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Originally Posted by BroncoBilly
So by your last statement, it is a pass. Please don't patronize us with saying, "it's just a few". There were hundreds of thousands in every part of the world when this story broke, and the intelligence says that they were whipped into a frenzy by Iran, and Syria.
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There were hundreds of thousands of terrorists? (*)(*)(*)(*). We're outnumbered.
Those protests were because people thought their prophet was being defamed. It had nothing to do with supporting terrorism. Just like I'm not likely to make much headway with the Catholic Church by posting pictures of the Pope sodomizing young boys. It doesn't matter what I'm trying to say; the way I tried to say it drowns out the content of the message.
I come from a Western democracy that values free speech, from a culture with a long tradition not only of protecting speech, but developing the tolerance necessary to do so.
So I do not support the violence of the protests, or the notion that the cartoonists deserved to be killed.
But I also understand that cultures differ, and someone raised in, say, Afghanistan does not have the same long tradition of free speech and tolerance. So to expect them to react with tolerance and a reverence for free speech is simply ridiculous.
That does not mean I'm giving them a pass; I thing free speech should be a universal value, and do not believe things like "democracy is only for white westerners." But I do recognize that people responding in culturally predictable ways to incitement does not mean that Muslims are all violent terrorists.
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what those of us want to say about any religion is our right, it is freedom of speech.
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Agreed, of course.
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You continue to use Christians as some kind of sounding board
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That's largely because this is a Christian country, and I'm trying to show that you're holding Christians and Muslims to different standards. If we were in India, I'd be using Hindus in my examples.
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tell me how many Christians threatened to kill the artist that mocked Jesus with feces? Disgusting? you bet... threatening his life? didn't happen.
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Again, you're expecting medieval tribal cultures to somehow have, overnight, the principles and coping mechanisms that took the West centuries to develop. I freely admit that I think their attitude is inferior; but you're holding them to an unrealistic standard.