11 dead
Free speech and press under attack by radical Muslims
Sickening
There is video of them executing a cop in the street
11 dead
Free speech and press under attack by radical Muslims
Sickening
There is video of them executing a cop in the street
"For there is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it. If only we are brave enough to be it." Amanda Gorman
"When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross"
Hawk (01-07-2015)
They hate us because we bomb them.
"Yes, I did think Aldrich was good UNTIL I SAW HIM PLAY. "- thethe
BedellBrave (01-07-2015), Garmel (01-07-2015)
"For there is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it. If only we are brave enough to be it." Amanda Gorman
"When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross"
Hawk (01-07-2015)
makes my blood boil.
"Yes, I did think Aldrich was good UNTIL I SAW HIM PLAY. "- thethe
Originally Posted by gilesfan
They were peaceful people until we tried to Westernize them
Garmel (01-07-2015)
Shocking to me that some can still not see how important this world wide struggle is against radical Islam.
Natural Immunity Croc
"For there is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it. If only we are brave enough to be it." Amanda Gorman
"When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross"
BedellBrave (01-07-2015), Garmel (01-07-2015), Hawk (01-07-2015)
Dothan piece - link - bingo!
The article (comments? ) reminded me the difference between Muslim and Islam
What part of the article and what difference beside, a Muslim is an adherent of Islam and not Islam itself, do you mean?
"In the wake of the vicious murders at the offices of the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo today, let me offer three tentative premises about blasphemy in a free society.
1) The right to blaspheme (and otherwise give offense) is essential to the liberal order.
2) There is no duty to blaspheme, a society’s liberty is not proportional to the quantity of blasphemy it produces, and under many circumstances the choice to give offense (religious and otherwise) can be reasonably criticized as pointlessly antagonizing, needlessly cruel, or simply stupid.
3) The legitimacy and wisdom of such criticism is generally inversely proportional to the level of mortal danger that the blasphemer brings upon himself.
The first point means that laws against blasphemy (usually described these days as “restrictions on hate speech”) are inherently illiberal. The second point means that a certain cultural restraint about trafficking in blasphemy is perfectly compatible with liberal norms, and that there’s nothing illiberal about questioning the wisdom or propriety or decency of cartoons or articles or anything else that takes a crude or bigoted swing at something that a portion of the population holds sacred. Such questioning can certainly shade into illiberal territory — and does, all-too-frequently — depending on exactly how much pressure is exerted and how elastic the definition of “offensiveness” becomes. But our basic liberties are not necessarily endangered when, say, the Anti-Defamation League criticizes Mel Gibson’s portrayal of the Sanhedrin in “The Passion of the Christ” or the Catholic League denounces art exhibits in the style of “Piss Christ,” any more than they’re endangered by the absence of grotesque caricatures of Moses or the Virgin Mary from the pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. Liberty requires accepting the freedom to offend, yes, but it also allows people, institutions and communities to both call for and exercise restraint.
In this sense I disagree slightly with Jonathan Chait’s formulation today that “one cannot defend the right [to blaspheme] without defending the practice.” If I devoted my next blog post to a scabrous, profanity-laced satire of the Buddha, I would not expect Chait or anyone else to immediately leap to my defense if the Times decided to delete the post and dismiss me from its ranks of columnists. If I ran a reactionary website that devoted itself to recycling pre-modern calumnies against Jewish law and ritual, my rights as an American would not be traduced if people picketed my offices and other journalists told me I had a moral obligation to desist. And similarly, in a cultural and political vacuum, it would be okay to think that some of the images (anti-Islamic and otherwise) that Charlie Hebdo regularly published, especially those chosen entirely for their shock value, contributed little enough to public discussion that the world would not suffer from their absence.
But we are not in a vacuum. We are in a situation where my third point applies, because the kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could … and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.
