Saturday, February 04, 2006

This is exactly what the world doesn't need right now.

The building in which the Swedish, Danish and Chilean embassy are seated in Damascus, Syria, has been attacked and burned by demonstrators. These later continued to the Norwegian embassy and attacked that building too. Supposedly this was triggered by a rumor that Danes were going to gather in central Copenhagen to burn copys of the Quran. Thankfully no one seems to have been killed or severly hurt among embassy personnel nor demonstrators.

All of this because of twelve drawings and the inability to understand just how fanatic fanatics can be. We should have learned our lesson a long time ago. Fanatic Nazis killed non-aryan people, fanatic Christians still bomb abortion-clinics, fanatic Muslims set of on suicide missions, other fanatic Christians tortured "heretics" and the list goes on and on. History is just packed with examples of what fanatics will do to make their point.

What is somewhat hard to understand however is that these twelve drawings have drawn such attention. I found much more offending pictures on the internet and even a site dedicated to pictures of the Prophet. Of course, that site states that it supports freedom of speech, but in fact it's main goal is to spread even more hatred. There is a Swedish neo-nazi organization behind it and if theres one thing they do not support, it's the freedom of speech but they sure as hell like to use it as an excuse to impose their twisted view of the world on others.

More and more newspapers in other countries have now started to publish these pictures. Once again under the cover of freedom of speech. I still can't decide if this is a good thing or not. On one hand it might be that the number of countries having published them is discouraging to fanatics, on the other hand it might just add more gasoline to the bonfire. For the time being I'm more inclined to believe the latter. Why? Because for moderate Muslims this just might be the insult that tips the scale.

Here in Sweden the heads of Muslim organisations have called for peace and serenity amongst their members. They still support the boycott of Danish goods but they condemn all acts of violence.


I had a discussion with a friend today. He said things like; What's all the fuss about? Those pictures aren't so bad. They have to understand the freedom of speech overrules everything."

After listening to his ranting for a while I asked; If I took a picture of your mother's pussy and published it on the internet, with her name, address and phone number, how would you feel about that?" He answered that he would kill me or at least give me a severe beating and force me to take down the picture. "But if my opinion is that her pussy is the ugliest pussy in the world and I use the picture to prove my statement, I'm only expressing my freedom of speech, am I not? You cannot claim that publishing pictures that severely offended a lot of Muslims is just an expression of freedom of speech and at the same time not letting me exercise my right."

2 comments:

Littlemilk said...

Great analogy. I just saw the movie Hustle and Flow, your pussy analogy made me think about the interesting ways people use the word in punch lines. Hustle and Flow did that too.

Check that movie out if you can. The actor Terence Howard is up for a best actor award. He did a great performance.

PissedOffPencil said...

Thank you Littlemilk, I'll try to see it when the opportunity arises. :)