The Persian people have an impressive history, fwiw, and I never hear disparaging remarks directed at them. I heard many when I attended UT during the hostage crisis. There was much anger and it appeared to be a lot of support for bombing Iran. But even then I saw no one bother the Iranian students who were attending UT at the time.
Oh but trust me, i've met alot racist SOB's out there. the comments about Iranians being terrorists is a common insult that get thrown around too easily. yet history has shown no iranian has ever been convicted of terrorrisim. it's a shame, but there are racist pigs out there. i guess every society has it's rotten appels.
BTW, remember, i said every Society has a minority of rotten apples. I'm not painting everyone with the same brush whatsoever.
Every country has their Pat Robertsons, I know enough Iranians to not assume that they are all the same through and throughout. Many say that they have a racist extremist president just like many Americans say about their own, so we probably do have more in common with the Iranians than we think.
what are you talking about? have you ever watched an episode of south park? if they are trying to show hypocracy then they are doing a bad job. they are just being jerks to be jerks and they are acting like children.
If I had to use one word to some this all up it would be "childish". One big to the Iranian leadership...
I've never heard that term being used with Persians. But I can also say that from my experience with Persians, is that many of them can pass of as a white person or European. The complexion is very fair, and often times its very hard to tell. I have heard many Iranians from the northern areas of the country refer to themselves as the true Aryan race. After all Iran does mean "Land of the Aryans."
I have to agree with New Yorker. The hypocrisy the Europeans are exhibiting here is almost too rich to believe. Do they not see it themselves?
Were the Jews responsible for creating that cartoon? No....Did they support it? No.... Free Speech is one thing, but to mock a horrible event like the holocaust? Imagine how you would feel if it was about 9/11
Go ahead and put me on your ignore list until all the Israel-Middle East stuff dies down (or beyond). The subjects of Israel and anti-semitism is not something I think we could see eye to eye on. I should probably stop participating in these kinds of threads, since they go nowhere.
To counter that, the member you are alluding to is one of those I have utmost respect for in CF.net. I seldom, if ever, openly express my positive opinion on a fellow member -- nearly all my praises are directed at relevant posts only. But I feel I need to make an exception on this occasion.
I think you know very little about how I feel on these topics, but since you see some logic behind a national leader using any pretext to spew more racial hatred and holocaust denials pretty much says it all for me. And don't bother responding.
Although I understand this is an emotional issue for you, I suggest that you not personalize these discussions. I stay emotionally detached and I suggest you do the same. People will disagree with you...and if you respond by calling someone an anti-semite, you're judging without sufficient evidence and it reflects poorly on your character.
It doesn't matter who created them. The point is that the cartoon produced in the west were deeply offensive and hurtful to Muslims. Who is anyone to say that it's ok to hurt Muslims with cartoons but not ok to hurt Jews? That's a double standard. The fact is that the Muslim Cartoons were pick-ed up in the name of free speech. The fact is that the cartoons put out mocking the Halocaust are not being printed anywhere. Has anyone seen the cartoons? Most of them don't deny the Holocaust and are political in nature. They are hard to find of course...so much for free press. I think the Iranians have made a point here. Yes, the content is disturbing...but the point is clear. There is a double standard.
To Muslims, Muhammed and Islam is the most sacred holy things in their lives. As a non-Muslim (which I am also) it is easy to say that it is "nothing". So to dismiss the "defiling" as nothing compared to holocaust denial isn't quite right. Both are different but wrong in their own way. But just as you find holocaust denial beyond the pale and orders of magnitude worst than "defiling", many Muslims will rightfully feel the opposite and its important you realize this also.
I feel the same way about this art as I did about the Danish art the inspired it, which is to say *yawn*. The can make whatever cartoons they feel like. T he official position of the leader or Iran that the holocaust was a myth is r****ded, but making some cartoons is not going to change anyone's mind about it. There are ignorant people, a good many of them in the mideast, that deny the holocaust and there is the rest of the world that realizes that it happened and was a terrible atrocity against Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Catholics and others. The ignorant already believe the holocaust was a myth, and the educated will not be persuaded by some stupid cartoons that few have even seen. I will say that the ran out of virgins cartoon seemed more clever/funnier to me than either of the Iranian cartoons I have seen.
