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Rackspace Shuts Down Quran-Burning Church's Sites
theodp writes "In response to a complaint, Rackspace has shut down the websites of the Dove World Outreach Center, a small 50-member church which has received national and international criticism for a planned book burning of the Quran on the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. The center 'violated the hate-speech provision of our acceptable-use policy,' explained Rackspace spokesman Dan Goodgame. 'This is not a constitutional issue. This is a contract issue,' said Goodgame, who added he did not know how long it had hosted the church's sites. Not quite the same thing, but would Kurt Westergaard's cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad also violate Rackspace's AUP? How about Christopher Hitchens' Slate articles? Could articles from one-time Rackspace poster child The Onion pass muster?"
awesome, it's nice to see a company with a bit of a spine, freedom of speech is one thing, but no-one has to provide a stage.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
"Freedom of speech" only applies to Government's interference in forms of speech. Rackspace is a private company and can do as they please.
How is this a matter of hate speech laws? There's no law involved here, only the Acceptable Use Policy of Rackspace. It's not a matter of whether people have the right to dislike other groups of people. It's a matter of whether you can be punished for breaking a contractual obligation not to host stuff that violates the acceptable use policy.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Political Correctness has replaced both freedom of religion AND freedom of speech in this country. We've become a nation of cowards.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The first amendment prohibits the government from suppressing speech, not Rackspace.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
is for all these groups going out of their way to condemn this idiotic church but no condemn the threatened response of adherents of Islam. If one little piss ant church in America can cause so many Muslims unglued.
Frankly, while I find the idea of burning any book abhorrent I think that spitting in the face of these radicals of Islam is more important than not. Either bring your religion to 21st century and join the rest of us or shut the hell up.
So, yeah a small town church with a ego maniac at its helm is burning a book, it is no excuse by any RATIONAL people to react with violence.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Tell me, how is book burning representative for that quote popularly attributed to Voltaire now again?
I'm not sure what's sadder. A backwoods pastor trying to provoke a reaction by book burning or the international media giving the idiot so much free airtime and so many free column inches. I bet the guy has never felt so important. If I were a cynical sort, I would think the media is devoting so much time to this subject purely to provoke a reaction from certain groups in order to have something explosive to report and moralise on. After all, nothing sells newspapers like violence and bloodshed...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
...how does a tolerant society deal with intolerance?
There are many inconsistent and hypocritical ways of answering this question. I'm not sure there are any good answers.
This "church" is doing to tolerance what Gödel did to mathematics -- showing its internal contradictions.
Reading a book from cover to cover should be a prerequisite to burning it.
Need to quote my own sig for those that have them turned off: (quote is sig was made intentionally shorter to fit the size limit. Here is the full one) "Freedom in the United States of America is no longer the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want." - A. Anderson
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
(1) The constitution is binding on the *government*, not private parties. Rackspace may deny service to anyone, just as Dove World Outrage Center may.
(2) There's a legal and moral distinction between being insulting or derogatory speech (Westergaard, Onion) and inciting violence (Dove).
(3) "Clear and present danger" is a recognized exception to free speech. Don't yell fire in a crowded theatre, etc. The *predictable* result of Dove's action is a sharply increased risk of retaliatory attacks killing US soldiers.
IMO any of these three reasons alone is sufficient to say that Rackspace's action is no affront to free speech. In combination, they're sufficient for me to say that anyone who protests Rackspace's actions more than Dove's is exhibiting a lack of understanding and/or perspective so serious that it's the domain of psychiatry rather than philosophy. I say that as a card-carrying monthly-dues-paying ACLU member, by the way. The actual advancement of civil liberties is only harmed by such ridiculous positions.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
To all the people claiming that this violates this church's right to free speech, please inform me of how this is a government action. Because that is what is protected under the First Amendment. Hell, it's the first three words of the fucking amendment...
You misunderstand the point of the first amendment, and the founders' conception of rights. The first amendment does not GRANT rights; it merely acknowledges that the right to free speech exists, and constrains the federal government (and by the 14th amendment, state governments) from violating the right. Individuals, and corporations, can violate people's right to free speech without running afoul of the first amendment, because the rights are PRIOR to the constitution, and are inalienable.
