Well if you zoom out one step, the filmmaker created this movie because he was offended by acts committed by Muslims around the world, which means Muslims were responsible for the film being made, which makes them guilty of fomenting blasphemy about their own religion, which makes them guilty of offending themselves, which makes them guilty of violence and killings.
That is fine but a US Diplomat was killed over it. So that part isn't fine. I don't care if they argue on the web, on twitter, or make films, but if those films trigger events then the film maker no matter where in the world they are should be detained, questioned, and made to cooperate. American citizen or not, the only way the Egyptian film maker can make this right is by doing the right thing.
Then if you zoom out another step, those Muslims did those things because they were offended by non-Muslims doing things that were incompatible with Islam, which means non-Muslims were responsible for what those Muslims did, which was responsible for this guy making a movie about Mohammad, which was responsible for Muslim violence and killings we see today.
Eventually, you'd zoom out to the sun. Without the sun, trees would not have grown and ships would not have been built, and grass would not have grown and camels and horses would not have flourished, and people would never have traveled and different civilizations would never have known of each other's existence, and people in one region would have stayed in their respective caves and ate their fungi and worshiped their gods in isolated peace. So what's the point I'm trying to make here? We should have censored sunlight a long time ago.
Irrelevant. We cannot read any of their thoughts so we don't know why they acted. What we do know is that their actions were damaging and there has been a loss of life. People died so now it's more like yelling fire in a theater and people get trampled to death and you want to claim free speech.
The point here is the film maker knew he was going to trigger violence. He was part of the scheme and did not seem to care who would get killed over it. His film is hate speech at least and treason at worst.
His film, offensive or not, did not say "go forth, riot and kill" it was just a bad movie. The movie's creator should not be held responsible in any way for the actions of people who viewed it. If these same people has watched Team America I'll bet they would have had a similar (if not as extreme) reaction to the portrayal of muslims.
So the only mistake Bin Laden made is that his tapes said "Go out and kill"? Did they ever find the tape where Bin Laden said to hiijack airplanes and launch 911?
That being said Bin Laden was a terrorist long before 911, but I'm just making that point. Bin Laden is a dead scumbag terrorist, but the Egyptian film maker is a scumbag as well and his actions have costed who knows how many lives.
Let's hope there aren't any more lives lost over his ignorance.
What about the unwritten manifesto of radical Muslims that prescribes violence against blasphemy?
Muslims are condemning that. Why aren't Christians condemning these so called "Christians" who make films that do this? Where are patriotic Christians?
There is a big, big difference between "Mohammed is a goat-fucking paedophile" and "We should go murder some infidels".
A big difference to you because you're not a Muslim.
Uh what? If there's no difference to Muslims then they really are evil, a war really is inevitable, and they really must be destroyed, because they really will want to destroy us first.
I'm not saying that's how it is, I'm saying if they can't see the difference and they're willing to be violent over it then their faith truly is evil. I'm not saying any other faith ain't, either. Any faith which places you above nonbelievers, which is most of them, is evil.
Fundamentalists are nuts whether they are Muslim or Christian. We should not protect or coddle our fundamentalists. He (the film maker) should not be treated as anything other than a traitor. His actions hurt the troops, hurt the USA, he's a traitor peroid. Yes you have free speech but if your free speech is an act of treason while that speech need not be censored it's still a treasonous act not all that different from Al-Awlaki.
According to U.S. officials, al-Aulaqi was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda in 2009.[28][29] He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States.[30][31] In April 2010, American President Obama authorized al-Aulaqi's targeted killing.[32][33][34] The targeted killing of an American citizen was an unprecedented Presidential order which al-Aulaqi's father and civil rights groups challenged in court.[35][32][34][36] Officials stated that the "imminent threat" international legal standard is used to add names to the C.I.A.'s list of targets.[33]
Do you also think the Norwegian Labor Party should be censored because a follower of Breivik's ideology might be offended by their stance on immigration, and go on another shooting spree because they see it as a message that embraces the destruction of their white race? After all, we have to appreciate the fact that the white nationalists likely perceive the pro-immigration message as a threat.
