Denmark opens up a can of worms

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Actually...someone just did...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4676524.stm

I'm afraid though, that this man is going to need around the clock security as from now on.

 

Hey, if you guys want to label all Arabs, by what some Arabs do, knock yourselves out. It's still racist. I haven't commented about the pictures posted because the situation has obviously escalated beyond control. In other words, an argument that this is a non-violent situation would be invalid, so I conceded by not arguing the subject further. My posts have been about this:

I'm trying to stop the furthering of harmful cultural misconceptions that exist solely because people make these types of huge, sweeping generalisations and no one calls them on it.

[ February 04, 2006, 18:20: Message edited by: Drew ]

 

Dendri, I have seen simmilarly vile slogans during neo-nazi marches. Does this mean that all white Europeans are knukle-dragging thugs? Of course not. Such generalizations are pointless. Though I can not speak for the muslims in Germany, moderate muslims here in Britain have been very vocal in their outrage at such sentiments.

 

Satan, is it racism or generalization to ask for a decisive reaction of ALL muslims who disagree with the extremely dangerous game played here? It would be in their own interest.

All those individuals who followed placards calling for beheadings should be made to leave at once! Likewise all who dont distance themselves clearly from people promising to slaugther Europeans.

This is too much for words.

I never made swooping comments about muslims. No one in this thread did, I think. Some are just too eager to read it, yes?
In fact I hope for a strong outcry from the muslims in Europe, strong enough to allow not the shadow of a doubt where they stand. Now would be a good point in time. A few intellectuals doing so are insufficient. Otherwise people will have an even more "inaccurate" picture of Islam, and only because the muslims allowed it.

 

@Dendri: The quote I posted did come from this thread.......

Forcing these people to leave is not even feasible. Most of those people are citizens, which means they don't have another home to return to. Like it or not, these muslim citizens have the same rights to free speech as anyone else. Obviously death threats are illegal but the rest, while in very bad taste, is legal and should be allowed in a democratic society. Kicking out your subversives is not democracy.

 

They are citizens with DOUBLE nationalities. Overhere the Moroccans still have Moroccan passports as well as Dutch, and that gives the authorities the perfect stick to beat them with if they keep misbehaving themselves. It takes a few adjustments to the law as well, but they're working on that very hard. This applies not only to muslims btw, but to ALL immigrants and assylumseekers who don't respect our laws and values.

 

@Mithrantir:

Go to Iran, where it's legal to picture the prophet, he is shown on placads on the streets.

Yup, the american created Saudi Arabia as we know it nowadays - and most of the troubles we now i the middle east. Anyway We just can't compare ie Christianity to islam, since it's two completely different religions. Ie Islam was created by and for warriors, Christianity for citylike people.

Drew: I still mean it is a problem stemming from the lack of democracy, since the illitteracy amongst the most Arabs (and other as well) makes it easy to controll the masses. And Illiteracy IMHO stems from lack of democracy. The same issue isn't excisting in europe (well anymore I guess) where many more people are able to read and thus understand the meaning of religion and democracy. I've got muslim friends who are upset, but they are able to understand why, what we see in the press makes me think, that the angry mobs are controlled and thus the lack of democracy.

Here in Denmark many from the arab world is now danes with a danish passport, but even more keep their original countries passport, and thus making them citizens of another country. I guess it's like that in most of Europe. In the US it's probably an completely other matter.

 

@ Drew
Too bad for us since they dont think of themselves as citizens. Should give you a clue why they have been referred to as guests.

... but the rest isnt the problem. Hello?!
Dont you understand it's not peaceful protest getting people up in arms? It *IS* the death threats (with memory of past assassination)... the call for violence - oh, and the rather violent reaction reported today from Damascus, for example. That seems to be but a minor annoyance to you, the way you phrased your post...

 

Norwegian and Danish embassies in Damascus have now been burned down.

 

Shaitan i corrected at my next post. The Quran says it is forbidden with the penalty of death to draw the FACE of the prophet and Allah.
If they do picture him then they are not as fundemental as they want to be shown.
Furthermore one notion about homosexuality in Islam.
In the Quran it is explicitly forbidden to have intimate relations with women and is allowed to have with men before you are married. But when you are married it's vice versa the whole deal.
And now to get in topic.
As i have said before there is a bigger proportion of zealots in Islam than in Christianity. This may has to do with the fact that Islam is a relatively younger religion than Christianism, it may also has to do with the fact that the vast majority of Muslims lives in a very bad financial (or opressed) state.
What happened to Damascus or wherever else may happen (because i fear it will) is an outcome of a continuous feeling of wrongness these people get from the western civilizations.
They feel we do them wrong in every step, thus helping the extremist organizations to recruit more people. We have entered IMHO a endless circle of pointing fingers and throwing accussations which will end up (as a worst case scenario, but not so science fiction anymore) in a war.
@ DREW