You are thus conflating the "first amendment" as the source of free speech rights. It is not, at least under the American view of rights. Sadly, you've been modded informative, which means many Slashdot readers are ignorant of the basic Enlightenment philosophy underlying American law.
I think the line is bit more blurry when it comes to things like ISPs. They're working with public property and they get government funding for crap like the national broadband initiative. So how can they turn around and resell services with restrictions that the government would not be allowed to have? Imagine if your electric company said "We're turning off the lights on any residence we feel is associated with hate speech." Private company, maybe, but I feel like that's different since they're also in a government protected market.
Both situations are different from, say, a restaurant refusing to allow you to get up and preach to all their customers. That's not the business of a restaurant.
Actually the interesting way to push back against the burning of the Rainbow flag (representing homosexuals), would be for a group of atheist homosexuals to congregate in public, just across the street from the church, and burning a bunch of Bibles. If they really wanted to be provocative, they'd even burn an effigy of Jesus on the cross.
I mean - surely such free spirited church goers would have absolutely no problem with homosexual atheists doing such a thing, right? They'd probably defend their right to do so with blood if they had to.
If burning your own copy of a book is "religious violence," to the point of being terrorism, then we have no free speech rights whatsoever, do we?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Yes there is. Fear. Cowardice. Very few are left with the spine to stand up and say that Islam is NOT above criticism. Even show a picture of Muhammad and television networks run away, newspapers cower in fear, the citizens of the most powerful country in the world turn into a bunch of scared children--unwilling to make even the most token effort to defend one of the defining principles of the Constitution that founded modern democracy. People who would have no problem with someone burning a flag or Bible become apologists for repression in the name of religion. And they don't do it because of "respecting religion." Let's be honest. They do it because they're COWARDS.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
He didn't mention the First Amendment. He mentioned freedom of speech. The First Amendment is the codified protection against government intrusion on that particular freedom. It doesn't apply to private actions.
But that doesn't mean that private actions can't limit freedom of speech. This private action decidedly does - it's a decision to limit expression based on its content. The fact that this ISP has both the legal right (assuming the contract is in order) and, to many, the moral right to do this does not mean that the decision does not limit free speech.
We accept limits on freedoms all the time, because we have to balance the rights of some against the rights of others. In this case, the two rights at issue are freedom of contract and freedom of speech. I suspect that the former supersedes the latter for most people in this case because: (1) contracts are voluntarily entered into; (2) there are other web-hosting alternatives available to the church. I suspect that were the second factor not present - say in the event of a monopoly or oligarchy of web hosting providers who all restricted particular content - quite a few people might consider restricting freedom of contract to prohibit certain types of content-based restrictions in web hosting service agreements.
The question isn't whether this limits freedom of speech. The question is whether this is a proper limitation on freedom of speech. A follow on question would be, if this is improper, should it be allowed under the law.
There's no question of rights or freedom here. This is about a guy being an absolute asshole and other people telling him that he should stop being an asshole.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
No. I keep seeing this repeated, but it's absolutely not true. Constitutionally-protected free speech only applies to the government's interference in forms of speech. Free speech refers to lack of any interference. If a lynchmob attacks the idiot ranting on street corner, he is not able to exercise free speech. If someone can not publish a book critical of Islam because an Ayatollah will put a fatwa on him and someone will kill him if he does, then it's not free speech.
That Voltaire quote that everyone trots out says that he would 'defend to the death your right to say it' not that he would 'defend to your death the right for the government not to interfere with you.'
The entire point of free speech is to allow people to say unpopular things. Personally, I think that burning Muslim and Jewish[1] books is a pretty idiotic statement to make, outclassed in stupidity only by the Muslims threatening violence if he does it. Burning books harms no one - it is simply an expression of an opinion. He has just as much of a right to do it as I have to call him an asshat for doing it.