Irrelevant. The more relevant question is whether or not we should be promoting Breivik's manifesto.
It's called the inquisition. A time when people where routinely tortured to death for a wrong word. Burned at the stake for espousing un-Godly ideas. You want it back, then let the fundamentalists religionists shut down free expression with threats of violence. If idiots want to tear down their own countries be being goaded by trolls then more power to the trolls.
There is only one way to react to this religious violence, troll the shit out of the idiots until the fellow citizens learn it is smarter to lock up violent religious reactionaries then people who express challenging ideas.
I refuse to be silenced by religious whack jobs. I refuse to allow the rebirth of the religious inquisition in my time. I honestly was largely indifferent to pro or anti-Muslim sentiment until now. The greater the violent reaction to the spread of anti-Muslim ideas then, the more I am for the spread of those anti-Muslim ideas and absolutely no different for any other violent repression of ideas by any other religion, Christian, Hindu etc.
This is exactly why free speech was instituted as law, to protect people from persecution by religious freaks, by those who abuse religion for personal gain, by those who claim superiority through religion. Free speech has it's roots in the resistance against religion, it was the weapon used to tackle the inquisition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition and prevent it from recurring. Based upon the way Muhammad is depicted in the Koran he comes off as a paedophile and a misogynist, a person who created a religion for his own personal benefit.
Now they call it enhanced interrogation. What has changed? I'm all for free speech but if we are going to have free speech we have to accept that the consequence is that anyone can yell "fire" in a crowed theater and that is okay because it's free speech.
Does this anti-Islam video call for the murder of anyone? I bet not, since Google's looked at it and said "doesn't threaten anyone, doesn't even insult Muslims, just their religion, it's not against our terms of service".
There is a big difference between calls to violent jihad and a video condemning a religion.
So you're saying it's okay for Youtube to host Bin Laden tapes where there is no direct quote of a call for violence? Youtube can go ahead and host terrorist messages just so long as the terrorists refrain from calling for violence?
Are those "subliminal messages" actually real threats of violence that warrant preemptive violent action, or simply insults that are especially insulting to people who adhere to a particular mythology?
It's going to take forensic experts from their culture to determine exactly what may or may not have been contained in the film. American Muslims might not be vulnerable to the subliminal messages because those messages might only work on people who accept a very specific interpretation of specific quotes from the Quran. This is the problem, there are cults within Islam just like there are Christian cults and these cults do not accept the mainstream interpretation. My best guess is the film was designed to suggest a holywar in which the United States government along with Israel want to wipe Islam off the face of the earth through attacking the Prophet.
It did not help that the guy who made the film blamed it on the jews as that was strategic. It also did not help that Mohammed was associated with or in order words labeled a pedophile in the film. It didn't help that people in the USA are starting witch hunts against both pedophiles and the Muslim brotherhood. That film contained enough crap in it that yes it could have been seen as a subliminal attack on Islam itself. But I'm not an expert on Islam or on the culture of these countries and few of us are but that film maker in my opinion knew what he was doing considering he's an Egyptian. He may know some things about that culture that we don't know.
Who cares if Muslims find it more insulting? Remember those cartoons of Bush, showing him as a chimpanzee? Those were legal.
Now, if someone drew cartoons of Obama as a chimpanzee, that's a race-wank dog-whistle, because of the history of depicting black people as simians. That's especially insulting to a black fellow. But it is ALSO LEGAL, because both "offending someone a little bit" and "offending someone a lot" are part of free expression.
Because it's more than just insulting. If you know enough about the Muslim belief system you know certain people in that belief system are fundamentalists who believe in the concept of holywar. To certain Muslims this issue is as critical as the abortion issue is to Christian fundamentalists. I don't support either extremist group but I don't think it's fair to treat Muslim terrorists any different from Christian terrorists. The Egyptian film maker is associated with a Christian domestic terrorist group that hasn't paid it's taxes in decades and that does not support or believe it is a part of the United States. Look deeper into this story because it's not a simple matter of an innocent film maker who made a film which insulted Islam, this particular film maker is very organized, very deliberate, and associated with or may be a part of a domestic terrorist group.
