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Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

theguardian.com

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Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#411

Post by waps »

dragontamer wrote: post #376
ilitirit wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> real satire "Real" satire of Islamic culture has been performed for decades. For the most part, you don't have to include the image of Mohammed for every statement you want to make of Islam. However, I do agree that you should be allowed to do so without fear of violent reprisal. Unfortunately, this is not the world we live in at the moment. It's going to take a while before Islamists change their views on this iss…

If you're gonna denounce a religion, can you at least get the sects done correctly? Wahhabism / Salafist Islam, which is a very small minority of Muslims, is the one preaching the extremist reaction. The majority of mainstream Shia / Shiite Muslims are actually peaceful. They kinda don't like the cartoons, but I don't know of any attack from "mainstream" Muslims. They all come from the Al Quaeda-inspired Salafist sec…

Let's see ... Freedom of speech ... the answer is "No".

Every other religion, and atheism, and every government party, and ... Don't get this treatment. Just on page two of the newspaper in front of me is a depiction of green party voters as idiots. Apparently they're all women, ugly, fat and insane. This depiction is done to denounce what boils down to the actions of a city official.

Should I write the paper complaining that there are multiple branches, men, and a great variety of ideas while complaining of racism ?

An attitude like this will kill all humor.

Btw what do you make of the primary source material ? Like that list of people muhammad had executed ? Is that somehow excluded from "mainstream" islam ? It seems to me a very well established point that islamic literature is not exactly peaceful, and "the prophet" is at best a warlord ... At worst ...

Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#412

Post by btilly »

dragontamer wrote: post #391
jacquesm wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That certainly didn't help. But Islam still has to see its Erasmus and until then this madness will likely persist. Religion is a personal thing.

Can you name an attack on the Western world in the last 30 years that didn't involve the Wahabist / Salafi extremist sect of Muslim? There's one sect kinda-sorta preaching violence. And that is the Wahhabi Islam that followed Osama Bin Laden. Beyond that, your mainstream Shiite / Shia Muslims are rather peaceful folk within the Western World. Frances 7%+ Muslim Population is a testament to that. Its pretty much those…

Yes, I can. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah#Alleged_suicide_and_t... for a list of attacks attributed to Hezbollah, which is a Shi'ah organization.

Furthermore support of violence to suppress freedom of religion is by no means limited to a small splinter sect in the islamic world. For example in a Pew survey, 88% of muslims in Egypt support the death penalty for converting away from islam. When you consider that about 95% of Egyptians are muslim, that's a pretty mainstream view.

If you want to know more about muslim views, I highly recommend reading through http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religio... for perspective. Coming from a Western view you might encounter a lot of, "No, you think you are tolerant but what you think of as tolerance really isn't." And it is important to understand that.

The item I pointed to is kind of canonical. A muslim who lets others practice their religion believes that he is tolerant of those religions. And continues believing that even while saying that if a member of one of those religions convinces some other muslim that that religion is correct, then they need to be killed for the attack on the one TRUE religion, islam!

Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#413

Post by [deleted] »

chroma wrote: post #32

The Charlie Hebdo attacks show that these days, real satire of Islam can't be done without significant risk of violent reprisal. If you doubt that statement, remember The Book of Mormon. (The play, not the actual book.) Could you imagine Trey Parker and Matt Stone making an equivalent Broadway play about Islam? Could you imagine them calling it The Qur'an to Google-bomb the original? Even if they disregarded their ow…

[deleted]

Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#414

Post by waps »

jacquesm wrote: post #377
btilly wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view is that Ataturk was trying to declare victory for western ideals while not actually holding them. His policies include fining people who speak languages other than Turkish, forcing people to have Turkish surnames, confiscating property from Armenians and so on. (I don't believe that he was directly responsible for the Armenian genocide, but there is nothing in his policies that would suggest he was opposed to…

He was far from perfect and the Armenian genocide will forever mar his legacy (and to this day can't be talked about in a reasonable way in Turkey, or even with quite a few Turks outside of Turkey). But he did move Turkey from the state it was in to the next step. Keep in mind that most of the things that you add there were compromises, he was walking a very fine line between unification and all out civil war. I doub…

Kemal Ataturk is like a lot of other historical figures. What he accomplished is great. If he did 1/100th of that in America today, any state would reintroduce the death penalty just for him. He was a massacring bastard, created institutions that codified racism, attacked and stole from innocent people. He is a monster.