When it comes to Rackspace, the situation is more difficult. As a private company, they have the legal right to refuse to provide a service, but what happens if everyone does? It is not possible to publish information on the web without using some privately owned infrastructure. Does this mean that it's okay to stifle free speech on the Internet, as long as it's done via corporate collusion rather than government mandate? In the US, the legal answer is yes.
Of course, it's also within the rights of Rackspace's customers to decide to move elsewhere. If I did business with them, this would cause me to notify them that I was leaving at the end of the contract period. My hosting provider will object if I use their service to do anything illegal, but beyond that places no additional restrictions. I would be very nervous about using a provider that would pull your account because your posted material that was in some way objectionable to some arbitrary group.
[1] Yes, he's also burning the Talmud, but apparently we only care that he's burning the Qur'an. Oddly enough, he's not burning any books from non-Abrahamic religions.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Have you seen the videos of the Muslim protests against this? They're burning all sorts of things in response to just the announcement of the Koran burning.
"When most people talk about free speech, they're talking about the principle of free speech, not the legal right."
Right... except you're not guaranteed the principle of free speech by anything. Also, even if the principle of free speach has any backing, Rackspace is not obliged to broadcast it for you. Their version of free speech is to not be required to echo your speech.
He's just burning some books. Our soldiers are being attacked because they are occupying peoples' homes and supporting a new government they don't all accept. The argument that burning these books would put our soldiers in more danger is not only incorrect, but irrelevant as here we are...giving up our rights and freedoms because we fear the terrorists. Another victory for fundies.
Talk about gross oversimplification. Our soldiers are being attacked because the people they displaced from power want it back. Oh, by the way, the people we displaced from power are Islamic Extremists, who deny basic education to women, recruit children into their armies, and are all around bad guys. The "regular" people of Afghanistan are all too happy to be out from the thumb of the Taliban. Not that our actions have been overtly friendly with civilians as of late, but that's the cost of a guerrilla war.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
If you can explain to me how burning someone else's holy book qualifies as satire or parody then I'll accept the equivalence with Westergaard's case.
I'm sure burning someone else's holy book would be vandalism, destruction of property, and a crime.
However, burning your own copy of a different religion's holy book, would just be destroying your own property, which isn't harming anyone else. And making fun of religious folks in general, and some people's strange notion that destroying one copy of a book is somehow scorning their beliefs.
If a religion wants to prevent people from burning their book, then they should distribute the book only to their religious institutions, under requirement that special agreements be assigned to protect their copy of the book from vandalism, restrictions against distribution, etc.
Slashdot moderation violates our founding ideals. You shouldn't use slashdot.
This is not a question about rights. No one is denying this man has a right to do what he says he will do.
What we are saying is that he is a fucking lunatic for exercising this right. Yes it will act as a recruiting sergeant for the Taliban (who must be laughing their heads off about this). Yes it will be used by demagogues to whip up mobs to attack Christians in many countries. Yes it is really just fucking rude and unnecessary.
If we were talking about cartoons of Mohammed then I might agree with you - there is an important principle about parody there - but this guy has just picked the most offensive thing he could do to the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, and is then going ahead and doing it. Irrespective of any arguments from common sense, principled tolerance, or basic good manners.
Lunatic is too kind - it suggests he is not responsible for his actions. This man is a crazy evil shit.
This sig all sigs devours
These guys are doing -nothing- of consequence. The Koran comes off of a web press in the tens of thousands, just like any other book these days. So all they are doing ultimately is making a bit more business for some printer. It isn't as though they are destroying some special, ancient Koran that has historical and cultural significance, they are just burning a mass produced book. If they can't see the futility of that, well then that makes them the retards.
Is it offensive? Probably but then when did anyone have the right not to be offended? I see offensive shit all the time out there, particularly against religions. South Park has been positively brutal to the Catholics, the Mormons, the Scientologists, etc. They have been some of the funniest episodes (the Mormon one kills me every time) but I'm sure they offended the hell out of a bunch of people. Tough. Nobody says you have the right to go through life and not be offended.
So these guys want to go offend Muslims. Big deal, who cares? Let them.