This film doesn't call for violence. Bin Laden and al-Awlaki do. There is a big, big difference between "Mohammed is a goat-fucking paedophile" and "We should go murder some infidels".
A big difference to you because you're not a Muslim. Even if you were a Muslim I doubt either of us could read the translations. So once again it's all in how the film is translated and what subliminal messages it contained. It might not directly call for violence but it could indirectly do it. The result is the same in the viewers minds with the only difference being the semantics used to achieve it.
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.
Memes are powerful. And that is what we have to understand as freespeech supporters.People are going to die for freespeech and sometimes they will be innocent people. The effect of certain memes on certain people can be very negative, as images, words, films can provoke people to act. Religious memes are among the most powerful.
I believe that your mistake was to hold the above viewpoint and yet still to live in the US.
Supporting Muslim countries in resisting US occupation sounds at least faintly reasonable. Doing the same while living in the US does not seem reasonable; it arguably meets the definition of treason.
So why isn't the anti-Muslim film maker guilty of Treason? He produced a film which set of attacks against troops all around the world but that isn't treason? It resulted in deaths but that isn't treason?
To be fair why not allow fundamentalist Muslims to release their Jihad videos to Youtube translated into english for American audiences? Freespeech right?
Calling the President a "poopyhead" doesn't actually hold any implied physical danger what-so-ever. Saying I am gonna _________ is a future tense action statement with a verb, sure, that would be worth looking at.
The fun starts when "loss of honor" becomes worth retaliation, as another poster below mentioned. So while there's no physical action planned, "the loss of honor is unforgiveable" etc etc.
That is all subjective. Calling the President a name isn't a threat, but it could be perceived as a threat depending on the context and culture.
Understanding this distinction is key to this whole situation (the Muslim rioters don't get it, either), and the Preacher's post merits many Insightful/Informative mods.
Huh ? They get it perfectly well. The whole rioting thing... is a threat. It's the "don't laugh with me or I'll beat you up" from kindergarten, except with moronic adults and killing.
It's more complicated than that. Depending on how the film is interpreted is what determines the reaction to it. If the film tells believes to attack then they'll attack because they'll believe that is what Allah wants. If the film is designed in such a way to make people subconsciously think Allah wants those actions and they are the most fundamentalist Muslims there are, what do you think the result will be?
The film was calculated in such a way that if it's shown to enough Muslims eventually someone would be affected by it in that way. It's not merely like making a violent movie in the USA, it's more about making films to see just what it would take to get people to go violent. Films can make some people violent, as can scripture, or anything else, and when you have a billion people and millions see something then of course a few hundred out of millions could take it the wrong way.
It's not all that different than nuts in this country who think George Bush is an alien.
You don't understand this because you're seeing insults and threats as being one and the same thing. They are not...
*dingdingdingding* We have a winner!
Understanding this distinction is key to this whole situation (the Muslim rioters don't get it, either), and the Preacher's post merits many Insightful/Informative mods.
Whether the film is an insult or threat is a matter of how you interpret it. The film if you're a Muslim contains subliminal messages that only a Muslim or someone with some background would understand. For that reason the film is like a dogwhistle in that the true nature of the film is only going to be understood by the most fundamentalist Muslim believers.
I don't believe this film was just created to inspire anger. I believe it was designed to inspire and trigger terrorist attacks.
If you go online and threaten the president it wont take long for your free speech to put you in a cell. So how some right wing nutjobs can be allowed to kill an ambassador and hundreds of thick rioting foriegners I dont understand at all
You don't understand this because you're seeing insults and threats as being one and the same thing. They are not, and that's why you're confused. The film is pretty shitty, but no excuse for the violent responses its seen. Any government censoring in order to protect hypersensitive and violent people from taking offence is going to be very busy indeed.
If you read anything about how actual assassination attempts take place it usually never is a situation where some guy makes a video threatening the President. What happens is some cult makes a video quoting scriptures that only the cult can make sense of and something in the message acts as a subliminal artifact to sleeper agents who act on it.
