? You bet your sweet bippy.
7. Is this a free speech issue? No way.
Let's dissect this, paragraph by numbered paragraph.
Paragraph 1 assures us that yes, Flemming Rose had a perfect right to publish those cartoons, "as a matter of free speech." But by the time we have arrived at Paragraph 7, this has been stood on its head, and the poster answers his own question -- "Is this a free speech issue?" with "No way." So the Danish paper had a right to exercise its free speech, but this is not a "free speech" issue.
What is it then? Let's start with the next paragraph, paragraph #2.
We are immediately confronted with that adverb "responsibly." All of a sudden we have entered a world where the right of free speech has been modified by a very powerful, because so very vague, adjective: "responsibly." You may exercise your right of free speech, but you must do it a certain way. You must do it -- "responsibly." So all of a sudden the burden is now on you, the one who wishes to exercise that right of free speech.
And what now should be taken into account by you is that some will take offense. And despite the classic formulation of the right of free speech offered by John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty"-- the right to free speech must include the right to give offense -- all of a sudden we have been transported to a different universe, where we must calculate the fanaticism of those who might take offense. And if they turn out to be fanatical enough, murderous enough, as they have proven to be in the case of these Muslim mobs, then it is "irresponsible" to have offended them in the first place. We should have "foreseen" how they would behave. In Anglo-American law, students of contracts will remember all about that: Hadley v. Baxendale. Q.E.D.
Was that Danish newspaper acting "irresponsibly"? Not at all. It was, of course (and stated openly) that it was putting to the test its right, the right of all Western peoples living under Western laws and guarantees, the right to still exercise freedom of speech. It wanted to see if Muslims were going to try to control, and limit, its exercise even within Europe. The cartoons were anodyne. The business about Muslims never permitting images of the man they call (but we Infidels do not, and are under no obligation to do so) the Prophet, is false. There are Muslim images of the Prophet all over the place, and if one consults the book "The Islamic World" put out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (by Stuart Cary Welch, an expert on Mughal miniatures and other examples of Islamic art) one will find a discussion on p. 95 of just how common were certain images of Muhammad, such as those of him ascending to the Seventh Heaven on his strange steed al-Buraq during the Miraj or Night Journey.
Flemming Rose has testified that he had no idea that such a reaction -- the economic boycott of Denmark, the recall of ambassadors, the crazed mob attacks on Danish consulates and embassies and, in a general anti-Infidel fit, on the embassies of the United States and other Western countries -- was forthcoming. He could not have foreseen, and did not foresee -- and it is wrong to blithely assume that Western men, rational and modest, would ever have assumed, that there would follow the publication of the cartoons the display of primitive and murderous fanaticism that did follow. He had no way of knowing that there would follow the total destruction of the last Christian church in Benghazi and the harrying out of all those Italians who still remained, and the burning down of churches in many Muslim countries, and the murder of an Italian priest in Turkey, and dozens of Christians in northern Nigeria, and so much more. Were the Danes supposed to understand that that is how Muslims all over the world would behave, that their governments would whip them up for various reasons, including the main reason -- to divert attention from the local lords of misrule (the poverty in Libya, the stampede at the hajj in Saudi Arabia, the general mess all over Dar al-Islam, with the ever-present all-purpose answer: whip up hatred of the Infidels)? It is false to accuse the Danes of knowing in advance that all this would happen. Danes everywhere are now under a collective death threat all over the Muslim world. Flemming Rose himself has fled the country; who knows where those cartoonists, on whose heads bounties have been placed by assorted imams, now live? Do you think they, or Rose, or Jyllends-Posten, had any idea? Did you have any idea this would happen? Are we not continually astonished at how Muslims behave? Would you have predicted, five years ago, that someday Muslim websites would use as a recruiting tool, so proud were they of it, the videotaped decapitation of the Berg boy in Iraq, or of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan? Would any Infidel have predicted any of this?
Paragraph #3 -- to call the brave refusal to kowtow, to submit, and instead to heed all the ex-Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq, “extending the middle finger” (as you put it so crudely) is asinine. Only such people correctly identified the problem, as did Flemming Rose. Only they told the world that this was a deliberate and sustained attempt to force dhimmitude on Europe, to make it change its laws and customs, under Muslim threats of violence and more than threats, actual acts. To be unable to see that this is hardly to "give the finger" to the Sunnis. Why, pray, to "the Sunnis"? Didn't the Shi'a in Iran also riot, even though they are, as perhaps you were alluding to, more at ease with images of Muhammad? There was no "giving of the finger" to anyone. Every appearance by every Dane -- Flemming Rose, or Juste, or Rasmussen, was entirely dignified.
Paragraph #4: You say there was another way to have challenged the atmosphere of intimidation and self-censorship that, it was felt, had descended upon Denmark and much of Western Europe. It was a way that could have been found "with the greatest of ease." Strangely, you do not tell us how the beliefs of "moderate and Jihadist" Muslims might affect their reaction to the cartoons. And that itself is a very peculiar phrasing, since it implies that "moderate" Muslims, whom you do not define, do not believe in the Jihad -- but Jihad is a duty laid out, clearly and repeatedly, for all Muslims. Any Muslim who claims not to believe in Jihad, not to believe that is in the duty, collective and sometimes individual, to participate in the relentless campaign to spread Islam all over the world until it "dominates and is not to be dominated," is simply not a "moderate" Muslim but no Muslim at all. Jihad is central to Islam; it is practically the Sixth Pillar of Islam, as Muslim commentators have noted. See, and read deeply in, the texts of the Muslim Quranic commentators, assembled in The Legacy of Jihad. Then read, if you wish, the overwhelming scholarship by Western students of Islam also collected in that indispensable volume: indispensable both by itself, and because it will now allow scholars to follow suit, and to collect and publish all the real scholarship on Islam from the period 1880-1960 that has been allowed to be deliberately ignored, as if such people as Schacht and Abel and Margoliouth and Snouck Hurgronje and Lal and all the others simply were irrelevant, when their scholarship is impeccable, and they are a constant source of embarrassment and anguish to the apologists who have infiltrated the ranks of MESA Nostra and are now in charge of teaching young Americans about Islam. These apologists are moving heaven and earth to keep both the full texts (and intrepretative guides, such as naskh or abrogation) of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, away from the students, and also to keep those students either pre-brainwashed to mistrust real scholarship, or not even to allow them to find out about such scholarship.
Paragraph 5 tells us that the right of free speech should not have been exercised because Rose did not advance, but retarded, the cause of "pluralism." What does this mean? Islam does not believe in pluralism. It never has. It never will. It believes that "Islam is to dominate and is not to be dominated." The entire history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, whether Jews or Christians, Zoroastrians or Hindus, Buddhists or Confucians, shows that that is meant. Islam is not to co-exist as an equal with any other faith -- so the Western idea of "pluralism" has no meaning. If "pluralism" is taken advantage of in the Western world by Muslims, that is only temporary, until such time as they are numerous enough, and powerful enough, to bring about the changes in local laws, customs, manners, and understandings that will allow Islam to dominate and Muslims to rule. There is not a single counter-example to this in the long 1350-year history of Muslim conquest, from Spain to East Asia. And one can see, today, in all the lands where Islam rules, the emptying out of the non-Muslim populations, from the Hindus who over the last 50 years have had to leave Pakistan and Bangladesh, to the steady elimination of the Christians in Turkey over the past century, to the constant persecution, and sometimes mass murder, of Christians in the Sudan, in Nigeria (the Biafra war, fought in self-defense against what Col. Ojukwu carefully described as a "Jihad"), and indeed the assault on Maronites in Lebanon, Copts in Egypt, the Christians who managed to remain in Algeria and Libya and elsewhere in the Maghreb, and all kinds of other non-Muslim populations wherever they happened, unhappily, to find themselves under rule by Muslims.
"Respect for the opinions of others" has nothing to do with pluralism -- or rather, no one deserves respect just because they exist. What if a belief is not worthy of respect? Why should Infidels respect for one minute a belief-system as antipathetic to art, music, free and skeptical inquiry, and to their own beliefs, to their own desire to live unmolested and unsubjugated -- why does Islam deserve the respect of Infidels? Doesn't the contents of a particular belief-system first have to be analyzed? Are we not entitled to withhold respect, which is not a party-favor that one simply distributes like confetti?
