"Innocence of Muslims" film

You know nothing about freedom, let alone other countries. Have you ever even been to a country with a muslim majority? I have.

You are the one who refuses to have an 'open mind'. For instance, despite all the anti-semitism, did you know that jews can go to a synagogue unhindered in Teheran? That same thing can't be said about the Ukraine or Russia, for instance.

You talk of our 'values' being superior, but what are 'our values'? When you look at an Islamic country, you see bearded mullahs opressing women. You don't see the massive amounts of charity in Islamic culture. It is *exactly* the same thing as muslims looking at America, and only seeing greedy corporations/banks robbing the people and pursuing profit regardless of morality, but not seeing individual freedom, except when it is abused to insult muslims.

This film is a deliberate attempt to provoke attacks against western targets, and you have fallen victim to its maker, because you are now thinking what he wants you to think.

Those poor defenseless islamic women really need us strong, virile, western men to liberate them from their lecherous Arab husbands, obviously.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/20/world/meast/iran-hijab-fisticuffs/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Would I be right Thomas in thinking you are an absolute cultural relativist in that you don't believe any culture has the abilty or perhaps the right to judge another because we/they are so indoctrinated with our respective values that an objective judgment is impossible? If so, let me ask you an intriguing question Allan Bloom raised in his otherwise odious book The Closing of the American Mind (Levine's The Opening of the American Mind is much better) --"If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives [continue] under your governance [to] burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?" Please don't reply that the Brits shouldn't have been there in the first place. They were there. They outlawed it. Were they right?

I cant see what all the fuss is about, after all the most damning image and portrayal of the so called prophet muhammed
is the koran itself, Muslims should be burning that!

ROFL

First off, I don't believe TQ has been to a country ruled by a muslim majority. He's trying to scoreboard us.

How long do you think a caucasian know-it-all would last on the streets of Tripoli?

[QUOTE]Now having an opinion already makes me a fascist.[/QUOTE]

Exactly. And TQ's way of thinking would make him a Pacifist. And it that's the case, then I'm a life long Democrat. Thanks a lot, Obama.

But, I must say I respect your views, TQ. Often I have been a one legged man at an ass-kicking contest, as you appear to be here.

[QUOTE]I am not a friend of organized religion in any form, but I will say this: I have never met a muslim anywhere near as offensive as some of the christians who try to run the show where I live. [/QUOTE]
printed out TQ's link...

PUTTING THE "JAB" IN HIJAB

Tehran, Iran (CNN) -- They may be a far cry from their Western counterparts fighting for the acceptance to breast-feed -- or go topless -- in public, but two girls clobbered a cleric recently in a small town in Iran when he admonished one of them to cover herself more completely.

The cleric said he asked "politely," but the girl's angry reaction and some pugilistic double-teaming with her friend landed the holy man in the hospital, according to an account Monday in the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.
Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti said he encountered the girls on his way to the mosque in the village of Shahmirzad for noon prayers in late August.

He told one of the girls to cover up, the report said.

"She responded by telling me to cover my eyes, which was very insulting to me," Beheshti said. So he asked her a second time to cover up and also to put a lid on what he felt was verbal abuse.

She hit the man of the cloth, and he hit the ground.

"I don't remember what happened after that," he said. "I just felt her kicks and heard her insults."
Beheshti, who emerged from the infirmary three days later, said he did not file a complaint against the girls.
But he doesn't mind the local prosecutor's investigation into the matter either "as long as the case helps the cause of Islamic hijab."

It's very simple - the noisy minority is always the most visible and convenient sample group whenever making whatever point it is we're trying to make about a group of people.

Sure enough that in Sydney Australia there was a 'lot' of angry Muslims waving signs and smashing things. But I'd be willing to bet that they're a mere percentage of the actual number of Muslims in the country.

I think one could make a (very carefully worded) argument for our way of life being better than that in Syria or the Sudan. But it's way too simplistic (and frankly, wrong) to blame it on race or even religion. These people don't act like bashy bazooks because they're a lower race - they do it because they're in a shite situation, and people in that situation *will* act up. And even though religion happens to be frequently woven into whatever caused that shite situation in the first place, the actual truth of it is that if we didn't have religion, it'd be some other flag being waved to get people to do what we want them to. Factionalism has many faces!

[QUOTE] [b]YourValentine wrote:[/b]
The freedom of speech is mainly the freedom of a minority to voice their opinion or else it is worth nothing. I do not need freedom of speech to say that the sun is shining, I need it when I want to say something extremely unpopular. There is no human right to be not offended by what other people say and we cannot let a rioting mob dictate what is possible to say or show or display in our countries.[/QUOTE]


I haven't seen the movie, and don't know what it's about (just making that clear before i jump in). But i think the original idea of freedom of speech is different to how we throw the term around today. Today people argue that freedom of speech allows them to spout anything they want. The original idea of freedom of speech (if i am right?) was to allow people to assemble freely and speak about oppression and alternative political ideas. Not to allow them to spew inaccurate hate on other groups. If used correctly, free speech is fantastic and essential, if abused it's a cheap catch-phrase that causes a lot of harm.