The CIA knows how to do this. Intelligence agencies know how to do this. The film maker according to reports I've read on Wired and the SmokingGun is a former FBI informant. So he actually would have the sort of background and training to pull that off and you cannot rule out that he could be an actual terrorist or part of a terrorist cell. The entire situation is as fishy as Sirhan Sirhan.
Could he be a double agent? I find it very difficult to believe this entire chain of events wasn't planned. It looks planned in such a way so as to seem spontaneous when if you look closely at it you realize it's not.
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...
I think there is a line which must be drawn with regard to hosting films. If Google did not take down this film then Google would not be justified in taking down the next Bin Laden video or Anwar al-Awlaki video. I think from a business perspective and a global security perspective it makes sense for Google to take down any material which is inciting terrorist attacks or assassinations.
We might not know certain things about that material. It might contain signals to trained sleeper cells and for that reason alone it should be removed.
within the same paragraph, can you use up all the oxygen in the room?
The term is misused in much the same way as "conspiracy theorist" is used to denigrate anyone holding suspicions against the wealthy and the powerful (even while the latter have their professional conspiracy theory corps working full time to fill the prisons) no matter how well founded in fact.
In this case, its a bias against individuals who become very reputable/trusted among a subgroup without any accompanying transition to society's inner circles.
Its also interesting to see who gets a pass in this regard, despite their cult-like behavior. Ayn Rand required ideological purity from her associates, and made pronouncements of excommunication of individuals from her Objectivist movement but I don't recall any persistent charges of personality cultism against her and her followers.
Objectivists are a cult too. Any time you put a person above a mission it starts looking like a personality cult. Julian Assange has made many questionable and selfish decisions such as that decision to conduct the troll hoax operation.
Didn't he threaten the FBI the other day to reveal all kinds of information unless he got his laptops back from the FBI taken in the first raids? There were two videos on his Youtube channel (can't check now).
Yeah real smart, threaten the FBI and think they wont do anything.
In a profanity-laced tirade, Brown threatens in the video to strike back at Smith.
"So that's why Robert Smith's life is over," Brown said. "But when I say his life is over, I don't say I'm going to go kill him. But I am going to ruin his life and look into his (expletive) kids."
Brown then smiles before adding: "How do you like them apples?"
are you saying he shouldn't be arrested for that?
From this point on Mr. Brown is irrelevant. He's part of the system now.
So he's an attention whore. That's all fine and dandy, but the last time I checked the FBI had better things to do. You just said it yourself: There's no evidence at all that he had anything to do with anonymous, its activities, or any of its affiliated groups, everything about the guy can be laid at the feet of the media, who are more than happy to sensationalize lies. If the layman on the internet knows that, the FBI knows that. So why are they raiding his house? What's there to gain? Well, it sends a strong message. It scares people. Oh right, that's what the FBI is for these days.
Barrett Brown's lack of affiliation with anonymous isn't what makes this newsworthy, it's that despite knowing that, the FBI were more than happy to ruin him in order to send a message.
Do you think that matters? If the FBI is at war with Anonymous they can make use of Mr. Brown.
Barrett Brown is not Anonymous. Most of the Anons I know worth their salt think of him as a fraud. This is the problem of a leaderless, hierarchyless political movement: anyone can claim affiliation. All Barrett did was claim to orchestrate some invisible campaign against Mexican drug gangs, of which no evidence was ever actually presented, and idiot reporters lined up to print his lies verbatim.
Barrett Brown claimed affiliation with Encyclopedia Dramatica, another Internet community, on Twitter recently. Current and former ED admins lined up to denounce him as never being known there.
Barrett Brown is a liar and a fraud. His days are up now that he's finally committed the crime of threatening an FBI agent. There's no way he's getting bail.
What I mean is he will never again be considered a part of any serious activist movement. Once they know he got raided by the FBI they know he's the new FBI bitch. Many people suspected that Sabu was the FBI bitch after he got raided but somehow people still trusted him and look what happened there?
If an activist gets raided by the FBI they need to find a new profession because their activism days are over. They can look forward to lifetime surveillance from that point on and pressure potentially for 10 or 20 years straight by the FBI to cooperate and that is if they don't go to prison. Since I doubt Mr. Brown will be going to prison it's much more likely that he will cooperate and what does that mean?