And even if this or that belief or system somehow merited "respect," that does not trump the right to exercise free speech. One may deplore a cartoon as exhibiting bad taste, or see through the obvious sensationalism of such non-art works as Serrano's Piss Christ. But one does not shut it down or make death threats. Had Muslims simply quietly expressed some kind of dignified sorrow at those cartoons, or ignored them altogether, one might think of them differently today. As it is, whatever modicum of respect some might have had has been completely lost in the worldwide display of murderous rage, and the taqiyya sentiments of the so-called "moderates" (e.g. Ihsanoglu of the O.I.C.), with their transparent nonsense and attempts to throttle, through the passage of laws, the right of free speech recognized in the Western world and by the rest of the civilized world. That right, of course, is not recognized by any Muslim country -- they respect, and adhere to, a document quite different from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights, which makes every individual right subject to Islam and the Shar'ia -- which is to say, subject to the principles and Holy Law of Islam. And those principles flatly contradict every single one of the rights of individuals which the advanced world takes for granted.
Most grotesque of all, in this grotesque effort, is the blaming of Rose and not the fanatical mobs, for the "blood" of those killed: "Does Rose have blood on his hands?" asks the poster. And he does not stay for anyone else to answer, but answers himself, in the unseemly style with which he seems quite satisfied: "You bet your sweet bippy."
So it was Rose who was responsible for the murder of the Italian priest in Turkey, and not the Turkish boy who shot him. It was Rose who beat to death those Christians in northern Nigeria, including that priest and several young children. It was Rose who led the charge and set fire to those churches in Nigeria and Benghazi, in Libya, and in Indonesia and Pakistan, and Rose who led the charge on the Danish embassies and consulates, and American embassies and French embassies, and whatever else could be found that represented the "Infidels" who are always and everywhere to be blamed for everything, if you view the universe through the prism of Islam.
And that is how this poster and so many other wise heads in the Western world have put the entire burden of the victims, living and dead, animate and inanimate, of the deliberately whipped-up hysteria and hate exhibited by Muslim mobs all over the world, on the frail shoulders of the fearless Danish editor, Flemming Rose. Rose’s crime was to stand up for free speech. In this he was seconded by others, though not by the pusillanimous major newspapers, not by The New Duranty Times in what is its least finest hour since its scant coverage of the Nazi murders of Jews in the 1930s and then, at industrial strength, in the 1940s (see Professor Laurel Leff's books).
And this is how, having started with the question: Did Rose "have the right to publish those cartoons, as a matter of free speech?" and then answering it "Absolutely," the poster managed, by the crazed and cruel (il)logic of his posting, to end up declaring that in fact that "right" is not existent, he did not "absolutely" have that right at all, or rather, he had the "right" but had no right to exercise the right. In this the poster lays bare the logic of all those in the West who have begun by affirming that of course they value the freedom of speech, but…
In other words, you must realize that you "absolutely" have the right but you have no right to exercise the right. You may not exercise it precisely to the extent that those who may take offense will be primitive, fanatical, murderous. And the more murderous, primitive, fanatical they are, the more cunningly and meretriciously their assorted lords of misrule harness that hysteria and hate to divert attention from those examples of misrule, and onto the hated Infidel. That Infidel is hated because Qur'an and Hadith and Sira have prepared Muslim minds to hate the Infidel. They have inculcated from early on the need, the right, the positive duty (yes, "absolutely") to hate that Infidel, not to take him as a friend (or only feigningly so, to promote Islam), not to do him favors, not to see him as anything but a creature who stands in the way of the spread of Islam, and hence to be conquered, not necessarily through military means, but through any means that present themselves (economic boycott and bribery, Da'wa, demographic conquest, propaganda of every kind) and that prove most effective.
So by the poster's logic, one should still exercise that right of free speech. But be sure you do not use it to offend anyone who, in taking offense, has a demonstrated propensity to burn down embassies and churches and other buildings, and beat people to death, or shoot a priest or two. That wouldn't be right. And you, like Flemming Rose, would have only yourself to blame.
No, make sure that you offend only those whose reaction, upon taking offense, might be to write a letter to the editor. Or nurse a private sorrow. You know -- take a look at how Christians and Jews have behaved when they or their beliefs have been mocked in some way. So they are fair game. Buddhists too. Hindus as well -- except when they are maddened, in India, by some Muslim outrage that goes beyond free speech, such as when Hindu pilgrims on a train are burned alive. What cruel and cynical casuistry. What indifference to free speech, the product of centuries, tossed overboard in order -- in order to make peace, or rather to appease, those who wish to impose their view of what we can say, what we can write, what we can publish, in our own lands.
Disgusting.
The essential fallacy of this whole line of argument rests on an Orwellian inversion of the traditional notions of limited speech rights: we do not protect direct incitements to violence (aka fighting words).
Now, what this means is that if, for instance, in response to the cartoons, Christians mobs were running around Denmark torching mosques and beating up muslims, one would then be quite right to say that Jyllands Posten had NO RIGHT to publish the cartoons. Of course, one has to posit both a very different cultural situation in Denmark and an entirely different set of cartoons in order to even entertain the possibility of this sort of outcome: it is, quite plainly, utterly irrelevant to the current debate.
The response that the cartoons did generate does happen to look, graphically, a lot like the above scenario, but the actors are reversed: the muslims are burning churches and beating up christians in another part of the world. These people weren't incited to violent acts by (or in sympathy with) the cartoons; they are taking violent retribution against the cartoons.
To confuse these two outcomes is indeed to capitulate on the fundamental basis of freedom of the press: the right to speak unpopular or offensive ideas.
But then, to confuse these two outcomes is to do exactly what the sloppy moral thinking of digital modernity encourages one to do: assess every act on the basis of its immediate and consequent imagery (and the emotional impact of that imagery), rather than on its fundamental moral orientation or ontology.
Read the "Degree being vizarded," speech in troilus and cressida: that will tell you all you need to know about what happens in a world in which philosophical rigor has been abandoned by the "ruling classes."
The cowards of the mainstreammedia - not publishing - which is an act of cowardice by those claiming to be the vanguards and champions of the truth, or at least the right of free speech, and instead publishing their mealy mouthed claims to moral sensitivity - as if they are to be applauded by their restraint.
Hypocrites.
This is a central and the good fight.
God bless all you fighters.
DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - A German court on Thursday convicted a businessman of insulting Islam by printing the word "Koran" on toilet paper and offering it to mosques.
The 61-year-old man, identified only as Manfred van H., was given a one-year jail sentence, suspended for five years, and ordered to complete 300 hours of community service, a district court in the western German town of Luedinghausen ruled.
The conviction comes after a Danish newspaper printed cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad -- sparking violent protests around the world from Muslims who saw the images as sacrilegious and an attack on their beliefs.
Manfred van H. printed out sheets of toilet paper bearing the word "Koran" shortly after a group of Muslims carried out a series of bomb attacks in London in July 2005. He sent the paper to German television stations, magazines and some 15 mosques.
Prosecutors said that in an accompanying letter Manfred van H. called Islam's holy book a "cookbook for terrorists."
He also offered his toilet paper for sale on the Internet at a price of 4 euros ($4.76) per roll, saying the proceeds would go toward a "memorial to all the victims of Islamic terrorism."
The maximum sentence for insulting religious beliefs under the German criminal code is three years in prison.
I'M STILL HERE
By Michelle Malkin · February 23, 2006 10:29 AM
Dear readers:
Yes, I know the site has been down all morning.
Yes, I've contacted the FBI.
I will try to get back to work, but this has been a bit of a distraction.
Thanks for sticking with me.
What's a "bippy"? I don't think we have them in England.
I worked in a goverment office many years ago where the toilet paper (hard, Izal or bronco type) bore the legend,
Property of HM Government. Now wash your hands.
Her Majesty was not offended.
No body rioted.
We did ask the union to lobby for soft paper, which we got, eventually.
What's a "bippy"? I don't think we have them in England.
A cross between a biddy and a bap I think.
Actually I do remember the phrase, from Rowan and Martins Laugh In, brought to you from beautiful downtown Burbank. Which means that the poster has to be at least as old as me, probably even older.
Has anybody seen Giaor lately?
Under particular circumstances, tolerance and respect are synonyms for surrender.
How well we are learning to tolerate our disenfranchisement and respect our masters.