I just want to step back for a second with a parallel. When black comedians make racial jokes against white people it is ok. Nobody was outraged by Eddie Murphy telling jokes about white people not being able to dance. At the same time, when Fuzzy Zoeller jokes about Tiger Woods and serving watermelon everybody who is not a moron cringes and considers it wildly inappropriate. Stop for a second and ask yourself why this is. Could it possibly be because in the history of the United States, racial stereotypes of black people were associated with slavery, murder, and all that crap while stereotypes about white people haven't been tainted by the same? Before moving on, I want to ask that if anybody doubts the Holocaust took place please respond, otherwise I will just assume it is accepted as real, and that is a precondition for everything from now to the end. If you are generally stupid enough to believe the holocaust deniers then I can understand how the rest of this won't make sense. Over time people begin to 'normalize' the motives of people far in the past. They begin to assume, for instance, on an emotional level that the system of slaves and plantations were some happy coexistence out of Uncle Remus, not what they were. Sometimes you actually have to go and look at first hand documents to remind yourself. As a case in point I don't remember if anybody remembers a not to old thread I posted about my deed not allowing for my house to be sold to 'colored' people. After someone posted a similar clause from another deed all the responses were more or less "that is so strange". This is because people know that there was more or less universal racism back then, but somehow emotionally can't grasp this and on some level feel that they were more or less like people are now. Black people were lynched (i.e. killed) almost daily for being black. Can you really grasp that sort of mindset? It is difficult for anybody. I have copies of some of the nastiest, most horrible, anti-Jewish racism the Nazis could put out. Believe me it is not pretty stuff. This anti-Jewish racism lead to an quasi-international movement to remove all of the Jews from society, treat them as subhuman, make many slaves and kill or starve the rest to death. This did not occur because of anything they did, but rather because of what they were. Almost immediately after the end of World War II, people who still harbored these racially motivated hatreds of Jews were exposed as bigots. They had to stop and regroup. Society would no longer tolerate these hatreds because of what happened, so they had to find other avenues to attack Jews. One of the prime ways that many of these people did so was to claim the Holocaust didn't happen. It is my best judgment that almost without exception, the people who made this claim did not do so because they believed it to be the truth, but because they felt that it was the best way to attack the new sympathy to Jews because of what had been done to them. This is why in much of Europe denying the Holocaust is illegal. It is not in order to stifle any real dialogue. It is because it has always been used as a wedge by the people who still hate Jews to rally support even if they knew they were lying. Of course there are people who hate Muslims with the same blind irrational hatred. To go back to the analogy there are black people who have blind racial hatred against white people in the United States. But in the United States there existed an institutionalized and nearly universal racial hatred against Black people, but not against white people. Rational thinking people see attacks against Jews as the rekindling of a massive forest fire that has just been extinguished. Yes people who speak out against Jews are treated differently that people who speak out against others. It is done so because their situations are different. I would also like to point out that at no point in this discussion have there been any widespread calls to boycott the Muslim world. I personally see these holocaust deniers as no better than Alfred Rosenberg or Hans Zoberlein. I care more about what happens to stray dogs and cats than I do what happens to them. But at no point is anyone calling them to be silenced or killed. They are free to wallow in their own fecal hatreds and make me loose the little bit of pity that I have for them. And before anybody talks about there being no Muslim hatred against Jews, I would like to point out the existence of Palestinian and Bosnian Waffen-SS battalions specifically formed around the concept of hatred of Jews, and if you doubt me I will provide references. So, once Muslims have been rounded up, put in detention camps, starved and worked to death or just murdered and robbed, and once this occurs on institutional and industrial scales such that 5 or 6, or however many millions die simply for being Muslims, then I think it might be time to consider what the Danish and what the Iranians are doing to be two sides of the same coin. At the moment I just see the same old forest fire starting to flare back up and it makes me tired that people can't see it for what it is. People b****ing about preferential treatment of the Jews are guilty of the same narrow sort of view that effect those white people who b**** about how affirmative action mistreating white people. It is so completely out of context that it is insane. So that's my rambling BBS rant for the month. That is all.
Ottomaton, I haven't read your entire post. Just want to comment on one factual error. It was Fuzzy Zoeller, not Payne Stewart, who made the watermelon comment.