Tolerance means letting people do what they want, more or less. There has to be limits, you can't harm others, but there's no reason you can't offend them. Also real tolerance would be on the part of Muslims says "Ya knock yourselves out. Retards," and just ignoring the whole thing.
Western world: "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Islamic world: "Die for insulting our moon god!"
Christian world: "Die for insulting our sky god!"
"When Mighty Mouse falls victim of cocaine, the Devil's talcum powder, when directors with Mafia-sounding names make films about Jesus hanging out with whores just a stone's throw from that wholesome Universal Studios family tour, it is time for action. Unfortunately, conventional protests such as picketing and telephoned bomb threats do not seem to be working" Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore, New York
“Neither the label ‘fiction’ nor the First Amendment gives Universal the right to libel, slander and ridicule the most central figure in world history.” - Jerry Falwell
"Following the boycott and protests against The Last Temptation of Christ, no Hollywood movie studio has seriously considered making a film that challenges the gospel story of Jesus." - The Long Term Effects on Censorship as a Result of the Protest Against the Last Temptation of Christ
Does this kind of thing still happen in the Christian world? Hmm... Playboy in Portugal shut down for its ‘blasphemous’ Jesus photoshoot
Step back and take a breath. Look at the sequence of events. Think. This is about provocation, retaliation, and the nature of tolerance. One man threatens to do something but has not actually done anything yet, thousands "respond" by actually doing that thing first.
The parent asked how this can be satire, so...
Look at South Park. They have completely and totally slammed a number of religions, drug them through the mud. They had Catholic priests with little boys on leashes as sex slaves (attending a party for Satan), they had a whole episode mocking the Mormon beliefs complete with a brilliant song, they've slammed the Scientologists a couple times. None of these have faced any censorship. However they tried to show Mohammad. Not even insult him, just how his picture, and it got censored.
There is no explanation other than fear. It's clear Viacom has no problem with mocking religions in general. Why would they? Those episodes are popular. However for some reason Islam is off limits. The only reason is because they are scared. Muslims threaten violence at the drop of a hat, and they just don't want to be a target.
It it pure cowardice. We stand behind our freedoms... until someone says they'll hurt us, then we cave.
First, Free Speech only applies to the government laws. Read About It: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech...
It does not apply to contract law!
Second, the Church is free to get their website hosted on a million other web hosting companies. They just need to read the terms of service beforehand.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
It's a pity you couldn't manifest all of this moral outage when we were funding and arming those Islamic extremists to fight the Rooskies.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
"government has no right to speak negatively about what this guy is doing"
There is no "official" government view, the President has a viewpoint, the congress has its viewpoints,etc,etc,etc
The President of the United States has the same right as any other citizen to express his views, the fact that his views may have persuaded rackspace to yank the nutjobs
account is irrelevant as long the President took no official action to cause this. Auditing someone in retaliation for refusal to do what the president says is illegal and isnt necessary.
The bully pulpit of the presidency has been used many times and is completely within the Presidents perogative
whoa there cowboy, network neutrality has NOTHING to do with free speech laws.
Network neutrality only means that a network operator should treat packets the same regardless of source, meaning no "preferred service" to YouTube or degraded service for break.com. The content of the packets, the actual speech part, plays no part at all in this. Rackspace is also not a network provider, they're a hosting service.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
Uhm.
To the people who say 'Why doesn't the government condemn radical Islam?" , the fact is, we do.
The US Government, like all good government, speaks mostly through action rather than words in condemning radical Islam. Think about it.
-Supporting dictatorships in lieu of radical Islamic Groups (The US's support for Pakistan, and propping up the Shah of Iran)
-Supporting a dictatorship's war against a theocracy run by radical Muslims (Iran/Iraq War)
-Targetted killings of radical Islamicists in Iraq and Afghanistan
-Huge bounties on the heads of radical Islamicists (The hunt for Osama Bin Laden)
-Wholesale invasions of countries and the dissolution of governments that support radical Islam (Invasion of Afghanistan and the fight against the Taliban)
-Supporting moderate Muslim governments over radical ones (Visits to Egypt, funding for Pakistan and Iraq)
In fact, the American military's main goal over the past 9 years has been the suppression, destruction and dissolution of radical Islam over the years. Pretty much every armed force from the Army proper, to the CIA has been devoted to taking radical Islam to task.
