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Colin View Drop Down
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Points: 1260 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Colin Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13 February 2006 at 3:00am
Originally posted by peacemaker peacemaker wrote:

On saturday, Feb 11, 2006, there was a peaceful demonstration in Toronto against "offensive cartoons", and it didn't become a headline news. Media only wants to see violent protests, and not the peaceful ones.

http://www.islamicity.com/m/news_frame.asp?Frame=1&refer enceID=24681

Peace

You are correct about the media, but the media's "good news is no news" approach to news reporting is not especially aimed at Muslims. Unfortunately, bad news sells. Ask any newspaper proprietor and they will tell you how sales increase whenever a major disaster story breaks.
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Angel View Drop Down
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Points: 6641 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Angel Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13 February 2006 at 5:31am
ops154, Al Jezza has an english site  
~ Our feet are earthbound, but our hearts and our minds have wings ~
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Points: 349 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Ketchup Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13 February 2006 at 8:46am
Originally posted by Israfil Israfil wrote:

Ok then Ketsup then perhaps there was some misunderstanding on my part then, if you may, forgive me. But to say multiculturalism isn't working is an entirely different issue then and totally off topic, however just briefly commenting on it I have to say that, that is a diferent view to have. Obviously you are a Brit, me I'm an America and multiculturalism is working fine in California. Our state alone has more diverse group of people than any country and U.S state.

Of course we have our differences but the same can be sai about putting different species of animals together. The important is the acclimation of those in our society who are our foeign to our culture. You have to be patient. Regarding the issue of cartoons I'm curious to how the subject was deterred and came to multiculturalism.

Keeping in the spirit of being off topic..

Quote I never said I was racist, what I said was that I come from what was up until aprox 20 years ago a predominantly white country and one of our major trades was slavery.. if that makes me racist then so be it.  Personally I don't care if someone is black, pink, green or, red.  What I do care about is the erosion of our culture because multicilturism clearly isnt working.

I brought multiculturalism onto it bacause I was called a racist... as you can see I'm not bothered if people are the colour of the rainbow.

Our society is eroding.. our western way of life does not fit in to the Islamic scheme of things...

Since the flood gates openned and the whole world poured in because they wanted to live in the land of "milk and honey" it is an undeniable fact that things have gone down hill and there is a strain on society.  The new commers keep themselves to themselves. so you are right its like putting lots of different animals together. its when the new animals fail to mix with the rest of society and we find ourselves having to change our way of life to accomodate them then things get sticky.. they don't understand our way of life and when they do they don't like it because we are immoral westerners yet they came to us.  So you get tension.  It can only work if they accept the values of thier host country.

The multicultural fantasy in Europe -- its eclipse can be seen most poignantly in Holland, that most self-definedly liberal of all European countries -- was that, in due course, assuming that the proper resources were committed and benevolence deployed, Islamic and other immigrants would eventually become liberals. As it's said, they would come to ''accept'' the values of their new countries. It was never clear how this vision was supposed to coexist with multiculturalism's other main assumption, which was that group identity should be maintained. But by now that question is largely academic: the European vision of multiculturalism, in all its simultaneous good will and self-congratulation, is no longer sustainable. And most Europeans know it. What they don't know is what to do next."

 

Multiculturalism is a fantastic idea on paper. in reality a dead duck.
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Mishmish View Drop Down
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Points: 1694 		Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Mishmish Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 February 2006 at 5:35pm
The Right to Be Offended
http://www.masnet.org/articleinterest.asp?id=3191
Gary Younge
The Nation
February 8, 2006

In April 2003 Danish illustrator Christoffer
Zieler submitted a series of
unsolicited cartoons offering a lighthearted take
on the resurrection of
Christ to the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
Zieler received an e-mail
from the paper's Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser,
saying: "I don't think
Jyllands-Posten's readers will enjoy the
drawings. As a matter of fact, I
think they will provoke an outcry. Therefore I
will not use them." Two years
later the same paper published twelve cartoons of
Muhammad, including one
with him wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with
a burning fuse.
Predictably enough, it created an outcry. How we
got from there to talk of
"the Muslim threat" to the immutable European
traditions of secularism and
freedom of speech, while Scandinavian embassies
burn in the Arab world, is
illuminating.

Four months after the cartoons were published,
Jyllands-Posten's editor
apologized. In the intervening time Muslims
engaged in mostly peaceful
protests. Several Arab and Muslim nations
withdrew their ambassadors from
Denmark while demonstrators picketed embassies.
According to Denmark's
consul in Dubai, a boycott of Danish products in
the Gulf would cost the
country $27 million in sales.

All of this went largely unnoticed in the West,
apart from critics who
characterized the protests as evidence of a
"clash of civilizations." In
their attempt to limit free speech, went the
argument, the demonstrators
proved that Islam and Western democracy were
incompatible.