But he ended 1500 years of war between islam and

The wast

Christianity

India

China

Africa

...

But yeah today it seems maybe he didn't so much end it as interrupt it for 100 years.

Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#415

Post by jules »

UhUhUhUh wrote: post #342
chroma wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only non-violent religions I know of are Jainism and Theravāda Buddhism. The holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all contain passages encouraging their followers to torture, kill, and otherwise harm non-believers. Mainstream adherents followed these directives for millennia. It's taken centuries of conflict with enlightenment values to relegate such views to extremists. After September 11th, I read the…

Give any religion enough uneducated, miserable, humiliated young people and you will get the same result. The world, unfortunately, is not in short supply of such. Even buddhists can become rabid.

It's too easy to completely dismiss the effects of a particular religion or group. There are uneducated, miserable, humiliated young people from many groups in the world, yet only those from some of those groups kill comic writers.

Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#416

Post by jacquesm »

waps wrote: post #414
jacquesm wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was far from perfect and the Armenian genocide will forever mar his legacy (and to this day can't be talked about in a reasonable way in Turkey, or even with quite a few Turks outside of Turkey). But he did move Turkey from the state it was in to the next step. Keep in mind that most of the things that you add there were compromises, he was walking a very fine line between unification and all out civil war. I doub…

Kemal Ataturk is like a lot of other historical figures. What he accomplished is great. If he did 1/100th of that in America today, any state would reintroduce the death penalty just for him. He was a massacring bastard, created institutions that codified racism, attacked and stole from innocent people. He is a monster. But he ended 1500 years of war between islam and The wast Christianity India China Africa ... But…

I find the best person to compare him to historically is Tito.

Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#417

Post by nonexpectation »

austenallred wrote: post #409
jackbravo wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, didn't know about that =). Although, it does say that: > no one is known to have been killed by the militia or anyone else specifically because of it. There were, however, other associated deaths: the militia and other state authorities used Boggs' Executive Order as a pretext to expel the Mormons from their lands in the state, and force them to migrate to Illinois. I'm pretty sure many muslims countries suffer…

No one is known to have been killed as a direct result of that order; that was the last straw after a lot of other stuff had gone down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haun's_Mill_massacre#Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Joseph_Smith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Crooked_River

Don't forget about the Mountain Meadows Massacre which occurred in the larger context of the "Utah War" about 20 years after your referenced events. http://mountainmeadowsmassacre.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War

Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#418

Post by tomp »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #400
tomp wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other, and perhaps bigger, point is why the need for ridicule in the first place? > Perhaps you would be inclined to understand, teach, etc. What approach do you suggest? Imagine, for a case, that you meet someone that claims to believe in unicorns. Most people would say that person is insane, and there is no point in "teaching" him/her otherwise; if one is so oblivious to the reality as to believe in the exist…

> Imagine, for a case, that you meet someone that claims to believe in unicorns. Well, we're going a little too deep in mixing trivial examples with significant real-world issues, which I think, beyond a certain point, just gets us off track. Here's the main point: there are large groups of people who believe in something for which they believe there is compelling evidence. You disagree with them, based on your evide…

> Here's the main point: there are large groups of people who believe in something for which they believe there is compelling evidence. You disagree with them, based on your evidence. [...] Their belief is derived in full weight of and respect for the scientific evidence.