***
Paster Terry Jones is acting like an asshat and ruining our work against radical Islam. THAT'S why we're condemning him.
When Muslims burn bibles, the Western world DOES get upset. Infact, we get so upset we make lists of the incidents and eventually take armed actions against groups that go too far. Obviously we hope that the local governments take care of things, but do you think that the US is so naive? We have diplomats and ambassadors all over the world busy 'nudging' governments whenever such actions occur.
Radical Islam taking action against blasphemers isn't a threat, it's a fact. We have armed men and women protecting us so we CAN do blasphemous acts safely. But doing them makes their job harder. It's just like you don't randomly provoke local gang-members or mafia-men: it's well within your rights to do, but is it SMART? No. Can the government protect you from retaliation? They'll TRY, but whether they'll succeed is a different matter.
Radical Muslims, like any radical members of a religion, are generally brainwashed ignorant thugs. Pastor Terry Jones is a radical Christian. Why should we treat him any differently? We should condemn his sentiments and desires, and make sure to take action in case things turn violent.
Did you know there was a Greek Orthodox that's nearby and destroyed when WTC fell on it? Do you know that they haven't been given their permit to rebuild but the city has given one to the imam? They've been trying since it was destroyed.. There's that double standard again. How long do we have to put up with it?
Did you know that the Greek Orthodox church has been allowed to rebuild the entire time? Did you know they are trying to broker a better deal with the port authority to get a new, bigger building? Did you know they turned down free land and $60 million because it wasn't enough? Did you know the port authority finally took the deal off the table because the church kept demanding more?
The church could have been rebuilt years ago if they were willing to keep their original location and pay for it themselves.
Hey guess what, Rackspace has the RIGHT to freely associate with whoever they want! Rackspace is a business and is under NO obligation to be the fall guy for this idiot church. They can get hosted somewhere else, perhaps the same servers that host stormfront.org? Or better yet, all the internet tough guys on slashdot today can probably scrape together enough to put the church's site up on some ubuntu LAMP stack and host the site themselves? You think its vital that the book burning message gets out? Fine, host it yourself. Its not difficult from a technical standpoint and its not difficult from a monetary standpoint. But don't think your insipid bigotry is moral justification to tell Rackspace how to run its business.
What Rackspace is doing is legal. What you're doing is justifying hatespeech and using that justification to force a business to behave in ways it does not want to.
Did you know that the area the world trade center was built in used to be called, "Little Syria" because it was the part of manhattan where the most muslims lived? There are plenty of mosques, and plenty of muslims in that area, and it's not a new thing.
Get over yourself. If they want to build a mosque next to a titty bar, in an old outlet store building, why the hell should you care?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Rothbard's argument is relevant, but not sufficient. There's a huge difference between saying that we should consider this from a propertarian viewpoint and that we should consider it only from that viewpoint. Rothbard crosses that line by the time he uses the word "simply" in the second sentence of your quote. As one poster has already pointed out, this situation is complex, and oversimplifying doesn't give meaningful input.
How would Murray Rothbard's argument address any apparent conflict when property is held in common? Do I gain the right to shout fire in a crowded public venue funded from tax dollars? Your Rothbard quote is arguing that all public property is criminal, because all rights can only be sustained where there is private ownership. But, in the US, it took a whole series of special laws in every state's legal codes for theatre owners to gain the right to be treated as though a contract existed without actually having printed one and gained signatures. A right of implied contract exists only because of specialised laws (a privilege or private law, the very word privilege coming from the Latin roots 'Privus' (Private) + 'Lex' (law)) intended to protect theater owners.
