Most people in this thread is abhorrently missing the whole point of this crysis, and the equivocation starts with the notion that somehow "US" have "TROLLED" the muslims, so they are just striking back, and therefore "WE" shouldn't have done so in the first place.
The problem with this version of events is that it completely ignores the fundamental difference between a totalitarian muslim state (and beware that most muslims in the world do not live in totalitarian states) and those states who have a core belief in individualism and liberty.
The latter states are *not* in the same category as the former. It is precisely the inability of some muslim fanatics to understand this basic point that they equivocate the ramblings, trollings, irate statements and what not of a free citizen in a free country with statements from a *whole* country. To these people, it is not a douche in country X that made a stupid cartoon / flick / whatever, it is the whole country that did so (by allowing them, thus condoning them and so on).
This has been true for years and years. When a danish newspaper went slightly off the rails, they weren't flooded by "offended" comments on their mailboxes, the danish embassy was bombed.
Think about that for a second. Now the counterpart is that even in this thread, this equivocation persists, even among people who should know better. No people, it wasn't "US" who offended muslims, it was a person, two people, three. With their own personal motives. Perhaps their motives were pretty high concept and very important, perhaps they were assholes. However, it *was not the "west" that trolled the muslims*.
This is very important to understand, because the whole discussion goes off the rails in this precise equivocation.
For the next question should not be "Should we troll the muslims in this way?". That's a fair question that can only, in a free country that is, concern the people asking that same question, and it shall be left for each one of us to answer that question. The real question that these fanatics confront us with is:
What shall we do when someone on our free countries decides (for whatever reason) to state something that infuriates this particular population leading to violent riots?
That is the question we should be asking. Not the other one.
So, again, people who seem to say that the newspapers and the moviemakers are the source of this problem:
What are you prepared to do to solve this problem?
You do have solutions:
1. Create laws to stop people from insulting every religion / group;
2. Censor every material that can anger people;
3. Make our leaders issue apologies for every time some random citizen decides to do something stupid;
4. Punish the random stupid citizen for annoying barbarians on the other side of the planet;
5. etc.
My only comment at this point is to make clear that if you choose any of those solutions or something equivalent, I will consider you to be an enemy of core values that I hold dear such as the freedoms our parents and grandparents fought so hard (and some died) for them. I will fight any change of these core values of our societies to the bitter end, and if that means I am against an angry mob of barbarian medieval gangsters who cannot bear the thought of someone somewhere else in the other part of the globe stating silly things about themselves, SO BE IT.