"Read the "Degree being vizarded," speech in troilus and cressida: that will tell you all you need to know about what happens in a world in which philosophical rigor has been abandoned by the "ruling classes."
-- from a posting above
The Speech on Degree is an old favorite, though not even then, and certainly not now, ever clapper-clawed by the hands of the vulgar. But do you think it stands for some kind of statement on "philosophical rigor"? That's news to me. I thought it had to do with the indispensability of a rightly-ordered hierarchy, reflecting that Elizabethen World Picture (E. M. W. Tillyard, here I come -- again), connecting the right ordering of everything, from ordering within a family, to the state, to the planets in their starry course. I thought it was about how everything is undone when people are no longer assigned their rank according to the merit earned and due, whether in a family (what happens in "Hamlet" when the primogeniture and due of birth is not observed?), in a state (keep that belly and those members properly aligned with the head and with each other, Coriolanus tells us), when the planets themselves seem to wander from their course.
Well, Ward Churchill is still getting $100,00 a year, and Cornel West is a university professor at Princeton. And here I am holding out my hand in eleemosynary position #1, still waiting for readers of JihadWatch to send those tangible signs of support hitherwards. Talk about "take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows."
Everything connects. Tout se tient. Get those planets out of whack, and say farewell to heavenly harmony. Nothing untunes that string like mass democracy, where legal equality is misinterpreted to mean that everyone's got a point, everyone is equally entitled to an opinion, and everyone is absolutely exempted from any need to know something before speaking about it, or forming an opinion. The perfect example: Tom Friedman, Talking and Writing and Speaking ($45,000 a lecture, and un-worth every penny).
Add to that the new, diverse, multiuniversity, so unlike whatever it was that once upon a time or times Jacques Barzun and William James dreamed that a university could be. The perfect examples: Ward Churchill, pulling down $100,000 a year for nonsense based on lies, and comical Cornel West, eagerly snatched up by Princeton, and given a university professorship -- a fantastic slap at every conceivable intellectual standard, an insult to the real faculty members, and to everything for which a university should, but no longer does, stand. And of course, the politics of the modern college or university demands that everyone agree with everyone else (it's called "collegiality"), that those with strong opinions of the wrong kind be mocked and their lives made difficult, especially if they for some reason refuse to participate in those endless sacrificial rites before the smoking altars of the Idols of the Age. Tired of all these, for restful death, or retirement, or simply a country retreat, you cry? You and me both.
Speech on Degree summed up in one line from Sonnet 66 we can re-route (ending up on our own un-superhighway of good old Route 66):
"And captive good attending captain ill."
Was Shakespeare ever wrong?
Franco Frattini, EU Commissioner for Freedom, Justice and Security, seems to feel very similarly:
Another hypocrite who starts with a ringing endorsement of free speech and ends on his knees.
The old "Shouting fire [falsely] in a crowded theater" argument about the Danish cartoons was first bogusly utilized by Scott Simon, National Public Radio, on his Weekend Edition show, a few Saturdays back.
The analogy is absurd. The "innocent victims" in the "crowded theater" analogy are those who are panicked and die in the resulting deception's stampede, while the criminal instigator remains safe.
In the Danish instance, the cartoonists were the innocent editorial commentators on Islamic violence inspired by Mohammad's example in the Koran and Hadiths.
They were shouting about a real "fire" and trying to warn the Umma crowd to wake up to the suicidal path that their extremists have taken their "faith" down. And to look at the dangerous cliff the Islamic Imperialistic militants were rushing over, with cries of "Allahu Akbar-r-r-rrrrrrrr!". (Splat.) And dragging the entire "religion" along with them.
Plus, the "crowded theater" (outraged Muslims in general, in this instance) is not stampeded to their own harm, but they rise up to try to kill those artists who were only attempting to warn them of a real mortal danger to the Muslim audience and their "creed" (of Islamic extremism).
Is it not only decent but vital for free speech to be used to warn those Muslims (whose radicals are endangering not only the violent leading edge jihadists, but the entire Umma) of their precarious position?
The Danish cartoonists were doing a public service to "moderate" Muslims.
Shouting "Fire!" in a burning theater.
Is Islam burning?
Just sniff any Islamic zone.
You smell gunpowder -as Iraqis slaughter one another, Sunni versus Shi'ite, -burning embassies (Syria, etc.), -destroyed businesses (Pakistan), -churches in flames (Africa,) -and plutonium being enriched (Iran).
If the warned people irrationally turn on and kill the messengers, and then are consumedin the flames of their own Muslim bretheren's making, who is to blame?
The Jews, of course.
(Couldn't resist... as Groucho Marx, an old vaudevillian said: "Any group that would have me for a member I wouldnt want to belong to." My exact feelings about Islam.)
Hugh, great article. The headlong rush by the MSM, our politicians, and posters such as the one you responded, to give up our basic rights is incomprehensible to me. Are Civics even taught anymore at school? Is there even a rudimentary idea of how valuable those rights are, and how hard we've had to fight to keep them? The reaction by our media and courts and politicians is extremely disheartening.
What good is a right if we don't have the right to exercise it? It's an empty word on a scroll somewhere in the bowels of the Smithsonian.
And now, as in rumoret's posting, people are being arrested and convicted for acts of free speech. Unbelievable.
Just out: MOHAMMED’S NEW MAILBOX - Mark Steyn's readers weigh in on the cartoons and free speech.
The Western elites sold their souls for oil over thirty years ago. Payment is at hand. They just didn't think THEY would be the generation doing the paying.
Unfortunately, We The People, will have to take on this burden as well.
We DO have a responsibility that goes hand in hand with freedom of speech. It is NOT to avoid offending. It IS to speak responsibly. It is not a legal responsibility, it cannot be imposed by law, but morally it exists.
What good is freedom of speech unless we use to to challenge? Of what worth is a marketplace of ideas, if we fear to express ours? We cannot avoid painful topics, because that breed neurosis personally and tyranny politically. In fact, this very responsibility is what Jihadwatch is all about, and all of us who participate in it are acting on it, in our small way.
This cartoon Jihad should serve as a warning to us, and a call to arms, or pens and keyboards. The people who created this site are in real danger, perhaps not as pressing as Rose or Hirsan Ali, or heaven forbid Theo Van Gogh, but a real danger. Anything we can do to further the cause of awakening people to the real nature of Islam is a free speech responsibility.
What can I do to awaken more people to the nature of Islam? How can I contribute? Here, I am preaching to the converted.
Quijybo
IF GERMANS USE THEIR LAWS IN THIS WAY THEN THERE IS HOPE!
I THINK THEY SHOULD KEEP A LID ON IT UNTIL THERE IS A STATE VISIT BY HIM.
Iran leader faces Holocaust case
Germany has condemned Mr Ahmadinejad's remarks
An Israeli lawyer, Ervin Shahar, says he has asked Germany to charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with denying the Holocaust.
Mr Ahmadinejad was widely criticised when he said last year that the Holocaust was a "myth" and that Israel should be "wiped off the map".
Germany passed a law in 1993 forbidding Holocaust denial. It is punishable by up to five years in prison.
Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II.
Mr Shahar said he wanted the German federal prosecutors' office to take the issue before the constitutional court in the hope that international arrest warrants would be issued against Mr Ahmadinejad.
Correspondents say prosecutors will have to consider whether Germany has jurisdiction and whether President Ahmadinejad enjoys immunity.
International case
"I'm awaiting a response about whether they will file charges but I don't know how long it will take," Mr Shahar told the Reuters news agency.
The crime as described is directly linked to Germany, committed among others against German nationals of Jewish descent
Ervin Shahar
"It doesn't take days but several months."
On Monday, British historian David Irving was found guilty in Austria of denying the Holocaust and sentenced to three years in prison.
He had pleaded guilty to the charge, based on a speech and interview he gave in Austria in 1989.
Although Mr Ahmadinejad did not deny the Holocaust on German soil, another law passed in 2005 permits the filing of international cases in German courts.
Mr Shahar hopes the case might result in international warrants for Mr Ahmadinejad's arrest, thus preventing the president from entering the US or Europe.
The lawyer believes Germany is the best country in which to file the suit, because it is the "most influential European state" and because the country is directly linked to the case.
The prosecutors' office in Karlsruhe has not yet commented.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4741042.stm
tolerance and respect are synonyms for surrender.
