your daily reminder that Islam is awful <iframe frameborder="0" width="640" height="359" src="http://api.dmcloud.net/player/embed/4e7343f894a6f677b10006b4/54ad1bf206361d50fbdab927/c6b3667ed8f9452da27c8b331efea884?exported=1"></iframe>
Shameful cowards Islam needs to get a grip on this -- their religion is becoming a laughingstock while this continues.
More tragedy, this stuff really is starting to wear on me. The amount of diseased demented violent humans that have been manufactured by idiotic foreign/domestic policies these last couple of decades just makes my stomach turn and more and more innocent civilians are losing their lives for it while the masterminds on all sides of these conflicts pony up the dough. Yeah, I pay lip service to free speech and then risk my security constantly by testing the barriers of my limited free speech, and also change my career to a field anchored to the idea of free speech. Makes total sense. Awesome to hear from a bunch of people who have clearly taken freedom of speech for granted. I think what's really happening is you guys paying lip service to protection of free speech and then shooting down any possible discussion of how to expand free speech and reduce the risks. You have this childish notion that the only way to make free speech completely safe is to repress it, please don't project that onto others. Also fantastic to ignore the context/history/relationship of extremist Muslims to France. France has made itself a home for extremists and then started bullying them and those extremists are now violently and non-violently harming both France and the Middle East. French government also have to be held partially responsible for creating this danger to all of us, allowing ISIS and their fellow terrorists to flourish much like Afghanistan did with OBL's crew.
They were just executing what many Muslims think should happen. Will some pay lip service and condemn this? Yes. Do many Muslims think that whoever "insults the prophet" should die or at least "live in fear for the rest of his life" (as Mathloom was wishing for)? Yes. Just like ISIS - I have learned that the distinction between "Islamism" and "Islam" is artificial. Islam itself is the problem. It is a fascist ideology. And when you have more Muslims in a country, you will have more of this stuff happen. It's inevitable.
This is a good time to be reminded of what it costs for freedom of expression, and what that really means. In 2014, 61 journalists were murdered in cold blood. 69% of them covered politics: 15% covered corruption. Of the murder cases that were brought to investigate their deaths, 96% of them did not receive any justice. Since 1992, there have been 1,101 recorded deaths, 88% of whom received no justice at all. Journalists are finicky people. They poke, and prod the powers that be for their sins no matter who that power is: extremist Islamists, Russian regimes, Mexican drug cartels, Egyptian Pharaohs. They bring light to those things people in power would rather not see: the excesses of the surveillance and torture state and dirty wars across the globe, the complicity of government with criminal gangs, and the rampant corruption associated with the accumulation of power. They are, and always will be, a vanguard for how free society feels to express itself. In a case that will fittingly receive no impunity, it should be fitting to bring to light the quiet, sacred sacrifice of those journalists who will have died without justice to advance our collective right to free speech. If you want to create something positive out of this disaster, honor the memory of all journalists who have fallen by donating to https://www.cpj.org/.
well, at least ATW isn't beating around the bush anymore. This is EXACTLY the kind of response extremists are seeking to trigger. They can't beat a society and the way it thinks by killing dozens, even hundreds at a time, but they can change it and make it the ugliness they envision by poisoning how people within it think, slowly but surely. There are data points that suggest the exact opposite of what you are claiming. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...e-political-views-of-muslim-americans/242975/
I missed this thread with the initial bombing but wanted to post my support for Charlie Hebdo and the loooong tradition of scathing French cartoons and satirical magazines and small papers challenging any and all evils. J'accuse. Spoiler
This latest incident should be a new thread IMO. What a tragedy . These are becoming way too common. These idiots have to be stopped. This will only further the backlash against Islam in western countries.
http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/01...ddle-east/pg-2014-07-01-islamic-extremism-10/ You think that people in any non-majority-Muslim country get anywhere close to approval rates for suicide bombings as the people in those countries? Think again. And even though there are plenty of Muslim extremists in the USA as well, Muslims in the USA are on average much better educated and much more secular than the vast majority of Muslims in the world. Try to count the hundreds of millions of Muslims from the Pew poll who think that suicide bombings against civilians "to defend Islam" are justified (more than "never"). Then think about how many Muslims from these countries immigrated to Europe. And then you will see that there are many, many Muslims who approve and support a terrorist attack like the one against Charlie Hebdo in which 12 innocent people were murdered - for freaking cartoons. Where is the outrage on the streets in Muslim countries? Where are the angry protests against this terrorist attack? They sure managed to come out in droves when the old Danish cartoonist drew his Mohammad cartoon.
I agree - texxx and I hardly see eye to eye, but we do here. What is it about this particular faith where this keeps happening and the perpetrators all share the same ideology? Why do people who live in Western countries, not caves in Afghanistan, keep falling for extremist ideology if it really is a "manipulation" of the faith? Why don't moderate muslims actually take a stand against this ideology or do they know that these actions are supported somewhere in the Quran if read literally? The common thread is just to visible to ignore.
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Muslim extremists have learned that violence doesn't have real consequences. This will scare many other papers away from playing with fire since bullets are scarier than law suits. You coddle these cowards long enough and this is what you get.