Your experience too is fragmended since you socialized with mainly the educated elite and not the mob. So if you ever decide to come to Europe and go in just about every city of this continent you will manage to see that things are not quite that beautifull.
All the immigrants i see here in Athens do not socialize with Greeks or even with immigrants of different religion. There is also a percentage of these people who willingly do not work or do not work in a legal work, thus backstabbing the economy of the country. And one more side effect of the illegal immigration (which is a great problem in Europe) is that the criminal organizations of their originative countries has managed to make a branch here too. As if we needed that.
I won't say that the majority of them are criminals, but they do move in the twilight zone between law and crime.
You may say i have a fragmented point of view and i tell you that i may do.
But man even the Muslims of Thrace that are supposed to be Greeks are not the open type too. They are just to secular and don't really like socializing or intermingle with people of different culture (or religion i say it again, it is almost the same for Muslims).
I fear this will get worse since we are just giving the extremists more excuses to help their cause and frankly they now have more than they could ever wish.
These cartoons were a direct hit not to Iraq, or Iran, or any Muslim country (which could be less generalising) but a direct hit to one of their foundation stones of their life, their religion.
I don't think that the politicians of any country should express his sorrow and beg for forgiveness from the Muslims.
But on the other hand the fact that they asked for it, pinpoints the difference of how the two worlds understands the political and religion structures and how do they intermingle in each world.

 

Well, I have to admit, my feelings of generosity towards Syria are somewhat diminished, especially after they torched our embassy down there. The Nation of Denmark (and many other countries) pump billions of dollars into these countries every year to aid them. Is this "our money´s worth", so to speak? Could all of our money be better spent elsewhere?
(I know that personally I wouldn´t stop supporting aid to poor people down there, I´m just playing Devil´s Advocate a little bit)


Edit: Oops, VERY notable typo.

 

By "the rest", I was referring to the fact that you are allowed to say some very offensive things in a democratic society. Inciting to violence counts as a "threat", so I obviously wasn't saying that was OK or allowable.

@Mithrantir: Now, you are aware of the fact that Arabs immigrate to the United States, too.....right? (In fact, until 9/11 it was easier to come here, so......)

@Shaitan: When Russia became communist, they went from close to 0% literacy to almost 100% literacy within the space of a generation. Democracy doesn't necessarily have anything to do with literacy.

 

Hold on a second.

European empires (chiefly the British, French, and Dutch)had been invading and controlling the Middle Eastern and North African regions before the U.S.A decided to turn away from its isolationists roots (1890ish Spanish-American war, 1910s WWI; still mostly isolationist until about 1940). Europe, it's time to stop blaming everything on America -- we contributed to the problems, but we were far from the sole cause. Our conflicts with the Muslim world are a result of our shared Western Civilization from Greek and Roman roots, not any individual country.

Don't criticize Denmark or the newspaper. This would've happened eventually in at least one of the many Western democracies that professes free speech. Are we really at fault here? My answer is no.

What is at fault is the (1)Muslim view that religion, culture and everday life are inseperably bound, and (2)the Western World's dedication to spreading our ideals of democracy while not interfering with religion. It doesn't work that way. We can't implement our system of democracy on a culture with such theocratic values. Either they'll evolve into democracy on their own, eventually deciding religion is a personal and not a public sphere, or they'll continue with their theocracies until the end of (their) time. I originally supported the US-led invasion of Iraq, in the vein of thought that spreading democracy would be admirable. With time, maturity, and reflection, it turns out I was wrong.

Sometimes I dream that we could deport all fanatics back to the Middle East, withdraw all Western interests from said territories (along with any people who wanted to leave behind the fanatical, theocratic landscape), and then wall-in the region so they could live in their own little world where no one dares question the absolute authority of Allah.

...I don't know where I was headed with this. Anyway, the Middle Eastern/Arabic/Muslim problem is not of the US's making; it's Western Civilization's conflict with a crusading, intolerant Muslim extremist base that is incapable of understanding the West's lines between public/private, science/religion, and freedom/respect.

 

If I go from my country to a muslim country I must adapt to their laws and customs. That is normal and logical. When they come here they do not adapt and make little enclaves where their laws reign. And, they expect that we live by their rules because they are so much holier then we. The last thing we must do is take them serious.

We give them, the organisations like the palestinian goverment, large amounts of money in the name of humanity and they repay us with attacks, murder and mayhem. We will send soldiers to afganistain to keep the peace and rebuild their country. We have been in Iraq to keep the peace also. Will we get thanks? NO! We are filthy cristian dogs. So western goverments, just buy their oli and be gone with them. If they want to join the western community, fine, but western terms.

In the 70's I think, we had problem with a few people from asia. We had a colony and the ones loyal to us came to holland. With a few terrorist events they try to demand something. What do you think would happened if we gave everything that they wanted. The attacks would not stop. So we rushed the hijacked train. Now they live amongs us with no problems.