Rothbard actually is arguing for the unlimited power of the government to create or destroy rights. How else can the right of contract support all these other rights, particularly when, in his own example, a contract doesn't exist physically, but exists only by government fiat. At the same time, he's arguing against himself, holding that same government fiat is insufficent to grant another right by any other means than through property rights. Since the real US constitution is most emphatically not about how the government grants rights, but how it must rather respect them, neither facet of his argument really sheds more light than heat.
Who is John Cabal?
when the trolls, from the christian world, or the muslim world, or the liberal world or the conservative world, are the ones driving the conversation
the vast majority of christians, muslims, liberals and conservatives are simply good people. but the ones who make the headlines and drive every subject of conversation are the same sort of people you see with a -1 rating on slashdot: the fucking useless trolls
i swear, international relations and domestic political commentary needs something like a slashdot rating system
let the trolls loose on slashdot, with no ratings to tell the difference between something you should read and something you should ignore, and what do you get?: a flooding out of a sane rational commons that anyone with good intent wants to be a part of. you drive good people away, you reward the most useless sort of asshole: the destruction of slashdot
likewise, when the lunatic asshole muslims and the lunatic asshole christians are the ones who set the news headlines aflame and drive the topic of discussion, you get the destruction of the whole fucking world: no civility, no understanding, empty useless seething emotions, until somebody sets off the powder keg. i weep for our children
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There's no question of rights or freedom here. This is about a guy being an absolute asshole and other people telling him that he should stop being an asshole.
He is, of course, completely free to ignore them.
Don't you think at least one person thought even Ghandi was an asshole?
Doing what you believe is right isn't necessarily a popularity contest.
No, its not. Network neutrality is about promoting free competition in online content businesses by prohibiting network access providers from leveraging their market power in the access area to stifle competition in content. Its about commerce, not expression.
It certainly is not about prohibiting content hosting companies (whether or not they also happen to be ISPs) from discriminating in the content they choose to host.
Hi there! I hear you want to use borrow a megaphone to spread your word more clearly to people around you. Ok, sure, but you can't use it to shout out religious hatred, ok? You can shout that out on your own, by all means, but not using my megaphone.
Hey, I heard you've been using my megaphone to shout out messages of religious hate. I'll be having that back now.
See? He can carry on screaming about burning the Quran all he wants. Just not on Rackspace's services.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
And as Americans, doesn't Rackspace have the right to host the sites they want? What kind of double standard is that?
I fully support the Church's right to burn all the Qur'ans they want, but I also support Rackspace's right to choose what content they host.
Dilbert RSS feed
It's not blocking a thing. it's not saying "We're not going to allow the people who use us as an ISP to not be able to see your website" It's saying, 'we won't be party to you putting this on the internet, you can go do it with some other HOSTING SERVICE. To use an analogy, blocking them (and thus even coming close to the 'net neutrality' issues that people are touting) would be like putting up a wall around the protesters and saying that "we're not going to let anyone see your protest" while what they're actually doing is more like "We're not going to hold your sign for you"
Free Pie! The Pie is Also Evil!
Exactly, no one can keep you from being an asshole in America. But no one has to let you use their property or services to be an asshole either especially when there's a big NO ASSHOLES clause in your contract to use said services/property.
I wonder if Rackspace is this high and mighty about kicking pro terrorist and islamic jihad websites off their servers?
Somehow I doubt it.
Hey, I can make up random shit, too! Let's try it:
---
I wonder if WCMI92 stopped raping little girls.
Somehow I doubt it.
---
See, wasn't that fun?
Does that make it unpalatable to Americans? You betcha.
That's not actually the biggest problem. The problem with crappy soldiers like that is:
1) You get the general population against you.
2) Genocide nowadays is not such a viable candidate if you need to trade with lots of other countries and their support. And the survivors will "never" forgive you, it'll take many generations.
they give in to the urge to behave like animals.
There's the problem, it's not a shortage of soldiers, it's too many bad soldiers. You CANNOT afford to keep shooting the wrong people/targets.
It takes very brave and professional soldiers to be careful to err on the safe side and not shoot people when their own lives are under threat.
