Why the Muslims are so angry

How about platform shoes with clear spiked 7 inch heels? They won't be running around then.....

source

Imam Mohamed Magid, executive director of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Northern Virginia, said while he understood Islamic offense at the cartoons, Muslims would be better off protesting defamations against the faith perpetrated by their co-religionists.

"Prophet Muhammad is offended every day when somebody blows themselves up in a marketplace in Iraq. He's offended whenever somebody is beheaded. Prophet Muhammad would have opposed the burning of these embassies, or calls to kill Danes or other people," Magid said. "You can't be untouchable and then call other people infidel."

So someone publishes a Cartoon which breaks no laws and thousands of muslims over the world breakout in protests and expect the rest of the world to unilaterally condemn the action, without considering the fact that to many other countries freedom of expression is an inalienable right.

However, when muslim suicide bombers blow up innocent people in Israel, or even buildings in NYC, the so called moderate muslim condemnation of such acts is always followed by some kind of justification for the action.

Where is the unilateral muslim condemnation of killing of innocents? If moderate muslims really do believe that killing innocents goes against Islam, where were the spontaneous protests when the Twin Towers fell? Logically, looking at the reaction of the muslim world one could conclude that they hold Cartoons to be greater blasphemy than murder.

Europe, and more broadly "Western Civilization" is suffering from it's own policies, it's own aggrandizement, and it's own hypocrisy. As much as I deplore religion, and especially Islam, for both political, philosophical, historical and personal reasons, it's hard to blame the fanatic Muslims for what is inherently a European, or Western problem.

"Free speech" is a fuzzy concept, yet it seems that it is only applied partially. Free speech has always been an illusion. Europeans, and in fact, Westerners like to boast about the fact that, they are tolerant, liberal, progressive, and believe in those enlightenment values such as free speech and the free flow of ideas. That is, like all things, partially true. If Westerners truly believed in free speech, they would not have these supposed 'hate crimes' legislations, or laws that ban the scrutiny or the freedom of inquiry regarding the Holocaust or other unpopular ideas, and in many Western European countries you can be fined, jailed, and/or exiled if you dare question the Holocaust or somehow make fun of Jews.

While I deplore Islam, and the fanatic, narrow-minded, backward response of the Muslims of the world regarding a few cartoons, I see it more as a protest against these double standards, against a history of Western meddling into the Middle East, and continued support for Israeli policies. As someone who is a self-styled anarchist, I do not believe any religion is or should be exempt from criticism, or even mockery. In any event, here is a wonderful article that I thought is illuminating.
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Democracy Not an Export Item

by Leon Hadar

The irrational response to the Danish cartoons shows that the Middle East may not be fit for democracy after all.

In a new film, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, comedian Albert Brooks is dispatched to south Asia by humorless Bush administration officials to look for, well, comedy in the Muslim world.

Trying to cope with the depressing reality of a post-September 11 world in which Americans now occupy some parts of an angry anti-American Muslim universe, the gloomy bureaucrats in Washington hope a Jewish comic from Hollywood will help them discover what makes Muslims laugh.

After all, laughter is a universal trait, and if we Westerners laugh, the Muslims will probably laugh with us. And who knows? This could be a form of Preventive Comedic Diplomacy: A laugh a day in Baghdad, Kabul and Tehran could keep the US military away.

Unfortunately, Brooks's mission of making the Muslim world safe for comedy proves to be a sad joke. As with most of his liberal Hollywood colleagues, Brooks believes that all cultures can be brought together by shared commitment to universal values. But these fellows in India and Pakistan just don't get his sarcastic and self-deprecating sense of humor, not to mention the double entendres and sexual innuendoes.

His Comedy Hour is a flop and he discovers to his chagrin that while Muslims do laugh "like us", their concept of what is funny is not the kind that might work for a stand-up comedian in New York, Melbourne or, for that matter, a cartoonist in Copenhagen. It's not that the 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published in the small Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten were very funny; they were quite tasteless and offensive. But you could say that about much of the stuff that we find any day of the week in our Western media, including caricatures that mock Jesus, bash Catholic priests, offend Jews and insult racial minorities.

If you don't like what you see, feel free to send angry letters to the editor, boycott and demonstrate against the offensive newspaper and ask public figures to condemn it. But in a society where freedom of expression is valued, you don't threaten the life or use violence against those who disturb your political beliefs or religious sensibilities. And that includes crude anti-fill-the-blank cartoonists.

That this kind of commitment to a free exchange of ideas and tolerance of dissent that those of us who were raised and educated in the West seem to take for granted, like the air we breathe, is not shared by many Muslims across the world, and especially those residing in the Arab Middle East, has become quite evident in a very dramatic way in recent days.