Anyone with common sense at this point will watch what they say and do around Mr. Brown or anyone associated with him. You can bet if the FBI raids someone they had that someone under surveillance for a long time and will continue to have that someone under surveillance or control for the foreseeable future.
"In other news, the spokesperson for an organization responsible for dozens of high profile electronic attacks, distributing classified data, and hundreds of other felonies was taken into custody today..."
Agree or disagree with Anonymous, it shouldn't be a surprise that he took the ride.
Yeah but at this point he cannot be considered as the spokesperson anymore. He just got raided, why would any active hacker or activist trust him now that he has been raided and arrested by the FBI? They can plant bugs in his house, they can force him to cooperate, so it's basically over for him. His days as an online spokesperson/activist are over and he will be lucky if he avoids prison.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if you zoom out one step, the filmmaker created this movie because he was offended by acts committed by Muslims around the world, which means Muslims were responsible for the film being made, which makes them guilty of fomenting blasphemy about their own religion, which makes them guilty of offending themselves, which makes them guilty of violence and killings.
That is fine but a US Diplomat was killed over it. So that part isn't fine. I don't care if they argue on the web, on twitter, or make films, but if those films trigger events then the film maker no matter where in the world they are should be detained, questioned, and made to cooperate. American citizen or not, the only way the Egyptian film maker can make this right is by doing the right thing.
Then if you zoom out another step, those Muslims did those things because they were offended by non-Muslims doing things that were incompatible with Islam, which means non-Muslims were responsible for what those Muslims did, which was responsible for this guy making a movie about Mohammad, which was responsible for Muslim violence and killings we see today.
Eventually, you'd zoom out to the sun. Without the sun, trees would not have grown and ships would not have been built, and grass would not have grown and camels and horses would not have flourished, and people would never have traveled and different civilizations would never have known of each other's existence, and people in one region would have stayed in their respective caves and ate their fungi and worshiped their gods in isolated peace. So what's the point I'm trying to make here? We should have censored sunlight a long time ago.
Irrelevant. We cannot read any of their thoughts so we don't know why they acted. What we do know is that their actions were damaging and there has been a loss of life. People died so now it's more like yelling fire in a theater and people get trampled to death and you want to claim free speech.
The point here is the film maker knew he was going to trigger violence. He was part of the scheme and did not seem to care who would get killed over it. His film is hate speech at least and treason at worst.
His film, offensive or not, did not say "go forth, riot and kill" it was just a bad movie. The movie's creator should not be held responsible in any way for the actions of people who viewed it. If these same people has watched Team America I'll bet they would have had a similar (if not as extreme) reaction to the portrayal of muslims.
So the only mistake Bin Laden made is that his tapes said "Go out and kill"? Did they ever find the tape where Bin Laden said to hiijack airplanes and launch 911?
That being said Bin Laden was a terrorist long before 911, but I'm just making that point. Bin Laden is a dead scumbag terrorist, but the Egyptian film maker is a scumbag as well and his actions have costed who knows how many lives.
Let's hope there aren't any more lives lost over his ignorance.
What about the unwritten manifesto of radical Muslims that prescribes violence against blasphemy?
Muslims are condemning that. Why aren't Christians condemning these so called "Christians" who make films that do this? Where are patriotic Christians?
There is a big, big difference between "Mohammed is a goat-fucking paedophile" and "We should go murder some infidels".
A big difference to you because you're not a Muslim.
Uh what? If there's no difference to Muslims then they really are evil, a war really is inevitable, and they really must be destroyed, because they really will want to destroy us first.
I'm not saying that's how it is, I'm saying if they can't see the difference and they're willing to be violent over it then their faith truly is evil. I'm not saying any other faith ain't, either. Any faith which places you above nonbelievers, which is most of them, is evil.
Fundamentalists are nuts whether they are Muslim or Christian. We should not protect or coddle our fundamentalists. He (the film maker) should not be treated as anything other than a traitor. His actions hurt the troops, hurt the USA, he's a traitor peroid. Yes you have free speech but if your free speech is an act of treason while that speech need not be censored it's still a treasonous act not all that different from Al-Awlaki.