No. There is no compelling evidence; there is even less scientific evidence (if you believe the contrary, please present it). And I don't need evidence to disclaim their belief, just as I don't need evidence to disclaim the belief of unicorns; the person making a proposition should present a proof. Edit: Mind you, I fully believe that unicorns could exist. But if you claim they do exist, I will call you on your bullshit, and demand you present a proof. Basically: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.

> That is, there is a measure of something akin to faith involved.

No, you don't understand science. There is not faith. There are only measurements. Even gravity is not "proven"; it's only "demonstrated" to such a degree that we reasonably believe it's foolish to believe anything else.

> Your certainty that they are wrong is exactly as valid as their certainty that they are right.

This is the other part of my argument; even if we assume that the universe and everything in it was created by God, the question is, which God? There is no "they" who could be "right"; there are different fractions of people, having different, incompatible but equally irrational beliefs (Egyptian gods, Greek gods, Roman gods, Jewish/Christian/Muslim god, Hindu god(s), ...). Each of these theories could be true, and if one is true all others are necessarily false (including atheism). Occam's Razor, a mental trick commonly applied in science, suggests that all religions are false.

Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#419

Post by unclebucknasty »

jules wrote: post #229
unclebucknasty wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's merely an uninsightful and flawed analogy with a deeply wrong conclusion. How so?

Lets count some ways: - Religion is different than race, because race is something that a person is born with and cannot possibly change. - He tries to make deliberately offensive panels that are supposed to provoke the same reaction in people as Charlie Hebdo's comics supposedly provoke in muslims, but he falls short by a long shot. The reaction to his deliberately offensive panels is "meh", not outrage, which compl…

>Religion is different than race, because race is something that a person is born with and cannot possibly change.

You assume that change is a desired outcome. Mr. Sacco does not.

>He tries to make deliberately offensive panels that are supposed to provoke the same reaction

I don't think Mr. Sacco believed it would invoke the same outrage as much as illustrate his point using imagery that everyone would recognize as offensive, even if they understood that he was making a point and were not actually offended.

>He depicts Charlie Hebdo as a magazine that makes fun of certain groups by maximally offending them without any satirical value.

I don't know the complete history of Charlie Hebdo, but Mr. Sacco provided at least one example of what he perceived as a double-standard. And, he calls into question the low-brow maligning of Muslims from both an artistic perspective, and a cultural one. As has been often pointed out, no other group seems to respond to satire as does a particular subset of Islamists. Mr. Sacco is simply suggesting that perhaps we should be asking why this is the case. This is why he singles out the magazine's attack on Muslims.

>his implication that it's then not worthy and we should rather appease the offended groups is still wrong

I don't think he was saying this. Rather, he's calling for introspection and earnest exploration of whether there is even the possibility that other dynamics are at play here.

There is, perhaps, a thin line between satire and hatefulness, bigotry, or even the simple promulgation of cultural superiority. At a minimum, he's asking us to be aware of that line.

>Free speech as long as you like what is said is not free speech.

He's specifically not condemning free speech (in fact, he "affirms" it in panel eight). He's calling for understanding, purposefulness, introspection, and responsibility in employing free speech. He's also speaking to his fellow artists and, tacitly, asking them to consider their standards.

>His comic is patronising ordinary muslims

Actually, I think your comment patronizes "ordinary muslims" more so than does Mr. Sacco's comic. And, I think you're making the assumption, not him. But, perhaps he could have been clearer in saying "some Muslims" for those who might take him literally.

I think you completely misinterpreted/misunderstood the message here.

Re: Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad

#420

Post by Joeboy »

Joeboy wrote: post #312
jules wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment was most likely deleted by the person who posted it, right?

From the replies I was assuming it was deleted for using the word "faggot" as a pejorative. I may be wrong. To be clear, I don't mind the fact it was deleted. I do think Freedom of Speech is a poor justification for reprisals against Muslims of Islam partly because, as Stanley Fish put it, there's no such thing as free speech and it's a good thing too.

That was supposed to say "Muslims or Islam". Can't edit it anymore and just realized it makes me look like an idiot.
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