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The Implications of Google Restricting Access To Anti-Islam Film
ideonexus writes "While the decision has been a footnote in most news stories, the Washington Post is raising the question of what it means that Google can shut down access to the anti-Islam film in countries where that film has sparked riots, something the American government cannot do thanks to our First Amendment. A popular meme in the Information Age is that the Internet spreads democracy by enabling citizens to organize and speak out, but we forget that much of that speech is now hosted by third parties who are under no obligation to protect it."
that shutting down access to anything in this country can't be done by the American gubmint "thanks" to our First Amendment then let me sell you this bridge I own...
First Amendment is BS. Read up on the Tarek Mehanna case .
Exactly four years ago this month I was finishing my work shift at a
local hospital. As I was walking to my car I was approached by two
federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do
things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. The “easy “ way,
as they explained, was that I would become an informant for the
government, and if I did so I would never see the inside of a
courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it. Here I
am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a
solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down
for 23 hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very
hard—and the government spent millions of tax dollars – to put me in
that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me
stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a
cell.
In the weeks leading up to this moment, many people have offered
suggestions as to what I should say to you. Some said I should plead
for mercy in hopes of a light sentence, while others suggested I would
be hit hard either way. But what I want to do is just talk about
myself for a few minutes.
When I refused to become an informant, the government responded by
charging me with the “crime” of supporting the mujahideen fighting the
occupation of Muslim countries around the world. Or as they like to
call them, “terrorists.” I wasn’t born in a Muslim country, though. I
was born and raised right here in America and this angers many people:
how is it that I can be an American and believe the things I believe,
take the positions I take? Everything a man is exposed to in his
environment becomes an ingredient that shapes his outlook, and I’m no
different. So, in more ways than one, it’s because of America that I
am who I am.
When I was six, I began putting together a massive collection of comic
books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a
paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors,
there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the
oppressed. This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of
my childhood, I gravitated towards any book that reflected that
paradigm – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I
even saw an ethical dimension to The Catcher in the Rye.
By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was
learning just how real that paradigm is in the world. I learned about
the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European
settlers. I learned about how the descendents of those European
settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III.
I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed
insurgency against British forces – an insurgency we now celebrate as
the American revolutionary war. As a kid I even went on school field
trips just blocks away from where we sit now. I learned about Harriet
Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this
country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and the struggles
of the labor unions, working class, and poor. I learned about Anne
Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned
dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King,
and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how
the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one
invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight
against apartheid in South Africa. Everything I learned in those years
confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was six: that
throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the
oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned
It's certainly possible that it was a deliberate provocation altough people who want to be offended can always find a reason to do so.
Have you actually seen the trailer? No more funding went into this piece of crap than into a purchase of a Domino's pizza. Anyone with an axe to grind and a green screen could have made this. It in no way "screams Israel".
The film "caused" nothing. Islamists CHOSE violence, which reflects on their Superstition, not the film.
This perfectly exposes Islamists, and is well worth the few casualties the Islamists inflict. If _I_ attack Superstition that makes me not PC and a Bad Man.
Well, have some Superstition direct from the source! In your face, by their choice.
http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/us-ambassador-christopher-stevens-killed-body-dragged-through-streets-by-muslims-islam-religion-of-peace-2.jpg
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Quite possible. Look at it from the perspective of someone in the religious right: They see the world divided, with the forces of Islam threatening to destroy western civilisation - a violent barbarian horde, willing to kill all who oppose them. Even worse, the rest of western society seems blinded to this - unable to see through their political correctness and fear of being seen as racist that there is a culture war on. This must be quite terrifying for those right-wing Christians - it's as if Hitler was marching across Europe, and Chamberlain just wants to sit down with him for tea and crumpets. So, they ask, how can they convince the leaders of the free world that Islam poses a threat so serious that action must be taken? The answer seems obvious: Let the fanatics be their own undoing. Goad them into acts of violence so great that they can no longer be ignored, and so prove to everyone that there can be no possibility of a peaceful coexistance.
It's a good plan, too, because it really does prove their point. If even just making an obscure film insulting the religion is enough to spark off riots and murders around the world, then it does start to look like the multicultural dream isn't realistic. When the foundational ideals of one culture are an intolerable evil to another, how can they occupy the same space without conflict?
The image of the Hebrew prophet Moses high-fiving Jesus Christ as both are having their erect penises vigorously masturbated by Ganesha, all while the Hindu deity anally penetrates Buddha with his fist reportedly went online at 6:45 p.m. EDT, after which not a single bomb threat was made against the organization responsible, nor did the person who created the cartoon go home fearing for his life in any way. Though some members of the Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths were reportedly offended by the image, sources confirmed that upon seeing it, they simply shook their heads, rolled their eyes, and continued on with their day.
http://www.upworthy.com/we-saw-the-violence-freedom-of-speech-can-spark-now-lets-see-the-love?g=2&c=cp1
A popular meme in the Information Age is that the Internet spreads democracy by enabling citizens to organize and speak out...