And in 7th century Arabic, the word Islam meant... surrender. So everything fits together quite nicely.
PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH
One might think of the fake religion's name to be like one of those fancy new sports team name. "And in the green and white uniforms, from Arabia, let's introduce the starting five for the Surrender. Let's put our hands together and give this hot new squad a warm welcome!"
mountainecho
As much as l dislike Christianity l doubt very much they'd carry on like pork chops destroying property and killing people as we've seen with these "unbridled" heathens. We've got to test the water, stretch the boundries to find ourselves in this madcap world of diversity. Know then thyself, presume not god to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man. When a child throws a tantrum, do l give him what he wants...? Nup
Now it's Pope -- not that Pope, the other one? When did Jihad Watch turn into the Norton Anthology, or possibly Bartlett's Quotations?
Great stuff, fitzy... You're da man
Limits to Freedom of Speech? of course!! But, notice that for Islam there's---
No Limits on Freedom of Slaughtering?????
Fatalities due to Danish cartoon rioting: at least 45.
Fatalities caused by the latest Iraqi Shia-Sunni skirmish: at least 111.
Body count from freedom of speech: zero.
Now where do we see non-Muslims rioting due to the unbelievably offensive realities that 1-)Muslims fail utterly to respect anyone other than themselves 2-)Muslims deny anyone else the right to much as exist in peace (notice the truly horrifying accounts of massive repression and slaughter of Christians in such Islamic countries as Iraq, Indonesia, and Pakistan) 3-)Muslims indiscriminately slaughter human beings like animals INCLUDING OTHER MUSLIMS with Islam's blessings. Any of these failings of Islamic society are enough to drive the infidels to the streets in protest. But it doesn't happen in spite of all this and no lives are lost as a result.
Will somebody please tell the world's Islamic leaders and their leftist supporters in the western democracies and the pseudo-democracies of Latin America (like Brazil) and Russia et al that what is NOT needed is constraints on freedom in the west. What is so desperately needed (that I can barely convey it with words) is constraints on Islam's genocidal and homicidal tendencies!!!!!!!!
Hugh, that was a brilliant and devastating polemic.
Bravo.
So by the poster's logic, one should still exercise that right of free speech. But be sure you do not use it to offend anyone who, in taking offense, has a demonstrated propensity to...
Exactly. In other words, Islam is demanding special dispensation. Such are the demands of relgious supremacism.
Free speech ain't free when it comes to Islam. You're free to praise Mohammed, you're not free to critize him. Think of it as a new kind of freedom, invented in 722 AD. Abu and Asma found this out the hard way.
On the cover of the Weekly Standard issue of two weeks ago (the one with the classy characters outside the embassy in London) one poster mentions a "3/11" (..."your 3/11 is on its way" or some such)...if one is simply glancing over the cover the date can easily be missed. Are intelligence officials giving this the attention it deserves?
Alarmed Pig Farmer-
Islam is essentially comparing itself to a cage of wild beasts, and that anyone "criticizing" them is like a fool who covers himself in a cloak of pork chops and jumps over the fence.
"Well, what did you think would happen?" they say.
And we reply:
"But we thought you were human."
Honest mistake.
But not for long.
APF:
You forgot about the part that Muslim believers are free to slag competing monotheistic religions as false and the followers as vile, craven enemies of the true faith and claim their "prophets" as your own.
Otherwise, I agree with Hugh that printing the cartoons is not the same as shouting "Fire" in a crowded public place with the obvious intent of creating panic. I also do not see where concocting and disseminating falsities about a well and independently verified historic event with the intention to denegrate and villify an identifiable group of people as an exercise in free speech or thought. I disagree with Deborah Lipstadt that the appropriate way to deal with Holocaust deniers is in civil court because that requires someone to initiate an action other than the government, and in the case of countries such as Germany and Austria in particular, it is most appropriate to have good "anti-hate" laws on the books. And blasphemy laws are not good laws, such as the one that resulted in the conviction of a German man for printing whatever anti-Islam message on toilet paper is merely blasphemy, however tacky the approach.
Apparently there is still some question as to which groups are tolerant and which are not. Please, someone with an existing anti-Islamist site please post two giant links next to each other one that says
"Click here to view the cartoons"
and next to it
"Click here to view the response to the cartoons"
and below it
WHICH DO YOU THINK IS INTOLERANT
I also do not see where concocting and disseminating falsities about a well and independently verified historic event with the intention to denegrate and villify an identifiable group of people as an exercise in free speech or thought.
I do. Free speech is not a concept that lends itself to qualification. To be free, it may constrained only by other laws that sensibly may supersede a specific instance of speech that violates the superseding law.
PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH
And another thing. Having looked at the cartoons, they all seem to be historically accurate. Where is the falsity and denigration in historical accuracy?
This whole cartoon episode reminds us that the eternal enemies of Individual Freedom and Reason are individuals and groups with pretenses to Absolute Truth.
APF:
I was not talking about the Danish cartoons. I was talking about David Irving, convicted Holocaust denier and fraudulent historian, whose UK-launched libel suit against a bona fide historian, Deborah Lipstadt failed miserably -- in a legal jurisdiction where the onus rests very heavily on the defendant -- as the judge found that Irving had clearly distorted historic evidence to arrive at his denial-supporting findings.
Holding and spreading harmless opinions is one thing. Holding and spreading specious lies with the intent to incite hatred and violence is another. The J-P cartoons were not printed with that intent, but rather the intent to publicize the Islamic-inspired climate of intimidation that is shrouding so much of the media and academia these days.
I'd advise you not to quit pig farming for law.
Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.
Ronald Reagan
40th president of US (1911 - 2004)
I'd advise you not to quit pig farming for law.
You apparently have not been to a college campus, or a law school, in a while. Where is the felony case against Esposito? Maybe a committee of professors at Seton Hall School of Law are reviewing Esposito's case under contract to the 1st District.
"3. Did he act responsibly in deliberately extending the middle finger to Sunni Muslims in general, and not merely to those who attempted to intimidate him? Was his decision to do so any more tolerant than Islam itself? Absolutely not. "
The truth of the matter is that the "middle finger " has been given so many times to the non-Muslim world via the nasty editorial cartoons and the violent actions of the radical Islamofacists terrorists for years. The cartoons simply are a needed wakeup call to the Muslim world that the non-Muslim world has had about enough of the aggression being thrown at them.
The violence of the last few weeks simply confirms this very bad image of the " middle finger " coming from the Muslim community.
APF,
No other law supercedes free speech as enshrined in the 1st Amendment. There are some laws and torts (E.g., defamation) for which free speech is not an affirmative defense, but those laws do not supercede the right of free speech This is not a mere technicality. To supercede, the law would have to outright prohibit or ban the speech.
For example, one can not defend against having intentional made a deliberately false defamatory remark about an individual on free speech grounds, but the law of defamation does not ban the speech, it just says if you exercise free speech and it is false, there are legal consequences. This is the same reason with yelling fire.
(Pakistan) Suicide bombers ready to kill cartoonists, says imam
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/subcontinent/2006/February/subcontinent_February973.xml§ion=subcontinent&col=
An Islamic cleric who offered $1 million and a car for the death of cartoonists who drew caricatures of Mohammed said that suicide bombers had volunteered to "kill the blasphemers"
After #1 was asked and answered, everything else was irrelevant. Good fisk, Hugh.
""Respect for the opinions of others" has nothing to do with pluralism -- or rather, no one deserves respect just because they exist."
(from a poster above (just kidding:-)).
I might have to take issue with that statement. I think that yes, everyone deserves respect "just because they exist" but respect for their existence should never be confused with respect for their opinions. Because opinions are independent of existence. And therein lies the fallacy of leveling the charge of "racism" at those who oppose the ideology of Islam.
Where is that Cleric getting a million dollars to have the cartoonists killed?
Someone needs to freeze his bank account.
To supercede, the law would have to outright prohibit or ban the speech.
Lisa, I said instance of speech.
PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH
Anyway, with Cartoon Rage the scope of the argument has just changed. Now, the government has openly endorsed the notion of limiting free speech via self-censorship at government direction. Also, with the existence of unconstitional hate crime laws already on the books, the table is set to begin criminal prosecution of Infidels with big mouths. You know, people like me.
But the unconstitutional constraint on the 1st Amendment does not supersede my rights laid out in the 2nd Amendment.