[QUOTE] [b]thomasquinn 32989 wrote:[/b]

You talk of our 'values' being superior, but what are 'our values'? When you look at an Islamic country, you see bearded mullahs opressing women. You don't see the massive amounts of charity in Islamic culture. It is *exactly* the same thing as muslims looking at America, and only seeing greedy corporations/banks robbing the people and pursuing profit regardless of morality, but not seeing individual freedom, except when it is abused to insult muslims.


So true -- and media distorts things, that's how we get our perceptions of the world, and their media distorts things just as much as our media does. Not meaning 'their' and 'our' in any offensive way, just meaning different countries and cultures slant things in different ways.

[QUOTE] [b]Zebonka12 wrote:[/b]

I think one could make a (very carefully worded) argument for our way of life being better than that in Syria or the Sudan. But it's way too simplistic (and frankly, wrong) to blame it on race or even religion. These people don't act like bashy bazooks because they're a lower race - they do it because they're in a shite situation, and people in that situation *will* act up. And even though religion happens to be frequently woven into whatever caused that shite situation in the first place, the actual truth of it is that if we didn't have religion, it'd be some other flag being waved to get people to do what we want them to. Factionalism has many faces![/QUOTE]


And if you go into some parts of the western world, and at various times in history, we have just as many problems. Also, a lot of the western world was colonised less recently then a lot of the islamic world, and wars were less recent too -- we've simply had more time to develop systems then some other countries.

@ Thomas Quinn - funny how you keep using the word "superior" with all its supremacy connotations. I did not use it, I said "better" This is your typical dishonest way of discussion.

@catqueen - the freedom of speech can only be limited by laws, I think there is a common consensus about that. Usually, you cannot racially abuse other people, you cannot insult individuals etc. Stupidity is not a reason why your freedom of speech can be taken away from you,though.

Just remember the recent universal outcry about the court case vs the group Pussy Riot in Russia. It was of little concern for most commentators that the artistic value of the performance was very questionable (I never heard the word "pussy" on TV so often) and that maybe Russian Christians might have been offended by the performance in a church - people thought that the freedom of speech and the freedom to criticise a government in an artistic performance should not be prosecuted by the state. In Russia, however, they violated a law and were sentenced (a very bad law imo). However, the maker of that film did not violate a US law and therefore he can publish and show it wherever he finds other idiots who show and publish it and we have to live with it. When we start limiting the freedom of expression at this point soon we won't have any freedom of speech at all.

Well I think Pussy Riot (and the makers of Innocence of Muslims) deserve incarceration for being mediocre above all else.

Thoughts from Salman Rushdie:

[QUOTE]
Manufactured outrage such as that seen in recent protests in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere is “much more prevalent and much more widespread” than it was when The Satanic Verses was published, the book’s author, Salman Rushdie, has told CNN's Fareed Zakaria.

Rushdie's new book, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, is an account of the firestorm surrounding The Satanic Verses. But Rushdie suggests that as with the protests over The Satanic Verses, the recent unrest surrounding a controversial video that was posted on YouTube has been managed. “At the time of the attack on The Satanic Verses, what we saw was not so much a spontaneous outpouring of rage as a very carefully manufactured outpouring,” Rushdie told Zakaria.

“There was no doubt that it was highly controlled. You know, there were missives sent out from mosques to all sorts of people and they were all identical to make sure everybody was singing from the same song sheet...making the same attacks on the book in the same words.”

“Looking back at it, you can see that that was one of the early moments at which this project of manufacturing outrage began,” he said. “And that’s, of course, become much more prevalent and much more widespread.”
“And I think certainly, if we look at what’s happening now, this is very much a product of the outrage machine," Rushdie said. “Yes, there’s this stupid film...and the correct response to a stupid film on YouTube is to say it’s a stupid film on YouTube, and you get on with the rest of your life.

“So to take that and to deliberately use it to inflame your troops, you know, is a political act,” Rushdie added. “That’s not about religion, that’s about power.”[/QUOTE]

He's bang on. This outrage has nothing to do with the film. These people live in the dark ages and most of them don't even know what a film is.

If they want to live in the dark ages, then let them. If anyone there wants to solve the problems, they can do it on their own. As soon as western troops get out of their countries, they will stop being upset, and maybe the flying airplanes into buildings thing will stop too.

There will always be radicals, for a lot of things not only religion. Here in the western world we give them freedom of speech (e.j. The Westboro Baptist Chruch), but we also keep a close eye on them because their actions borderline into infringing with other people's rights. Now, why can't Muslims nations crack down on their radicals? Is it because they agree with them to an extent and let them go ape shit every time some idiot (who I agree is well entitled to opinion) makes a film, burns a Quaran, or does something that deeply offends Muslims?