Even on its own terms this logic is disingenuous.
The right to offend must
come with at least one consequent right and one
subsequent responsibility.
People must have the right to be offended, and
those bold enough to
knowingly cause offense should be bold enough to
weather the consequences,
so long as the aggrieved respond within the law.
Muslims were in effect
being vilified twice--once through the original
cartoons and then again for
having the gall to protest them. Such logic
recalls the words of the late
South African black nationalist Steve Biko: "Not
only are whites kicking us;
they are telling us how to react to being
kicked."

Nonetheless, the "clash of civilizations"
rhetoric framed the discussion for
the almost inevitable violence to come. For as
criticism mounted, other
European newspapers decided to reprint the
cartoons in solidarity with
Jyllands-Posten. This was clearly inflammatory.
Now the flames have reached
all the way to the Middle East, where Danish and
Norwegian embassies have
been burned down. And the violence has been
characterized as evidence that
Muslims are plain uncivilized.

There seems to be almost universal agreement that
these cartoons are
offensive. There should also be universal
agreement that the paper has a
right to publish them without fear of violent
reprisal. When it comes to
freedom of speech, the liberal/left should not
sacrifice its values one inch
to those who seek censorship on religious
grounds. But the right to freedom
of speech equates to neither an obligation to
offend nor a duty to be
insensitive. If our commitment to free speech is
important, our belief in
antiracism should be no less so. Neither the
cartoons nor the violence has
emerged from a vacuum. They are steeped in and
have contributed to an
increasingly recriminatory atmosphere shaped by,
among other things, war,
intolerance and historic injustices. According to
the Danish Institute for
Human Rights, racially motivated crimes doubled
in Denmark between 2004 and
'05. These cartoons only served to compound
Muslims' sense of alienation and
vulnerability. The Jerusalem Post has now
published the cartoons. Iranian
newspaper Hamshari is calling for illustrators to
ridicule the Holocaust.
The race to the gutter is on.

The acts of violence, including death threats to
Jyllands-Posten's editor,
should be condemned. The fact remains, however,
that the overwhelming swath
of protests, particularly in Europe, where crass
banners and suicide-bomber
attire were the worst offenses, have so far been
peaceful. But those who see
this episode as freighted with weightier cultural
meanings have another
agenda. "This is a far bigger story than just the
question of twelve
cartoons in a small Danish newspaper," Flemming
Rose, Jyllands-Posten's
culture editor, told the New York Times. Too
right, but it is not the story
Rose thinks it is. Rose claims that "this is
about the question of
integration and how compatible is the religion of
Islam with a modern
secular society." In the mistaken belief that
Europe is a monoethnic
continent to which nonwhite people have just
arrived, Rose is not alone in
refracting every protest by a minority through a
racial, ethnic or religious
lens.

In so doing he displays his ignorance of both
modern secular society and the
role of all religions within it. Without anything
as explicit as a First
Amendment, Europe's freedom of speech laws are
far more piecemeal than those
of the United States. Many were adopted as a
result of the Holocaust--the
most potent reminder of just how fragile and
recent this liberal secular
tradition truly is in Europe. Last year the
French daily Le Monde was found
guilty of "racist defamation" against Israel and
the Jewish people.
Madonna's book Sex was only unbanned in Ireland
in 2004. Even as this debate
rages, David Irving sits in jail in Austria
charged with Holocaust denial
over a speech he made seventeen years ago,
Islamist cleric Abu Hamza has
been convicted in London for incitement to murder
and racial hatred and
Louis Farrakhan remains banned from Britain
because his arrival "would not
be conducive to the public good." Even here in
America school boards
routinely ban the works of authors like Alice
Walker and J.K. Rowling. Such
actions should be opposed; but no one claims
Protestant, Catholic or Jewish
values are incompatible with democracy.

Which brings us back to Zieler. We will never
know what the response to his
Christ cartoons would have been because they were
never published. (The
paper's announced plan to reprint some cartoons
about Christ fails to
mitigate its double standard.) That fact alone
shows that the question has
never been whether you draw a line under what is
or isn't acceptable to
publish, but where you draw it. There is nothing
courageous about using your
freedom of speech to ridicule the beliefs of one
of the weakest sections of
your society. But Rose and others like him
clearly believe Muslims, by
virtue of their religion, exist on the wrong side
of the line. That
exclusion finds its reflection in the Islamist
rejection of all things
Western. And so the secularists and antiracists
in both the West and the
Middle East find their space for maneuver
limited, while dogma masquerades
as principle, and Islamists and Islamophobes are
confirmed in their own vile
prejudices.


To view more articles, news and campaigns on the
"cartoon" controversy,
please visit the Muslim American Society's
website at
http://www.masnet.org/.
It is only with the heart that one can see clearly, what is essential is invisible to the eye. (The Little Prince)
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