It's what I said: all law and justice is ultimately derived from the business end of a gun. The only question is, which guns. The pompous anti-American George and Condi crowd are rooting for the government guns. Us rednecks out here are rooting for our guns.
A wee bit OT but would be interested if anyone has some percentage figures on how many muslims
support terrorism and those muslims who do not.
Throughout the entire muslim world.
We continue to see references to "holy warriors" by higher authorities in muslim countries....
carrying out the will of islam when bombings etc occur....even about the ones who hit the twin towers in NYC.
I don't see much from the muslim side opposing this stuff...you do see references to things like
"just carrying out the will of Islam" or "not all of us are bad" and on and on.
I realize firm percentages cannot be put together but perhaps an approximate.
I myself reckon it to be about 60-40 with 40 being the bad guys.
Here's some other details on the German man convicted for stamping toilet paper with "Koran, Holy Koran."
http://thomistic.blogspot.com/2006/02/german-speech-police-in-pay-of-mullahs.html
The government was acting at the behest of the Iranians, and admit they gave the man the sentence they did because of the comic riots.
The possibility of abuse of such a broad law (see post) is tremendous.
I've always opposed Germany's holocaust denial laws as well. Punish deeds not thoughts, and the publication of those thoughts, unless there is some extraordinary justification.
Policing historical opinions and attitudes towards "worldviews" seems particularly pernicious...
D. Ox
http://thomistic.blogspot.com
In my city I am organizing people to go on a march for freedom of the press. I've started a petition to be given to the major newspapers in my area which have decided not to publish these cartoons because they would be "offensive." The petition accuses the papers of not fulfulling their duty of defending freedom of the press and of speech--because of Muslim threats and violence, no editor can credibly pretend he or she is not AFRAID of a violent reaction and this is the driving reason behind not exercising the freedom of the press.
The freedom of speech should be something all Americans can rally behind. My friends and I will be talking to local veterans groups, churches, political organizations, etc.
When the Freedom of Speech rally comes up in March, we'll deliver the petition to our local newspapers. It would be great to see movements like this across the country. Now if only more than 3 people would participate...
From the Washington Post
A Failure of the Press
By William J. Bennett and Alan M. Dershowitz
Thursday, February 23, 2006; A19
There was a time when the press was the strongest guardian of free expression in this democracy. Stories and celebrations of intrepid and courageous reporters are many within the press corps. Cases such as New York Times v. Sullivan in the 1960s were litigated so that the press could report on and examine public officials with the unfettered reporting a free people deserved. In the 1970s the Pentagon Papers case reaffirmed the proposition that issues of public importance were fully protected by the First Amendment.
The mass media that backed the plaintiffs in these cases understood that not only did a free press have a right to report on critical issues and people of the day but that citizens had a right to know about those issues and people. The mass media understood another thing: They had more than a right; they had a duty to report.
We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree: Over the past few weeks, the press has betrayed not only its duties but its responsibilities. To our knowledge, only three print newspapers have followed their true calling: the Austin American-Statesman, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Sun. What have they done? They simply printed cartoons that were at the center of widespread turmoil among Muslims over depictions of the prophet Muhammad. These papers did their duty.
Since the war on terrorism began, the mainstream press has had no problem printing stories and pictures that challenged the administration and, in the view of some, compromised our war and peace efforts. The manifold images of abuse at Abu Ghraib come to mind -- images that struck at our effort to win support from Arab governments and peoples, and that pierced the heart of the Muslim world as well as the U.S. military.
The press has had no problem with breaking a story using classified information on detention centers for captured terrorists and suspects -- stories that could harm our allies. And it disclosed a surveillance program so highly classified that most members of Congress were unaware of it.
In its zeal to publish stories critical of our nation's efforts -- and clearly upsetting to enemies and allies alike -- the press has printed some articles that turned out to be inaccurate. The Guantanamo Bay flushing of the Koran comes to mind.
But for the past month, the Islamist street has been on an intifada over cartoons depicting Muhammad that were first published months ago in a Danish newspaper. Protests in London -- never mind Jordan, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Iran and other countries not noted for their commitment to democratic principles -- included signs that read, "Behead those who insult Islam." The mainstream U.S. media have covered this worldwide uprising; it is, after all, a glimpse into the sentiments of our enemy and its allies. And yet it has refused, with but a few exceptions, to show the cartoons that purportedly caused all the outrage.
The Boston Globe, speaking for many other outlets, editorialized: "[N]ewspapers ought to refrain from publishing offensive caricatures of Mohammed in the name of the ultimate Enlightenment value: tolerance."
But as for caricatures depicting Jews in the most medievally horrific stereotypes, or Christians as fanatics on any given issue, the mainstream press seems to hold no such value. And in the matter of disclosing classified information in wartime, the press competes for the scoop when it believes the public interest warrants it.
What has happened? To put it simply, radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons. The mainstream press has capitulated to the Islamists -- their threats more than their sensibilities. One did not see Catholics claiming the right to mayhem in the wake of the republished depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in cow dung, any more than one saw a rejuvenated Jewish Defense League take to the street or blow up an office when Ariel Sharon was depicted as Hitler or when the Israeli army was depicted as murdering the baby Jesus.
So far as we can tell, a new, twin policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: (a) If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature, and (b) if the group is pandered to by the mainstream media, the media then will go through elaborate contortions and defenses to justify its abdication of duty. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims.
While we may disagree among ourselves about whether and when the public interest justifies the disclosure of classified wartime information, our general agreement and understanding of the First Amendment and a free press is informed by the fact -- not opinion but fact -- that without broad freedom, without responsibility for the right to know carried out by courageous writers, editors, political cartoonists and publishers, our democracy would be weaker, if not nonexistent. There should be no group or mob veto of a story that is in the public interest.
When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press -- an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms -- would be among the first to surrender.
"[N]ewspapers ought to refrain from publishing offensive caricatures of Mohammed in the name of the ultimate Enlightenment value: tolerance."
-- from a posting above, quoting a Boston Globe editorial
No, "tolerance" as defined by The Boston Globe is not the "ultimate Englightenment value," and neither Spinoza, nor those who followed him, right up to the French Encyclopedistes, would have called "tolerance" the most important Englightenment value.
See, for example, Voltaire - remember him? Remember that he had something to do with the Enlightenment, Les Lumieres? -- and his play "Mahomet." Not exactly tolerant of Islam or Mohammed. And when an attempt to put that very play on was made in Switzerland a year or two ago, Muslim threats caused it to be cancelled.
The Boston Globe editorialist needs to learn a little more about the Enlightenment, and also about the meaning of words. "Tolerance" of a belief-system that is close to Fascism (see the essay by Ibn Warraq employing the fourteen criteria defining Fascism offered by Umberto Eco), that supplies a Complete Explanation of the Universe and a Total Regulation of Life, is not what the Enlightenment, or the development of the Rights of Man, the Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which have helped enshrine in Western law and Western attitudes the concept of "tolerance" rightly understood, would never have accepted the definition offered by the Boston Globe, which stands everything on its head.
To the Boston Globe editorial writer(s), "tolerance" is the supreme Enlightenment virtue. No it isn't. It is the supreme virtue of this latter-day unsaintly age, of the editorial writers, and all the people they know, who think just the way they think, and cannot comprehend what all the fuss is about. Why offend people? Why make them mad? That's not right. That's not what "pluralism" is all about. They have no idea that in Islam, pluralism has no place. They have no idea that for Muslims, the only distinction that matters is between Believer and Infidel. They have no idea that "Islam is to dominate and is not to be dominated."
It's not terrible to be ignorant of Islam. But it is terrible to preach all sorts of things, to instruct your readers in what they must do and think about Islam and its demands, without learning about Islam. What prevents the editors of The Boston Globe from clicking on the websites that will give them, in an instant, the entire Qur'an in four or five English translations presented synoptically (other things, such as the doctrine of "naskh" or abrogation, they will have to find out about themselves), and reading and reading and reading. And they can do the same with the Hadith collected and ranked according to authenticity by the most authoritative muhaddithin, al-Bukhari and Muslim. And they can read all about what Muhammad did -- not in Western biogrpahies, but in ones written by Muslims, and who see nothing wrong with the stories of Asma bint Marwan and Abu Akaf, of the deceit of Al-Hudaibiyya, of the Banu Qurayza decaptitations, the attack on the Khaybar Oasis, the legiitimacy given to child-marriages because of Muhammad's marrriage to nine-year-old Aisha, and to slavery, because unlike the American Cosntitution, there is no revising the Qur'an or the Sunnah (i.e. the contents of Hadith and Sira from which the Sunnah can be derived).