You screw up, next thing you know an entire village is now against you. They may not say to your face, but they now want you out. Previously they might have been neutral. After your screw up, building bridges etc isn't going to win them so easily. You are foreigners, if both foreigners and locals are screwing up, most will prefer the locals.
Screw up enough times and you lose the entire country. I think the US has lost Afghanistan and it's just a matter of time. The morale of the Taliban is higher than that of the US soldiers. Their soldiers take their losses better, they believe in what they are doing, they have supplies and support, they now control most parts of Afghanistan even if not officially.
It's easier for the Taliban to not make mistakes, when in doubt just shoot the guys in the US uniform instead of some brown guy in a shalwar kameez.
Such wars are not easy to win. In my country (Malaysia) they moved many entire villages to new villages ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayan_Emergency ). Foreigners did come in to fight and they did an overall good job, yes there were mistakes, but they were definitely not making trophies out of civilians.
The US can't fight it the way it fought Vietnam. They lost that war. They wouldn't have won. Soldiers in such wars cannot be trigger happy idiots. You need soldiers who would behave professionally.
It might not be laws, but it DOES violate the spirit of free speech.
No it doesn't. Consider:
A man knocks on your front door and asks if he can use your front lawn as a sitting area for talking to passersby. You agree, on the condition that he doesn't cause a commotion or damage your property. He proceeds to set up loudspeakers, shouts opinions with which you do not agree, riles up a crowd, and so on. Is it suppressing free speech if you kick him off your lawn? Of course not -- your front lawn is your private property, and he's only allowed to use it as long as you permit it.
Rackspace is in exactly that situation. They have private property -- servers -- which they rent to people who come up to them and ask for hosting. Rackspace agrees to provide servers for those people, provided they don't e.g. engage in hate speech using their services. When those people violate that agreement, they no longer have the right to use Rackspace's private property, and Rackspace is not suppressing anyone's freedom of speech by kicking them off their servers, any more than you would be suppressing that man's freedom of speech by kicking him off your lawn.
What's your solution?
Never get involved in a land war in Asia?
That is all.
Second, the Holocaust was not a Christian thing
I suggest you visit the Holocaust Museum in Berlin and become educated about the history of German anti-semitism. Germany has historically been a Christian nation, and the anti-semitic history of its Christian people has been well documented. Please don't try to rewrite history by pretending that religion was not involved. The Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer frequently invoked stories and images of supposed Jewish assaults and plots against Christians. There were numerous pro-Nazi Christian groups that wove Nazi propaganda into their theology (Rexists, etc.)
"Christianity, however, did play a critical role, not perhaps in motivating the top decision makers, but in making their commands comprehensible and tolerable to the rank-and-file - the people who actively carried out the measures against the Jews as well as those who passively condoned their implementation.... The old antisemitism had created a climate in which the 'new' antisemitism was, at the very least, acceptable to millions of Germans." - Catholics, Protestants and Christian Antisemitism in Nazi Germany
Some of the top Christian leaders actively supported the Holocaust:
"The duty of a Christian is to love himself first and to see that his needs are satisfied. Only then can he help his neighbor... Why should we not get rid of these parasites [Jews] who suck Rumanian Christian blood? It is logical and holy to react against them." - Patriarch Miron Cristea
Might I suggest actually READING a bible (or heck a Quran) sometime before spouting off like that?
Both books endorse violence, punishment, and death to those that violate their laws and customs many times within them. Simply because you like Christianity (most likely because you were raised within the church) and hate Islam (because it is foreign to you and you have not educated yourself) doesn't mean you can ignore the content of these books and pretend that the Bible is all love and daisies while the Quran is hate and flesh eating locusts. They both also have a lot of extremely positive stances on social issues, particularly when you consider that they were both written in human rights dark ages.
The fact of the matter is that neither Christians or Muslims follow the literal writings of their holy books and instead selectively pick components that support their moral stances. In truth the two books are fairly equivelent which shouldn't come as a surprise since they are Monotheistic tomes written in ancient times when there was a profound lack of understanding of the world and a general disrespect of people who are different.