A rather one sided meme. The internet spreads hate and intolerance as well using the same principles. The internet is both a conduit and a doorstep shaped by the capacity to make perception what we want.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Rubbish. A movie can not have the intent to offend since a movie can not offend. The only person who decides who is offended is the person who gets offended at stuff. I can say whatever I want to you, if you get offended by it that is your problem, not mine. You can chose not to be offended by it. Adults generally do when children say offensive things. When retards say offensive things too.
In this case the "offender" and the "offendee" are equally retarded, and boom, you have a boom.
People supporting free speech should sponsor one such movie a week, hitting every major and minor religious figure in history, until these retards stops electing to be offended by something that is not offensive.
No One Murdered Because Of This Image
When the foundational ideals of one culture are an intolerable evil to another, how can they occupy the same space without conflict?
You are unfortunately speaking the truth when it comes to fanatical members of Islam. Their culture is incompatible with the majority of western cultures, I'm not stating this based on having read anything in the Koran, simply based on observation. You do not see Christian's on crusades murdering, you don't see Jews in violent riots, the Sikh's do not try to destroy embassies, or those with believe in Hinduism (the 3rd largest world religion behind Christianity and Islam).
I do believe there are a majority of Islamist people who are peaceful and compatible with other religions. Unfortunately for them there are a large number of radical members of their religion causing a serious problem.
Terry Jones and Fred Phelps are real embarrassments for many Christians. They both spread hate in the name of their religion, which is shared by millions of others. They don't speak for those millions of others, and I hope the world generally understands this. These are fanatical members of Christianity. These are the people who incite others to violence--either it's gay rights, military families, or radical Islamist's.
I think the important thing to take away is that not all Islamist's are the problem. Arab does not equal bad. Individual people are bad. Groups of people are not always* bad, and so it is unfair and wrong to target entire groups when a small segment is the problem.
BTW, we should also consider our own media outlets. For example, if you were an foreign person watching mainstream media reports during the peak of the Occupy movement you might get the impression that it was a movement that the majority of the US was behind, that it was disrupting daily life, and a real clash between the people and the establishment... the truth is that it was quite localized, and while many average citizens were willing to make some posts to Facebook about it, they were not going to the movement organizations, or anything like that. So the truth is that the number of American (and other) people actually actively involved in the occupy movement were very small. The same thing is going on here. We see reports of riots, destruction, etc--how many people are showing for these vs. the total populations? Is this just an over inflation and over dramatization by our news media which are compelled to have 24/7 video coverage of events? The same media who will select the best angles to make a crowd look bigger? The same media who will float a canoe down a street with 2" of water, while filming at a low angle, to make watchers believe the street has feet of water on it--only to be embarrassed when two people walk right has the canoe in standard boots?
Don't allow the media to "radicalize" YOU. Yes, violent demonstrations that end in death and destruction must be taken very seriously. And those who performed these terrible acts should be caught, tried and punished. But do not be goaded into escalating that violence.
What you describe is agnosticism, lack of belief in God. Atheism is the explicit belief that God doesn't exist.
To me, this difference is important, because I used to be an agnostic until I've realised that this position was just a result of my liberal upbringing. Atheism is a much more reasonable position, because there are many good arguments why God cannot and does not exist in addition to the arguments against the positive arguments for the existence of God.
Bertrand Russell's "Is there a God?" was an eye-opener to me. Some of the arguments in it support only agnosticism, but some also support atheism.
You're right, though, that even an atheist might not have a motivation for arguing or fighting against theists. For that you need independent additional motivation, like e.g. believing in rational enlightenment or, from a more practical perspective, being against the countless wrongdoings of the religious institutions. I personally would fight against religion, because it's stupid and I dislike stupidity.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
We have now recognised the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate.
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
Being offended does not mean you have the right to censor someone nor does it mean that you have the right to lash out at others. If the movie bothered you, I refer you to JSM's points 3 & 4. Explain why the movie is wrong and fight against its bigotry.
I believe this onion cartoon explains the difference between Islam and the other major religions well:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/no-one-murdered-because-of-this-image,29553/?ref=auto
So are idiots in america viewing this as a freedom of speech issue.