Don't they owe it to their readers to do just a little studying?
And while they are at it, Die Aufklarung, Les Lumieres, the Englightenment, from Spinoza on (see Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750),
would lead them to realize that "tolerance" is not the supreme value of the Englightenment. The supreme value of the Englihtenment was in throwing off the mental shackles from religious authorities, that prevented or at least discouraged free and skeptical inquiry, and the most important weapons for undoing these shackles and conducting such free and skeptical inquiry were two: free thought, and free speech to express that thought.
The editorialists at The Boston Globe need, just like all those witnesses at Watergate, to refresh their recollections. Say, what was that Western Civ all about? And what about that Enlightenment, huh?
This kind of ignorance is no longer tolerable. And it won't be tolerated. Readers will simply go elsewhere. They will go to the Internet. They can question authority. They can tell the difference between those in brief authority -- because they are called "editors" at some newspaper -- and those who, for quite other reasons, may lay claim to offer a different kind of authority, and those claims, based not on a mere title ("Editor at the Boston Globe") but on repeated evidence of relevant and detailed knowledge, and a record of making sense of things that turned out to be accurate and helpful, may find many more people now willing to accept them, and receptive to those whose writings can easily be re-read and checked, both for accuracy, and for having, in retrospect, made sense -- sometimes perfect sense.
Hugh,
Yes, you are quite right: the Degree speech is about the collapse of hierarchy, and what hierarchy is more fundamental than ontological hierarchy?
Most of us in the West, even those of us who are dismayed at the level of intellectual discourse among intellectuals, probably wouldn't buy the notion that the end of royalty and primogeniture and the advent of democracy are the downfall of civilization. (The witlessness of entrenched aristocracies is rarely surpassed.)
But in the Elizabethan world, social hierarchy was seen as a natural part of the formal organization of nature (as revealed in Will's juxtapostion of the celestial and social mutinies). Thus, while Shakespeare might have been wrong about a particular, I think the general conclusion is inexorable: that when we stop believing in formal (Aristotelian sense) and categorical distinctions between acts, agents, and objects, we end up in the ugliest of worlds: the one in which shouting, and sloganeering, and brutality win the day.
So I shouldn't cite the collapse of "philosophical rigor," but rather, the abandonment of the entire project of a moral philosophy based on the notion that order and intelligibility are inherent in the world (rather than a wishful imposition).
(Certainly, Princeton's Peter Singer is philosophicaly rigorous--more so than most of his like-minded but more moderate contemporaries--such that he quite accurately and adeptly traces the wide and open moral pathway that leads out of the stormed Bastille of Natural Law right down to the threshold of the death camp. He dasn't go on into that dark place himself, but he puts up every marker and sign post, short of "Arbeit Macht Frei," such that any idiot should know that Singer has (unwittingly) done something far more important than merely to frame a cogent, if depraved, argument: he has lit the warning lights.)
Unfortunately, modernity's view of social hierarchy was similar to Shakespeare's in this respect: it, too, believed that all hierarchies stood on the same foundation; but, unlike Shakespeare, they took this to mean that all might equally be discarded.
And in that constellation of ruined gods--the kings, the first-born sons, the generals in the field--none falls harder than one God, who authored being itself, and imbued it with the order and intelligibility that are an implicit presumption of our every act, aspiration and communique. A fallen general may presage a lost battle, a fallen son may destroy a family, a fallen king may bring down a nation, but when God dies the whole civilization is at risk. "Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength." Our disorder and weakness is not, as theirs was, a failure of arms and governance, but a psychic weakness. It afflicts not one nation--not Poland, or the sudetenland--but the entire civilization, and it is a weakness of such severity that money and good governance and weaponry cannot, on their own, save us.
It seems that Fallaci, the Catholic atheist, had this precise epiphany: a moment in which she recognized, not the birth of a God, but a world which is dying, and sure to die, without him.
The rumors of God's death have been greatly exaggerated.
The modern secular West, and particularly the body politic of America, demonstrates the resiliency of the tensional presence of the divine Beyond: when sociopolitico-legal institutions are framed in attunement to the Unseen Measure, their fabric can weather the astounding cultural and material changes the last two centuries have taken us through, not without wear and tear, but still more or less suited to the divine plan in its mystery.
Civilization is far less imperilled by an uncertainty about God than it is by a blood-dripping certitude: and that's that choice the world faces now: take America's hand into the ambiguous, human, imperfect, wondrous future; or take Islam's hand into the absolute truth of hell on earth.
Interested--a bippy is an unspecified part of one's anatomy, but usually designates your backside as in bend over and kiss your bippy goodbye.
Dr. Pepper:
America's constitutional genius lies in its recognition that there are higher demands than those of the state. Further, the problem with Islam is not that it is theistic, but that it is based on false prophecy; and this is the burden of the commandment that we must not take God's name in vain.
ibrahim224~
we covered polls on this site before using these sites, or go to the archives of JW/DW
http://www.yougov.com/
http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?...
http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?PageID=814
Well said Dr. Pepper
I like the idea of the imperfect yet nontheless moving civilization towards a wondrous future. It has been a long climb up from primeval slime.
It is often said the "the death of God" is the sentiment of most Neitzsche influenced Europeans. The infamous, wildly blow out of proportion line found in Thus Spoke Zarathrusta: A Book for All and None, goes something like this:
"The devil whispered something into my ear: He told me that God is dead. God died because of his compassion for man."
Without getting into a huge post here, and by no means being an authority on the subject, let me just say the man had some issues with the one and only God. He tells us to slay the dragon that says "thou shalt" and lambasts the statement "thou shall have no other Gods before me" as a godless utterance.
It was a solid intellectual critique, and with many people not understanding the evolution of God throughout time, it is not suprising this statement keeps some away from Fred.
I always wondered what a man who was so critical of Christian ideas of God would think if Islam.
Pepper,
No doubt that a wide variance of belief regarding the Deity (or lack thereof) is no impediment to a successful civil society. As you suggest, it's almost certainly an asset.
The problem that confronts the west isn't the end of Theism per se, but the end of general belief in a philosophical framework that both implies a God and--for the theist--reflects that God's design intent. The point that a certain school of german philosophy came to was that, having let go of God, we at least need to pretend that he exists: there is no way for rationality to survive without at least the pretense. (In simple form: try justifying your, or anyone's, notion of good, evil, truth, justice, etc without recourse to an original design intent in the world. Or, more to the point, why would you ever try to convince anyone of anything if there is no fundamental intelligibility built into the world. And how does intelligibility arise without an intelligence?)
So when confronted with so many fallacies (collateral damage equals terrorism, verbal insult equals physical violence, intolerance of intolerance is the same as the original intolerance) the citizenry is ill-equipped to distinguish. Sure, it is valuable to concede that everyone should freely espouse their own worldview: but it is a short step from there--one aided and abetted by the general laziness of mankind--to an utter flaccidity of the brain, a surrender to the sort of reletavism that says, "We can't really know who is right about this or any issue, so why defend our own point of view or actions? Others seem to think these acts are very offensive, so they must be, in some sense, very offensive."
This mental torpor is a greater threat than Mohammad's sword. We've dealt with swords before.
Hugh...bravo...I was going to write that yesterday but got distracted.
Kepha...Islam and taking 'Gods' name in vain.
While humans insist on naming God, the word God itself is not a name, it is a title. When Moses asked God his name, the burning bush replied...I AM THAT I AM...That is not a name, it is a discription, it means 'existence is existence'. 'Tell them 'I AM' sent you, is also not a name. God was clearly evading the name issue. YHVH has been refered to as Gods name, and it may be for many, but to the ancients who knew how to pronounce it properly, it was also a magical formula, that by it's very utterance, could cause change. So actually God has no name. This is because, 'God' is not a 'thing'. Only things have names...'things' are created by God, but they are not God.
Allah is a name...Allah represents duality...AL-Lah...'The God'. 'Two' words to represent 'one' idea. Allah is a thing, a duality. Duality only happens in matter and that just happens to be where all the evil occurs. So Allah is actually, The Lord Of Matter...or evil.