The violence perpetrated by the mobs in centers of Arab civilization, such as Beirut, Damascus and Cairo, is very disturbing and reflects an illiberal political culture that is breeding religious intolerance and anti-modern attitudes. And it is strengthening the power of radical Islamic groups, ranging from the Arab-Sunni Muslim Brotherhood to the Shia Hezbollah.

What is even more disturbing is that some of this anti-Western frenzy has exploded in places in the Arab Middle East - in the new Iraq and in Palestine - where the Bush administration has been promoting its campaign to spread freedom and where open elections were showcased by Washington as highlighting its Wilsonian agenda of making the region safe for democracy.

Indeed, members of the radical political Islamist groups elected to power during this US-produced celebration of democracy - Iraq's Shia clerics and Palestine's Hamas terrorist group - have, with rare exceptions, been serving as cheerleaders for mobs attacking Americans and Europeans, including Danish troops maintaining peace in Iraq and officers of the European Union in Gaza, which is the main source of economic assistance for the Palestinians.

But the neoconservative intellectuals who have been the driving force behind the pro-democracy campaign in the Middle East refuse to admit that, not unlike Brooks's comedy spiel, their own democracy shtick has been a policy disaster. In two strategic parts of the Middle East - the Persian Gulf and Israel/Palestine - it has led to the victory of political parties whose values run contrary to that of the US.

These groups, for instance, would reverse women's rights and give second-class citizenship to non-Muslims. And their goals - in Iraq, an alliance with Iran, and in Palestine, a refusal to recognize Israel - would harm US strategic interests, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and hinder efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

So much for the idea that free elections give birth to liberal pro-Western governments. As policy analyst Fareed Zakaria argues, elections that take place in societies that lack the necessary institutional foundations - a functioning civil society, free markets, independent press and judiciary, religious tolerance - tend to produce an "illiberal democracy" that only exacerbates the problems of divisions and dysfunction and bring to power nationalist and religious populists who exploit their people's fears of the "other".

From that perspective, the US push for democracy in the Middle East has been a self-defeating strategy that has made the region safe for nationalism and other radical forms of ethnic, religious, and tribal movements that regard the US and its allies in the region as the source of all evil. It's difficult for American neoconservatives who fantasize about a global multicultural community committed to liberal democratic values to admit that perhaps the Muslims are not "like us" after all.

They laugh, but don't appreciate our sense of humor. They want to be free, but don't share our concept of liberal democracy, a set of values and institutions that can only develop through a long process of trial and error and in a hospitable environment. Perhaps the time has come for Washington to adopt a more realistic approach and stop looking for democracy in the Middle East while pursuing a policy that secures the real interests of the Western democracies in the region.

After all, liberal democracy, like humor, is not an export commodity. And, unlike humor, it's a very serious business.

Here are three reasons why Muslims are relevant to the West:

1) The threat of terrorism.

2) Oil - if the Middle East's main product was cabbage, the West could give a damn about Muslims.

3) The massive media hype that has gone with this cartoon has exasperated and amplified the situation.

We won't be able to solve the Muslim issue. What we need to do is make them irrelevant to the West. Fighting them, responding to them, buying their oil all make matters worse.

Very true, as the saying goes, violence begets more violence. Still, the situation is not going to change, and the West is heading toward its decline.

good post rodent

particularly liked this bit

I bet you didn't think a rodent can surprise you did you?

Well whether the West is heading toward its decline remains to be seen because the West *will* change a very great deal in the next 500 years. Whether the Muslims will have such impetus for change, is more of an open question.

I am considering this. What sort of front teeth you got?

What the hell is our oil doing under their sand? Damn thieves!

Oily bah bah and his Forties Field.

thanks Steve...

The whole thing stems from the US's obsession with massive oil consumption. Add to this the US's paranoia of atomic energy for electrical generation, add the lame ass SUV's, add the etc……

That all depends on who's asking. Not many like rodents, which is why I chose the name.

i'll try to get a link to an article in today's newspaper throwing some light on the situation in denmark and the demonstrations taking place throughout europe and in the middle-east
(toronto's globe and mail).

but i can really put it in a nutshell :
a)find out how many muslims there are in the world
b)find out how many muslims demonstrated - an estimate will do
c)calculate the percentage of muslims who demonstrated and the percentage of muslims who did NOT demonstrate(who went about their daily business of trying to make a living, much like you and i).
nuff' said !
hbg

thanks F4F, good map. Interesting that right in the middle of all that western military and oil interests is a large space where US has no military at all. Bush must have studied this very carefully. And he's found it has a name, Iran.

hamburger,

is that a joke ?

A Propagandist, Hitler would have been Proud of :

If you replace the Muslims with Jews in that article, i'am sure Hitler would have got great support from his people, the Nazi program of exterminating Jews from Europe would have been a lot easier.