This is not a free speech issue, it is a freedom of religion issue. Freedom of religion is not your freedom to censor, it is my freedom to do what I want with religion. I can follow them to the letters, I can take and leave any parts, I can completely ignore it and I can mock it. The right to mock religion is a important part of religious freedom. Consider the following:
Islam claim that Jesus is only a average prophet like many others, he is even not the best one(that would be Muhammad, right?). From the point of view of a Christian, that believe Jesus is the half-devine son of God, this is extremely offensive. Your right to worship is base on your right to mock someone else's religion.
Now take a deep breath and take your stupid hate cult back to the bronze age where it belong.
Thanks,
The civilized world.
My kids (non-religious and mixed-race) are in a Jewish day care center whose employees include a hijab-wearing Muslim. Now, I'll grant you that the Orthodox members do have their own room with their own teacher - but in general it shows that multiculturalism can and does work.
What doesn't work is extremism, and we should all work to rein it in.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Hardly just one. Christianity today is quite moderate (mostly, there are exceptions), but it has had it's inquisitions and holy wars in the past. A large part of the reason the US was founded with a secular government was to avoid the christian-on-christian violence seen in Europe, where Protestants and Catholics had been taking turns slaughtering each other and many minority sects were banned outright. Judaism lacks the numbers to do much today other than take part in some territorial squabbles, but their own historical texts describe how they came to possess Israel by first emptying it of former occupants, and you can see the propaganda still in there describing the previous tribes as so evil the land rejected them and God personally ordered even the children slaughtered to exterminate their line. I don't know a great deal about the other significent religions, but I'm sure a little research would reveal even Buddhism - usually regarded as one of the most non-violent religions around - must have a few skeletons in the closet.
If you're going to convince me that you're truly Muslim - or at least decently educated, then you need to be able to transliterate "God is Great" in a way that follows the accepted norms. Maybe you're being dialectical, but Islam is based on classical Arabic, and there's a "proper" way to render that phrase in English. As it is, it makes me wonder if you're truly Muslim or just pouring gasoline on the fire.
As far as I'm concerned, religious displays of violence are major sins, regardless of whether they're Muslim, Christian, or whatever. They're the ultimate in hubris, because they're basically saying that God, the Almighty, is too weak and too feeble to protect Himself, and so must enlist crowds of murderous men to do the job. God, if He is Who you say he is, could do a Sodom-and-Gomorrah on any place in the Universe, or even wipe the entire planet, if he felt the need to defend Himself. We see every day how the Earth and the heavens can be subjected to earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, plagues, meteor swarms - even supernovae. And that 's just in an apparently undirected way. If God can bind Leviathian, those are the least of punishments he could aim at the infidels if that was His desire. These mobs are about as meaningful as if a nest of ants were to rush to my defense against another nest of ants. As the Qur'an states repeatedly: "Let God be the judge".
Likewise, I'm very much opposed to suppression of offensive speech, because if you have faith, you understand that God is too powerful to be overcome by lies. That lies may eclipse the truth, but the truth will eventually prevail. And that the best way to expose lies is to bring them forth into the light of day for all to observe how their details fail, not to suppress them in the hope that no one will believe them.
There are a lot of ideals that America has discarded in the last 30 years or so, but one that we've managed to hold on to is the idea that free speech means free people. In a more authoritarian country, such slanders as this "film trailer" would either become underground "forbidden knowledge" (with all the appeal inherent), or officially sanctioned. Either way, the message would be legitimized. Instead, the controversy enabled by free speech and the freedom to view and dissect this work has exposed the tawdry underpinnings of this scheme and the lack of moral character of those behind it. Instead of undermining Islam, it may, in fact, have done the opposite. We learn a lot about people (and religions, and ideologies) by the calibre of their enemies.
So are idiots in america viewing this as a freedom of speech issue.
What is it then if not a freedom of speech issue? The only effective way to fight idiocy is to drag it to broad daylight and humiliate it publicly. If you can't criticize others because you might hurt their feelings, they'll never find out there's something wrong. Yes, the movie is retarded and offensive, but you're free to just ignore it or you can respond with another movie that's even more retarded and offensive to the other side.
As long as there are huge masses of people who are willing to kill over a retarded movie, this kind of retarded movies will need to be made. I know it sucks to be caught in the crossfire between two camps of retards but the alternative to a little disgust is to stay sorrounded by retards forever.
If you owned the ground at "ground zero", you could do that.
It's called "free speech".
It would be insulting and offensive, but legal. Just like this video.
Do you remember when a cross (crucifix?) was placed in a bottle of urine in an art gallery? The Christians were rather upset, to say the least. The Pope got all bent out of shape. People protested the museum. Public funding for art was attacked, again. NOBODY FUCKING DIED. Get it?
If the Muslim world ever wants to be seen as something other than a bunch of animals, they need to learn to deal with stuff like this without killing people and rioting. It *is* free speech. Offensive free speech, actually.
Maybe it's a trap?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."