Does freedom of speech excuse preaching hate?

I would wager that you don't have the stones to show your face in public, to the people you like to insult online.

Cycloptichorn

And yet you won't wager on the outcome of the election.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

I would wager that you don't have the stones to show your face in public, to the people you like to insult online.

Cycloptichorn

What's gotten into you the last couple days?

Sheesh!

There you go with you mind reading schtick

On Friday, fresh violence erupted in Yemen and Egypt and protests took place in Lebanon, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kashmir, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel and the Gaza Strip, Morocco, Syria, Kuwait, Nigeria and Kenya.

In the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, thousands of protesters attacked the embassies of Britain and Germany. The German mission was torched, its flag torn down and replaced with a black Islamist banner. ...

When my fellow Americans ask me that tired question, "Why do they hate us?", my initial response is usually: "It's not about you." When a fellow Egyptian wants to talk about hating the US, I flip that response on its head and tell her: "It's not about America – it's about you." The truth is somewhere in the middle, but too many people are willing to use it as a football in an endless match of political manipulation.

For a slightly subtler response, I tell my fellow Americans that "they" don't hate them for their freedom but, rather, because successive US governments all too willingly and knowingly supported dictators who denied their populations any kind of freedom. As a US citizen, I cherish the first amendment. It's what I whipped out as I stood alongside Muslims and non-Muslims in Lower Manhattan in 2010 to defend the right of an Islamic community centre to open close to Ground Zero. We told those who opposed the centre that that first amendment was what gave them the right to protest and at the same time guaranteed freedom to worship right there on that spot.

How could a country that cherishes such freedom be so willing to support dictators all too eager to deny that same freedom to their people? Even President Barack Obama, who spoke so eloquently about dignity and freedom in his 2009 Cairo speech, disappointingly dragged his feet when it was time to decide between Mubarak and the people rising up for that very same freedom and dignity.

Anti-US sentiment has been born out of many grievances – support and weapons for such dictators as Mubarak, unquestionable support for Israel in its occupation of Palestine, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen that kill more civilians than intended targets. ...

Anti-American rage that began this week over a video insult to Islam spread to nearly 20 countries across the Middle East and beyond on Friday, with violent and sometimes deadly protests that convulsed the birthplaces of the Arab Spring revolutions, breached two more United States Embassies and targeted diplomatic properties of Germany and Britain.

The broadening of the protests appeared to reflect a pent-up resentment of Western powers in general, and defied pleas for restraint from world leaders, including the new Islamist president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, whose country was the instigator of the demonstrations that erupted three days earlier on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The anger stretched from North Africa to South Asia and Indonesia and in some cases was surprisingly destructive. In Tunis, an American-run school that was untouched during the revolution nearly two years ago was completely ransacked. In eastern Afghanistan, protesters burned an effigy of President Obama, who had made an outreach to Muslims a thematic pillar of his first year in office.

The State Department confirmed that protesters had penetrated the perimeters of the American Embassies in the Tunisian and Sudanese capitals, and said that 65 embassies or consulates around the world had issued emergency messages about threats of violence, and that those facilities in Islamic countries were curtailing diplomatic activity. The Pentagon said it sent Marines to protect embassies in Yemen and Sudan.

The wave of unrest not only increased concern in the West but raised new questions about political instability in Egypt, Tunisia and other Middle East countries where newfound freedoms, once suppressed by autocratic leaders, have given way to an absence of authority. The protests also seemed to highlight the unintended consequences of America’s support of movements to overthrow those autocrats, which have empowered Islamist groups that remain implacably hostile to the West.

“We have, throughout the Arab world, a young, unemployed, alienated and radicalized group of people, mainly men, who have found a vehicle to express themselves,” Rob Malley, the Middle East-North African program director for the International Crisis Group, a consulting firm, said in a telephone interview from Tripoli, Libya.

In a number of these countries, particularly Egypt and Tunisia, he said, “the state has lost a lot of its capacity to govern effectively. Paradoxically, that has made it more likely that events like the video will make people take to the streets and act in the way they did.”

Some of the most serious violence targeted the compound housing the German and British Embassies in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, causing minor damage to the British property but major fire damage to the German one. The foreign ministers of both countries strongly protested the assault, which The Associated Press said had been instigated by a prominent sheik exhorting protesters to storm the German Embassy to avenge what he called anti-Muslim graffiti on Berlin mosques.

The police fired tear gas to repulse attacks in Khartoum, where about 5,000 demonstrators had massed, news reports said, before they moved on to the United States Embassy on the outskirts of the capital.

In Tunis, the United States Embassy was assaulted at midday by protesters who smashed windows and set fires before security forces routed them in violent clashes that left at least 3 dead and 28 hurt. Witnesses and officials said no Americans were hurt and most had left earlier.

The worst damage was inflicted on the American Cooperative School of Tunis, a highly regarded institution that, despite its name, catered mostly to the children of non-American expatriates, nearly half of whom work for the African Development Bank. School officials, who had sent the 650 students home early, said a few protesters scaled the fence and dismantled monitoring cameras, followed by 300 to 400 others, some of them local residents, who looted everything including 700 laptop computers, musical instruments and the safe in the director’s office, and then set the building on fire.

“It’s ransacked,” the director, Allan Bredy, said in a telephone interview. “We were thinking it was something the Tunisia government would keep under control. We had no idea they would allow things to go as wildly as they did.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/world/middleeast/anti-american-protests-over-film-enter-4th-day.html?hp

And I heard speculation on CNN earlier that the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya had nothing at all to do with the film, and that it was an attack planned well in advance to retaliate for the killing of a top Al Qaeda leader by a U.S. drone attack.

There are millions of things for millions upon millions of people from around the world who want to repay the US for its myriad war crimes and terrorist activities,

Very little of the spreading violence seems related to that film...And I heard speculation on CNN earlier that the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya had nothing at all to do with the film, and that it was an attack planned well in advance to retaliate for the killing of a top Al Qaeda leader by a U.S. drone attack. So far, the Obama administration denies that, and says they have no evidence to support a premeditated attack.

That is very much like what I heard on Abuzz after the other 9/11 .....

But I think at the end of the day, the West is in the right here. The United States is in the right. It is entirely inappropriate under any circumstances to use violence as a response to freedom of speech.
The way you counter bad speech is with good speech. Let them make a great movie about Prophet Mohammed. That's the way you do it, not by killing people, not by burning people.

Which Muslim "stunning records of success" are you referring to, hawkeye?
Could you give us a few examples?

Still waiting for a response from you, hawkeye.

Quote:

Which Muslim "stunning records of success" are you referring to, hawkeye?
Could you give us a few examples?

I thought I would be nice and NOT point out how clueless you are....in this case re your inability to comprehend the English language.

... the stunning record of success is referring to the playing of the victim card irregardless of who makes the play. Muslims are poorly educated and out of date, but they are bright enough to understand that playing the victim offers them a decent shot of getting what they want from Westerners, as we are conditioned to cave into claims of victimhood.