Just looking at his edicts and the behavior of his submitters should confirm that.
So while it is possible, by intent, to take Gods name in vain, this has no effect on God whatsoever. God does not need us for his existence, but we do need him for ours.
Finally, for the above reasons, Allahu Akbar, is closer to 'Hail Satan', than it is to 'God is Great'...have a good day...
I'd advise you not to quit pig farming for law. (posted by me, WD52, earlier)
APF's response:
You apparently have not been to a college campus, or a law school, in a while. Where is the felony case against Esposito? Maybe a committee of professors at Seton Hall School of Law are reviewing Esposito's case under contract to the 1st District.
Posted by: Alarmed Pig Farmer at February 23, 2006 04:20 PM
I reiterate my career advice to you. It's been about 12 years since I last visited hallowed Osgoode Hall at York University (Toronto, Canada), but I am quite aware of the vile state of academia. What felony are you alleging Esposito to have committed? In pretending to be an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, you might say that he's making a fraudulent misrepresentation, but that's a matter for the civil courts, not criminal courts and likewise any violations of his employment contract.
I hear via Solomonia and Martin Kramer's site that Juan Cole is searching for a libel lawyer, possibly because of Horowitz's 101 Worst Professors, but it's probably not a good idea. Kramer posits that even if the defamation was proven (i.e. that what was published was untrue, Horowitz knew it to be untrue and did it with the intent to harm) as a tenured prof he'd have a hard time establishing harm to his professional reputation. More likely, Cole would expose himself to being proven a blantantly biased teacher, with poor scholarship, if not outright fakery per David Irving suing Deborah Liptstadt and losing, very, very badly.
Kepha:
Although I have no problem with your statement that "the problem with Islam is that it is based on false prophecy" per se, this actually is NOT what makes Islam so INHERENTLY CRUEL AND VICIOUS AND INIMICAL TO LIFE ITSELF. False prophets have come and gone. But false prophets do not generally create the hell on earth that is so representative of Islam. I would argue very little besides Islam has ever created such terrible suffering among human beings.
Few will dispute that Islam is Hell on earth. That it is so, is not due so much to the falseness of its 'prophecies' (although they ARE without doubt false) but rather due to the fact that Islam has placed its ideological commands on a higher plane than life (and individuality) itself. Islam has taken this act of philosophical absurdity one step further: it has created a class of political (or 'theological'--here the terminology hardly matters since as we all can see Islam has replaced politics with theology or 'religion'...choose your term) rulers ("clerics") who have been accorded unchallenged authority to degrade all human lives they preside over in accordance with (and allegedly to "protect")Islamic doctrinal principles. Thus we see beheadings for homosexual acts in Saudi Arabia, Iranian and Nigerian women stoned and/or flogged for alleged sexual indiscretions, schoolchildren in Indonesia beheaded on their way to school being "caught" non-Muslim, women disemboweled for removing their burkas in Algerian sultanates, women in Afghanistan being clobbered by clerics with lead pipes for laughing aloud in public, skyscrapers blown up in New York City with commercial jetliners to cheering Muslim multitudes throughout the Islamic nations (to them this is GREAT STUFF!). And you will notice that Islam has nothing in it to replace the value of human life that it has taken away. In Islam, the value of life is unceremoniously and permanently removed from view. The suffering that human beings must endure due to its insanities never enters the picture.
We can plainly see therefore that human life (and suffering) in essence counts for nothing in Islamic doctrine. Since people are in essence LIVING BEINGS, Islam can be clearly seen as the enemy of human life itself. Living under Islam could thus be nothing else but the darkest of hells. And this is by its very design. Not mere falseness.
I can take a guess why some think Rose "has blood on his hands". They see this whole cartoon-rage issue as Rose "teasing the wolverine". And he got bit. And so did other innocent people and animals who happened to cross the mad wolverine's path. Hence, Rose-the-teaser is responsible for it all.
And Rose would be, if he were actually teasing wild animals.
But he wasn't.
Unless, of course, you think violent Muslims ARE wild animals.
Actually, those who demand violent Muslims take responsibility for their actions are the ones who don't think violent Muslims are wild animals. They actually believe violent Muslims have some ability hiding somewhere inside them to act more rationally.
And therein lies a quandary for those who think "Rose-has-blood-on-his-hands". They unwittingly suggest violent Muslims have no capacity to react any other way to an affront drawn on a piece of paper. They unknowingly, yet condescendingly equate violent Muslims with wild animals, completely incapable of any self-control or dignified reaction when provoked with an insult (not "threat", mind you). Now, if THAT ain't an insult, I don't what is.
If any Americans were to even think of reacting to the burning of the U.S. flag in the same way violent Muslims reacted to the cartoons, you can bet your sweet bippy their American "Rose-has-bloody-hands" counterparts would be thinking, "C'mon, we're better than that!"
"Better"? Than what? Wild animals, perhaps?
Furthermore, this thinking suggests that somehow Rose has the power to control the behavior of said "wild animals" by teasing/not-teasing, appeasing/not-appeasing, apologizing/not-apologizing, etc. After all, we don't expect wild animals to respond rationally, intelligently, or polemically to what is basically a non-threat to their lives. But doing the same with violent Muslims actually perpetuates a superiority complex (or dare I say, "colonial mentality") towards them....that somehow, these "poor, violent non-whites" can't control or do anything for themselves unless the "evil whites" just stop what they're doing, feed them, or simply leave them alone.
Like we're taught to do with wild animals.
speech is about the collapse of hierarchy, and what hierarchy is more fundamental than ontological hierarchy?
I don't follow. Could you clarify on this, mountainecho? What hierarchy? Collapsed in what way?
PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH PBUH
Waterdragon, I took your advice and am selling the pig farm and going off to law school. There are millions to be made in this exciting new practice area of hate speech. Although by nature I'd like to be a persecutor, the money these days is in the Moslem so I plan to specialize in civil defense of the criminal persuasion. Make sense?
I wish you well APF. Can you start your legal career by persuading rational people that the charge of "insulting Islam" is an ontological impossibility? Because Islam cannot FACTUALLY be insulted? To prove your case you might start by calling to the stand, the witness going by the name "Islam", in order to testify that "It" has been offended or insulted.
Just start there and then proceed to contemplate all the other most absurd legal issues confronting the west in the wake of the Islamic invasion.
The west is in dire need of non-PC lawyers BIG-TIME. I've read that lots of college students read this site. I hope so. There's nothing like the passion of youth, especially when it's harnessed towards fighting for the truth.
And in the case of "The West" vs "Muhammad" and the latter's legacy of violence and lies and sexual perversion, and well frankly EVIL (if the term is to have any meaning whatsoever), there's simply no comparison between the ideology of the west, as passed down to us from western philosophy vs Islam. There’s simply no comparison..
Oh sure for NOW there's still a fair amount of folks who are still confused about who precisely are the "good guys" and who are the "bad guys". The rest of us westerners have to patiently wait for the PC brainwashed among us to come around. It's a frustrating wait, no doubt about it, but it will happen. I’m sure of that. In the meantime, the west seriously needs some young lawyers on hand in training, ready to do battle, in order to fight the “good fight”, a fight that is definitely coming within the next decade, against the claims of Islamic theocracy.
Just beause all snakes are not poisonous does not mean I want any around. Islam is hate and murder.
Evil is as evil does and islam is such horrendous evil that the world will have to turn mecca and the stupid rock into glass to have peace in the world. 168 conflicts, 164 of them involve islam.
Vulcan: "168 conflicts, 164 of them involve islam."
I don't doubt that. I've heard figures of 25 out of 28 worldwide conflicts or even 95% of worldwide conflicts. One only has to pick up the newspaper everyday to appreciate the incontrovertible fact that Muslims are in fact waging a global jihad. And only a hardened cynic wouldn't question what the world would look like today if Islam was dead and gone. It's pretty darned obvious that BUT for Islam, the world would largely be at peace.
But just out of curiosity, do you know which 4 conflicts do NOT involve Islam?
APF,
It used to be that educated people rarely disagreed about things like: human life is a thing that is categorically better and more valuable than any other life form or object; or, an accidental killing is a completely different category of act from an intentional killing; or, insulting someone verbally is a different category of act from causing them physical harm.
