I think David Mitchell demonstrates my concern best, though he was talking about a slightly different subject...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt2u4dlZBHE
ok, so you think we should not 'annoy' them because then they will 'come'? I think they already came, and that was when we were not actively annoying them. further, what is your criteria for 'annoy' if someone is being unreasonable about what they claim offends them then I think it is totally appropriate to annoy the **** out of them (hence 0-/-< ). what happens when they start getting more vocal about their already present 'annoyance' with how we 'allow' our women to dress?
Perhaps the subject would be more easily addressed if we look at it from a slightly different perspective. It 'annoyed' a lot of white southerners in my country to see black people voting and intermarrying with white people. It 'annoys' a lot of people all over my country right now to see gays have the full legal protection as straight people. it 'annoys' a lot of people right now that a woman can end a pregnancy. in all three of these cases I think the people who are annoyed by these things deserve to live in a constant state of annoyance until they just ****ing get over it. Likewise any person who would be offended by a drawing needs to learn to just ignore it, and those who would fly into a homicidal rage need to be found and locked up. WE live in a free and open society, and we cannot allow fear of some ass hole idiot's temper tantrum to whittle us down.
If you think my annoyance is one-way then you are sorely mistaken, I stopped going to any kind of Church, not because I'm not spiritual, but because Church became more and more polarised in its opinions of other cultures and people.
Do you genuinely think that every Muslim in the world has fundamental beliefs? Do you honestly think that anyone who would take offence at images of Mohammed wanted to overthrow the West. It's things like this that
generate the cultural wall between even moderate Muslims and other cultures in the West, because whether you agree with fundamentalism or not, something like 'Draw Mohammed Day' is going to an offensive and hurtful thing, not because of what it says in the Koran, but because the images are being made
because they are forbidden.
That's the difference that people seem to ignore, this isn't someone expressing Freedom of Speech that may have the side effect of offending certain people, it's someone expressing Freedom of Speech
designed to insult and anger its target, be they moderate, passive, extreme or undecided, and it's mostly for the 'thrill' of watching them get annoyed at it.
The point of that video is to highlight the fact that we're all stuck here together, and the worst way of solving the problem is to poke an entire culture with a stick and then wonder why they are annoyed.
