Quote:
Originally Posted by ~ocean
r we all forgetting this is all beacuse of someones ignorance.. insulting the muslims on u tube.. the person who started all of this should be punished as well..
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Ocean;
I found your statement chilling.
I have to ask three questions which I'll front load and then expound on. Who should do the punishment? What should the punishment be? What *crime* has he committed?
Each one of these questions is important and I'm taking you at your word that you believe he really should be punished. Should the US government punish him? If so, for what crime? Making a hateful video that insults this or that group isn't a crime in the United States. If it were, then D.W. Griffith would have gone to jail for "Birth of a Nation" which was horrifically racist. The person who made this film has a
Constitutionally protected right to do so and can only be punished for doing so by our government under the most extreme circumstances. Are you ready to see Dan Savage driven off the air or out of the newspapers because I guarantee you that if we punish this guy for his insulting Muslims then we're going to, if only for the sake of consistency, punish Savage for insulting Christians.
Perhaps you think he should be punished by the people in Libya or Egypt or Yemen? If that is the case there's a word for that--it's called a lynching. Are you really going to sit there and say you are advocating mob violence? Perhaps you think we should turn him over to the legal authorities of a Muslim-majority nation. If so, again, on what grounds and do you want to open *that* can of worms? Are you prepared to turn over Salman Rushdie to, say, Pakistan which has blasphemy laws? Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" had him living under a fatwa for two decades and if he were turned over to the Pakistani courts he could be tried and put to death for violating Pakistan's *blasphemy* laws. If you turn over the maker of this film, whoever he turns out to be, you have to turn over Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has also written and made utterances that could have her tried for blasphemy in any country that still has such laws on their books.
And then, what should the punishment be? Should he have jail time or should he be executed? These are all questions that are *inescapably* raised by your statement. While I understand that it is emotionally satisfying to shout for his head on a pike, don't you think that we should resist that urge?
I'm not defending his movie, I'm not even defending him because I think he made a movie that was bigoted with the intention of inflaming anti-American sentiment abroad and anti-Muslim sentiment in the USA. But that is not a *crime*, it is simply odious behavior. I am defending a principle and it is this: people have a right to make utterances that I find offensive and wish that they wouldn't make. Hell, I'll go so far as to say that, at times, I wish they didn't have the *right* to make those utterances but that is me in the heat of emotions. Today the government can shut down the speech of someone we all think is odious, tomorrow they can shut down the speech of someone we all admire, the day after that they can shut down *our* speech.
I am sympathetic to the protesters
right up until they set foot on embassy grounds. But I do not think we should let ourselves be tempted to go down the road of censorship. There are people, fellow countrymen of mine in the USA, who think the very *existence* of this web site and every single word posted on it is a deep offense to their religion. They are free to blog about it, write songs about it, find the ISP that hosts the site and stand outside holding signs from now until the sun expands in a few billion years and vaporizes the Earth. But once we go down the road of censorship, they will shut this site down because it offends their religion and then, when we protest because our site was shut down, they will have us arrested for offending their religion because we protested their action. And when people speak up for us in solidarity they *too* will be arrested for insulting the religion of the censors.
You can tell when someone really believes in a right, it's actually rather easy. Ask them if they believe that right extends to the person or group they most oppose. If that person answers no, they don't really believe in that right on principle, they're simply advocating their self-interest. The easiest thing in the world for someone here to say is "I think that queer people should be able to write, speak and publish as they please". That tells us nothing about whether the speaker believes in free speech. The person who really believes in free speech is the one who will say "I wish this person did not have this right for their every word and utterance is odious to me and were it up to me, they would never be allowed to say such things. Fortunately, it's not up to me." That person believes in free speech down to the very atoms in the marrow of their bones for they are willing to pay the price of free speech, which is having to put up with speech you find repulsive.
Where do you stand?
Cheers
Aj