The presumption in all of these notions is that the world has in its very nature a kind of hierarchy: some things and some acts are better or worse than others. Also, there is a presumption that, while we may disagree about some of the details, the answer is there to be found, reasoned to. So in any dispute, the question is who has reasoned better, researched better, articulated more accurately, not who has shouted louder, cried harder, or brought more friends to the debate.
But more recently, a lot of educated people question these notions, suggesting instead that, for instance, all of these distinctions are things that we have imposed, for our own purposes, on an essentially meaningless reality. Thus, a pig and a pig farmer are no different--just a collection of atoms, or, to quote A Thin Red Line, "just meat."
Once you come to the conclusion that it's just meat, well, then it's just a matter of which lame bailing wire you're going to wrap around civilization. There have been a variety of candidates, but my initial point was that the favorite today is a complete abdication of the whole duty of finding a rationale for one's behaviors and beliefs. That is: no one really thinks at all. Why bother? There is no real answer out there. Instead, they merely react to the imagery before them. So they are swayed this way and that by crowds and enthusiasms and slogans.
Their most fundamental "belief" I would sum up this way: if two things look the same on television, they are the same. NO further investigation, syllogism or effort is required. There is no hierarchy of deeds or objects.
The "cartoons" were and are not an issue of free speech. It is a clash of civilizations and I use that term losely when referring to Islam.
Free speech is constantly modified by what is considered "socially acceptable" One cannot not use terms or theories in a socially acceptable way anymore with many different "groups" that was common 30 years ago. No need to elaborate as you know what they are.
The "cartoons' were an accurate depiction of how the West sees Islam based on their behavior.
The Muslims want us to respect Islam but that will never happen as long as you have 9/11, the beheadings, the fatwas, the repression in the Middle East, etc, etc.
Northern Ireland. Congo conflict. Basque Separatists. Ditto, but no violence, in Catalonia. Campaign by Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Local uprisings (Nagaland, Assam) in India, by various non-Muslims. Marxisant rebels in Nepal against Hindu government. Lord's Army in northern Uganda. These, with some disqualified according to the criteria imposed, and others perhaps added in their place, should add up at least to four. But who's counting?
Can anyone document the following stats for me please? I don't want to repeat anything that is questionable in the least...
" "168 conflicts, 164 of them involve islam."
I don't doubt that. I've heard figures of 25 out of 28 worldwide conflicts or even 95% of worldwide conflicts. "
thanks
carpe-aeternum -
I spent some time this morning googling "Armed Conflicts" and came across a number of sites attempting to list ongoing armed conflicts in the world today (some sites have neat interactive map features). I found the following site to be the most useful in terms of breaking down varieties of armed conflicts into categories (even though this was apparently last updated in 2003):
http://members.aol.com/CSPmgm/current.htm
But this list (from the same site but last updated in 2006) appears to be the most comprehensive since it starts in 1946 and it differentiates between currently ongoing (in red), diminishing (in orange), and officially ended but at high risk of re-erupting (in yellow). I leave it to someone else to count up how many of these involve Muslims:
http://members.aol.com/CSPmgm/warlist.htm
yadayada wrote: "They [who blame Flemming Rose and not the violent Muslim protestors] unknowingly, yet condescendingly equate violent Muslims with wild animals"
This actually is a broader tendency among anti-Western Leftists: when they regard Third World violence in general (and not all of it is Muslim-caused) in Africa, in Asia, etc., they do not hold the Third World peoples involved accountable and responsible for the horrible violence that goes on: anti-Western Leftists see Third World peoples through a crypto-racist framework (structured in great part by their anti-Western self-hatred), because they implicitly don't expect them to stop behaving like animals and savages: if they did expect them to stop, Leftists would be far more outraged and intolerant of such behavior that goes on daily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, etc. among non-Muslims and Muslims alike.
"I leave it to someone else to count up how many of these involve Muslims:" From my own post above.
But I decided to give it a try myself (which required a bit of googling about to find out what some of these conflicts are about).
Counting the red (active) and orange (active but slowing) conflicts only, there are 24 "active armed conflicts" listed at this link. But Pakistan is listed twice and India is listed 3 times, so I am listing Pakistan only once (since both conflicts are intra-Muslim) while I am listing India twice - once in the non-Muslim group and once in the Muslim group, which reduces the total number of conflicts to 22.
By this count there are 8 active conflicts that do not involve Muslims:
1. Burma (Myanmar)
2. Angola (Cabinda separatists)
3. Columbia
4. Uganda (Lord's resistance Army)
5. Nepal
6. Zaire
7. Haiti
8. India – (Maoist insurgency, Assam separatists)
and 14 that do
1. India - Kashmir
2. Nigeria
3. Russia - Chechnya
4. Afghanistan
5. Pakistan (intra-Muslim – listed separately in the chart as Pashtuns and also as Shia vs. Sunni)
6. Iraq
7. Saudi Arabia - vs Islamic militants (but if they include SA, they ought to also include other countries which have been the target of jihadist violence, which would bring Spain and Britain and Egypt into the count, although perhaps not the US, since that would be covered by our engagement in Afghanistan)
8. Sudan
9. Thailand
10. Turkey (Kurds)
11. Israeli/Palestinians
12. Phillipines
13. Somalia
14. Ivory Coast ?
Other sites that have attempted to track this and have different lists are here:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/index.html
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0873849.html
http://www.historyguy.com/new_and_recent_conflicts.html
Michael Savage lists 14 conflicts involving Muslims, including Kosovo, which is not included at the site I selected -
http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/14muslimconflicts.html
I also came across one site which used to track these figures but has stopped because of the transnational, assymetrical nature of terrorism.
But in any case, my conclusion is that it would be inaccurate to posit that Muslims are currently involved in 164 out of 168 conflicts worldwide or even 25 out of 28. I think a better estimate is approximately 64%, which is still quite a statistic considering that Muslims make up about 1/6 of the world's population. Neither would a statistic of 64% make it inaccurate to claim the following:
Despite representing only 1/6 of the world's population, Muslims are currently involved in a majority of the world's active armed conflicts.
P.S. It would certainly seem that Indonesia ought to be added to the Muslim list. But by the same token, examining some of the other lists I linked to - it would seem reasonable to add other conflicts to the non-Muslim list. I suppose it partly depends on one's definition of "active".
OK. That's it for me. Done my homework for the day:-)
The free speech problem has gotten almost all of the attention in the cartoons affair. What is almost always overlooked is that Muslims assign collective blame [and are allowed to do so]. That is, they blame all Danes for one newspaper and twelve cartoonists [besides the cartoons being rather mild]. Then, in Nigeria, the Muslim fanatics went after local Christians who had nothing to do with publishing the cartoons. This behavior too is outrageous and needs to get as much attention as the free speech issue. Collectively blaming and collectively punishing is of course justified by the Islamic teaching that "kulli kufar millatun wahidun" [all unbelievers are one nation]. If we were not so determined to politically correct, we might suggest that this Muslim attitude has something of imperialism or colonialism about it. That is, all of the subject group or people are blamed for the actions of a few or of an individual.
Another problem that has been treated but not enough, is that of Western political leaders, Geo Bush Junior in particular has called for "responsible" conduct by the Europeans over the cartoon riots. This means kowtowing to the Muslims' unacceptable behavior and ways of thinking.
Le Canard Enchaine had a fairly good opinion piece on the cartoon riots, which I endeavored to translate, in a rush and perhaps not in as soignee a fashion as I might have liked.
http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/2006/02/chained-duck-le-canard-enchaine-on.html
as to David Irving, he was the one who was trying to shut Deborah Lipstadt up. He initiated a libel suit against her, not the other way around.
So great to read the comments. And so disheartening.
The problem (and ultimately the reason for the downfall of Western civilization) is not islam.
It is our own insistence that islam is just another religion, which is to be granted all the priviliges that we associate with our concept of "religion".
The islamic threat could be dealt with, if we (our governments, our intellectuals) were willing to address the problem. But apart from a few isolated oasis in the intellectual desert, like this site, this does not happen.
So, while the West is endless cackling and arguing among itself, the onslaught be a united and single-minded islamic force continues.
Star Trek fans will recognize this. It is the Borg, and we are being assimilated. I did not ask to live in this episode, but is happening. All I can say is that I am glad that I am 51 and won`t live through final stage. My heart goes out for my children, though. It is a shame.