Am I a muslim hater? No. I have worked with quite a few, and still do so at my work, and we all had a laugh about te drawings. the muslims too! The avarge muslim that lives in a western world functions good and sometimes better than the natives. That is not the point. So do not attack me on it as I know you will.

My point is that we allow countries in the middle east to act like that because we react to them. After the cartoons we started to say sorry our mistake and that is the biggest stupid thing you can do. Average Ali is being used by powerhungry Iman's.

Now I am going to post this, and many off you will get mad. Sorry for that. It is called freedom of speech and is one of the foundations of the world we live in. Surely we are not going to limit that?

 

In a democracy, they have a right to express whatever opinions they have, including the right to suggest that we should abandon democracy and become a theocracy.

What everyone seems to miss is that only a tiny portion (less that a fifth) of middle eastern nations are actually theocracies. Most Arabs do not want a theocratic government. If Arabs wanted theocratic rule the ammount of theocracies would be much higher. The idea that Arabs (or muslims in general) believe in theocratic rule is out of line with reality. It's a cultural misconception that we need to abandon.

 

Yes well, the only limiting that should be done then in the Netherlands is a justified one, since apparently it's very okay(and very much within our rights *couch*) in Western Europe to insult a muslim to his core. But if try to insult the Jews to their core, in the Netherlands, and especially in Germany, using comics such as the AEL is now posting on their site, about Jews and Auswitchz and the Holocaust, that would be very very bad, resulting in very possibly a prison sentence.
Oops, that's discrimination.

You can of course argue that Jews do not start burning down embassies, but when was the last time that we ignored the complaints of Jews and started to copy the original attacker by repeating the insults under the motto of Freedom of Speech(do we have that anyway in the Western World? nope, well we do if it comes to muslims )?

 

There's a significant difference between making insults (such as van Gogh's geitenneukers) and shouting that all jews should be eliminated, all gays should be dropped off 10 stories high buildings, and calling for a holy war against everyone who won't submit to Islam. If you fail to see the difference between an insult and a death threat, you have a seriously troubled view.

 

I can see the difference, but so can a muslim, a muslim says "Yes, true actually" about that homosexuals should be thrown off buildings, and feels attacked by these comics, which we just shrug of as mildly funny. Most of the muslims here shrug it of as well, they learned to live with it, as they continuously get attacked with geiteneuker (one 'n', since you can't have sex with multiple goats at the same time), Mohammed's pedophilic notions and whatever.

That muslims demand execution is simply because they are absolutely insulted to their very soul, and that europeans can't understand that, doesn't mean that muslims have short fuses and make a lot of fuss over nothing, it means that Muslims and Europeans are two extremely different people, gee, really? Muslims and Europeans should simply never have mixed...

 

I absolutely agree with that last bit, but it's a little late for that i'm afraid.

However, i don't agree with the goat part. If a man can get it on with several women at once, than it's also possible with goats. But that's way offtopic i guess.

 

My fellow dutchman do not get exited to much. The cartoons that te danes published are not that bad. (Agreed upon by the muslims working next to me who even liked the one about the virgins). I have seen worse about afro american, woman, asian, males jews, cristians and you name what.

What about a cartoon about the ark with a very energetic rabbit who could not stop with the other rabbit.

Or about a dark man whit enormous lips and ...

But that is not what was shown to the crowds in the middle east. The were shown much worse cartoons used by people who stepped over the line to discrimination.

Suppose you are a devoot muslim in the middle east. your iman(who does the thinking for you in my view) shows you some drawings and gives a nice speech. you get angry. Then you go to the coffehouse for half a day and you talk about it. Someones says demonstration and there you go.

A few extremists use the cover of the demonstration to execute their attack on the target and hell brakes loose. It is planned and orchestrated by a handfull people who loose their power after the average muslim in the middle east gets what is going on in the world. Have you seen what they did to that building. It is a warzone. Only weeks before they where using danish money to build their country and now that building is a writeoff. Not something shown on most european networks while it can stir emotions. What do you think that could have happened in someone was still in there.

A few years ago someone made a sketch on tv. A german talking person was shown holding a canister of cyclom b that was chasing two jewish tourist. Cyclom b was used in WW2 to kill the jews in the concentration camps. That sketch was worse than the handful of cartoons. Some trouble was made. we talked about it for one or two days and the program was taken of the air. Did jews kill the maker? Did the jews burn an embassy? No, such thing, sadly, only occurs mostly with muslims.

If you accept the humanitarian aid(Money), also accept our ways. you do not have to like them, you do not have to follow them, but ... well you all understand it.

Lastly I will add again that I do not hate the muslim as a person. I really don't. It might look like it but no. Tommorow I will go to work and will interact will people from 4 different continents. It makes me sad, not angry.