In this sense, many of the Western voices criticizing the editors of Hebdo have had things exactly backward: Whether it’s the Obama White House or Time Magazine in the past or the Financial Times and (God help us) the Catholic League today, they’ve criticized the paper for provoking violence by being needlessly offensive and “inflammatory” (Jay Carney’s phrase), when the reality is that it’s precisely the violence that justifies the inflammatory content. In a different context, a context where the cartoons and other provocations only inspired angry press releases and furious blog comments, I might sympathize with the FT’s Tony Barber when he writes that publications like Hebdo “purport to strike a blow for freedom when they provoke Muslims, but are actually just being stupid.” (If all you have to fear is a religious group’s fax machine, what you’re doing might not be as truth-to-power-ish as you think.) But if publishing something might get you slaughtered and you publish it anyway, by definition you are striking a blow for freedom, and that’s precisely the context when you need your fellow citizens to set aside their squeamishness and rise to your defense.
Whereas far too often in the West today the situation is basically reversed: People will invoke free speech to justify just about any kind of offense or provocation or simple exploitation (“if we don’t go full-frontal seven times on ‘Game of Thrones’ tonight, man, the First Amendment dies”), and then scurry for cover as soon as there’s a whiff of actual danger, a hint that “bold” envelope-pushing might require actual bravery after all.
It’s safe to say that the late Christopher Hitchens had a more positive view of blasphemy than the one I’ve sketched above, and a more capacious view of the situations in which it’s worth praising and defending. But on this point I’m in complete agreement with these words of his, from a 2006 column that’s made the rounds today:
When Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, he did so in the hope of forwarding a discussion that was already opening in the Muslim world, between extreme Quranic literalists and those who hoped that the text could be interpreted. We know what his own reward was, and we sometimes forget that the fatwa was directed not just against him but against “all those involved in its publication,” which led to the murder of the book’s Japanese translator and the near-deaths of another translator and one publisher. I went on Crossfire at one point, to debate some spokesman for outraged faith, and said that we on our side would happily debate the propriety of using holy writ for literary and artistic purposes. But that we would not exchange a word until the person on the other side of the podium had put away his gun.
The emphasis is my own, because that’s the crucial point. Must all deliberate offense-giving, in any context, be celebrated, honored, praised? I think not. But in the presence of the gun — or, as in the darker chapters of my own faith’s history, the rack or the stake — both liberalism and liberty require that it be welcomed and defended."
Douthat
50PoundHead (01-08-2015), jpx7 (01-08-2015)
The 80,000 cops deployed throughout France to catch 2-4 people tells a different story.
thank you weso1!
thank you weso1!
People should be afraid of a group of people that are willing to kill themselves in the name of a deity. Those are the most dangerous people in the world and are incredibly sophisticated with their organization and tactical skills.
Natural Immunity Croc
No they aren't.
It's sad people use a tragedy to push their agenda. These radicals will continue to marginalize them if you treat them as such. People don't want to be part of a marginalized group but when you give them ammo, they have a stronger case.
Stockholm, more densely populated than NYC - sturg
Keep living in your dream world where you treat radicals like children.
Natural Immunity Croc
They only attacked France because they bomb their children.
"Yes, I did think Aldrich was good UNTIL I SAW HIM PLAY. "- thethe
BedellBrave (01-09-2015), Garmel (01-09-2015)
Has nothing to do with treating people like children and everything to do with people's will to be better.
Look at North Korea. You think people actively flock to North Korea to fight for them? No because they're marginalized. If you marginalize someone they'll be a threat but a contained threat. Radical islam isn't WWII Germany or Cold War USSR. They're North Korea without a state. Let them kill off their believers and eventually they'll find their recruiting pool dwindling. Especially when people realize "Hey instead of dying, I could maybe just live and enjoy my life" It's happened to every other religion/ideology. The human is the eventual growth that kills the cult mindset.
Stockholm, more densely populated than NYC - sturg
uh
"For there is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it. If only we are brave enough to be it." Amanda Gorman
"When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross"
Thats because this is the way you perceive the human spirit to be. The reality is people in the middle east view life in a drastically different way than you and I do.
This has happened with other religions becuase of the advance of technology. Guess what? We are at our most advanced stage and these people still want to live like animals. Its not going to change.
Natural Immunity Croc
Garmel (01-09-2015)
no they don't for the most part
honestly in my travels, most people in the world are pretty similar to a degree
"For there is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it. If only we are brave enough to be it." Amanda Gorman
"When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross"
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