Jihadin wrote:
Just reminded me to change my Avatar

 cincydooley wrote:

What's really being said is: "I may disagree with what you say, and I'll defend your right to say it, but I still think you're an donkey-cave."

 d-usa wrote:
I have the right to be offended at how this thread manages to become dumber by the page.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
"I promise your honor, I didn't mean to offend any Muslims with my Muhammad drawings" *bats Bugs Bunny eye lashes*


Yeah fething right.

"Fear is part of it.”

That’s how the Boston Phoenix explained its decision, back in 2006, not to run the Muhammad cartoons that had appeared the previous year in the Dutch newspaper Jyllands-Posten, only to spark riots months later — cartoonists in hiding with bounties on their heads, mercenaries throwing grenades at Dutch embassies and 200 deaths.

That violence came months after the cartoons had run, to little notice. Danish clerics then went to Gulf States with far more offensive counterfeit cartoons (for instance, of a dog mounting the prophet) to raise funds to foment “spontaneous” violent protests.

I was editor of the alt-weekly New York Press then, and we’d assembled a package with new reporting about that fundraising tour and several of the cartoons. As a weekly, we figured every other paper in America would have run the images by the time we went to print. After all, how could you report on worldwide violence inspired by drawings without showing those drawings?

But it turned out the Phoenix wasn’t alone in its fear . Almost no American outlets printed the fairly banal images, easily found online. Nothing at all happened to the handful of places that did print them, but the fear was contagious.

Violence worked, self-censorship held and, insult to injury, almost every outlet hemmed and hawed about sensitivity and such, rather than admit their fear.

At literally the eleventh hour, New York Press’ owner ordered us to pull the images, and news networks — which had booked me and my colleagues Tim Marchman, Jonathan Leaf and Azi Paybarah to explain why we were running the cartoons — had us on instead to explain why we’d all quit in response. Not one of those programs showed the images they had us on to discuss.

We wrote then: “As intended, a gullible Western press again portrayed Muslims as mindless savages to be feared and placated.”

Here we are again.

This time, the cartoons are more amateurish, and in line with that portrayal of Islam. The provocateur isn’t a journalist, but semi-pro Islamophobe Pamela Geller, who hosted a “draw Muhammad” event Monday in Texas, where she, cartoonists and other attendees were met by two surprise guests, in body armor and with automatic weapons. Thankfully, the pair was cut down by one of the many security guards the venue required Geller to provide.

Now ISIS, which claimed credit for that botched attack, has apparently put a bounty on Geller, and anyone willing to be near her.

She is an obsessed and all-but-willing martyr, caught up in the same hallucination of some apocalyptic war between Islam and the West as her would-be murderers.

But the assassin’s veto, as historian Timothy Garton Ash termed “the use of violence to impose your taboos,” is pointed at her neck. The nastiness of her words, about "the savages” trying to impose Sharia law here, is no longer the issue.

The threat to Geller’s life for speaking is.

Yet many among the literati, who typically fancy themselves truth tellers and idol smashers, spent the last week competing to disdain the obvious and explain why the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists weren’t worthy recipients of an award from a group dedicated to “defend(ing) writers endangered because of their work.”

One such useful idiot — who admits he’s never even read Hebdo — wrote “it seemed to me that ‘Je suis Charlie’ was a way for (Americans) to re-pledge their commitment to the War on Terror.”

That slogan, of course, was a Rorschach test, and the writer found in it justification for the position he’d already taken — one that’s a given at many of the right cocktail parties, and a lot easier than admitting fear.

I suspect the Hebdo gang would’ve found a laugh in a black-tie affair with the lit world’s name brands (minus those who skipped the dinner in protest) fundraising off of martyred cartoonists who’d eked out livings taking the piss out of the powerful and the sacred.

“We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends,” said Hebdo cartoonist Bernard "Willem" Holtrop, after millions rallied in solidarity after the attack he survived only because he hated meetings. “A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn’t know what it was. Now it’s the opposite.”

Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the 2006 Danish cartoons with little idea what he was getting into, and who a decade later still needs an armed guard (he and three colleagues are on an Al Qaeda-published hit list that also included Hebdo staffers), having survived several attempts on his life, explained why his paper didn’t run the French cartoons after those cartoonists were slaughtered: “Violence works. And sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen.”

He elaborated: “We caved in to intimidation. And I don’t think that we will get less intimidation because of that. Because we are telling the extremists that it works.”

Someone is always threatening someone else. Eventually, we all die. The question is what — other than fear — guides us until then.

Relapse wrote:
In other news, some kids and their teacher in Egypt got slammed into the pokie and are looking at some serious time for a 32 second video mocking ISIS.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/05/08/egyptian-youth-face-trial-for-insulting-islam-by-making-fun-isis/?intcmp=latestnews

 d-usa wrote:
Or we can add them to a list where mocking religion is against the law, even if that religion is mocked while making fun of ISIS.

But hey, facts are for pansies.

Relapse wrote:
I wonder how much the laws in the Middle East are more related to tribalism than religion. Anyone here a scholar along those lines?

 d-usa wrote:
Or we can add them to a list where mocking religion is against the law, even if that religion is mocked while making fun of ISIS.

But hey, facts are for pansies.

 cincydooley wrote:
I have to admit...I don't understand why this conference exists other than to be demeaning and hateful.....

Someone help me out here...

 Lone Cat wrote:
Does this conference considered as Hate Speech?

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:

 Lone Cat wrote:
Does this conference considered as Hate Speech?

No it does not.

There are reports starting to claim that the FBI were aware that the attackers were intending to travel to this event, that the information was passed on the LEOs, but the police on the ground were not briefed.

Relapse wrote:
I wonder how much the laws in the Middle East are more related to tribalism than religion.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

Relapse wrote:
I wonder how much the laws in the Middle East are more related to tribalism than religion.

I do not even!
Seriously, I have no idea what you mean. Tribalism? I guess maybe they still have “tribes” in the Arabian peninsula. But, to speak about the only country from the Middle East that I kind of know, never heard of “tribes” in Iran.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:
So the US and the UK are from the same tribe ^^?

 Jihadin wrote:
Three hours prior I believe.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
"Free speech" doesn't even begin to reason out why that information was withheld from their security. I hope all you people defending these pieces of gak are feeling a bit squirmy as to the trash you're defending.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
My point was that the other side has been using "free speech" to stand up for the people who put on this conference. I wanted them to try to justify their point now as to defending this scum.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
You are indeed missing my point. They have free speech. But they never made any attempt to alert the security about the information from the FBI that a terrorist group was indeed on their way to attack. They withheld information that did cause an injury. So all the people rallying around "free speech" should be feeling pretty ashamed for backing a group that quite frankly didn't give a crap about the people they were hiring to protect them. If they did, they would have warned the security. So regardless of whether or not you feel they had a right to be jerks (I agree they had the right), but they were PoS's for not alerting security.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
You are indeed missing my point. They have free speech. But they never made any attempt to alert the security about the information from the FBI that a terrorist group was indeed on their way to attack. They withheld information that did cause an injury. So all the people rallying around "free speech" should be feeling pretty ashamed for backing a group that quite frankly didn't give a crap about the people they were hiring to protect them. If they did, they would have warned the security. So regardless of whether or not you feel they had a right to be jerks (I agree they had the right), but they were PoS's for not alerting security.