Why was Al-Awlaki killed? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/secret-us-memo-made-legal-case-to-kill-a-citizen.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Did he specifically threaten the USA?
According to U.S. officials, al-Aulaqi was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda in 2009.[28][29] He repeatedly called for jihad against the United States.[30][31] In April 2010, American President Obama authorized al-Aulaqi's targeted killing.[32][33][34] The targeted killing of an American citizen was an unprecedented Presidential order which al-Aulaqi's father and civil rights groups challenged in court.[35][32][34][36] Officials stated that the "imminent threat" international legal standard is used to add names to the C.I.A.'s list of targets.[33]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Aulaqi
Do you also think the Norwegian Labor Party should be censored because a follower of Breivik's ideology might be offended by their stance on immigration, and go on another shooting spree because they see it as a message that embraces the destruction of their white race? After all, we have to appreciate the fact that the white nationalists likely perceive the pro-immigration message as a threat.
Irrelevant. The more relevant question is whether or not we should be promoting Breivik's manifesto.
It's called the inquisition. A time when people where routinely tortured to death for a wrong word. Burned at the stake for espousing un-Godly ideas. You want it back, then let the fundamentalists religionists shut down free expression with threats of violence. If idiots want to tear down their own countries be being goaded by trolls then more power to the trolls.
There is only one way to react to this religious violence, troll the shit out of the idiots until the fellow citizens learn it is smarter to lock up violent religious reactionaries then people who express challenging ideas.
I refuse to be silenced by religious whack jobs. I refuse to allow the rebirth of the religious inquisition in my time. I honestly was largely indifferent to pro or anti-Muslim sentiment until now. The greater the violent reaction to the spread of anti-Muslim ideas then, the more I am for the spread of those anti-Muslim ideas and absolutely no different for any other violent repression of ideas by any other religion, Christian, Hindu etc.
This is exactly why free speech was instituted as law, to protect people from persecution by religious freaks, by those who abuse religion for personal gain, by those who claim superiority through religion. Free speech has it's roots in the resistance against religion, it was the weapon used to tackle the inquisition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition and prevent it from recurring. Based upon the way Muhammad is depicted in the Koran he comes off as a paedophile and a misogynist, a person who created a religion for his own personal benefit.
Now they call it enhanced interrogation. What has changed? I'm all for free speech but if we are going to have free speech we have to accept that the consequence is that anyone can yell "fire" in a crowed theater and that is okay because it's free speech.
Does this anti-Islam video call for the murder of anyone? I bet not, since Google's looked at it and said "doesn't threaten anyone, doesn't even insult Muslims, just their religion, it's not against our terms of service".
There is a big difference between calls to violent jihad and a video condemning a religion.
So you're saying it's okay for Youtube to host Bin Laden tapes where there is no direct quote of a call for violence?
Youtube can go ahead and host terrorist messages just so long as the terrorists refrain from calling for violence?
Are those "subliminal messages" actually real threats of violence that warrant preemptive violent action, or simply insults that are especially insulting to people who adhere to a particular mythology?
It's going to take forensic experts from their culture to determine exactly what may or may not have been contained in the film. American Muslims might not be vulnerable to the subliminal messages because those messages might only work on people who accept a very specific interpretation of specific quotes from the Quran. This is the problem, there are cults within Islam just like there are Christian cults and these cults do not accept the mainstream interpretation. My best guess is the film was designed to suggest a holywar in which the United States government along with Israel want to wipe Islam off the face of the earth through attacking the Prophet.
It did not help that the guy who made the film blamed it on the jews as that was strategic. It also did not help that Mohammed was associated with or in order words labeled a pedophile in the film. It didn't help that people in the USA are starting witch hunts against both pedophiles and the Muslim brotherhood. That film contained enough crap in it that yes it could have been seen as a subliminal attack on Islam itself. But I'm not an expert on Islam or on the culture of these countries and few of us are but that film maker in my opinion knew what he was doing considering he's an Egyptian. He may know some things about that culture that we don't know.
Who cares if Muslims find it more insulting? Remember those cartoons of Bush, showing him as a chimpanzee? Those were legal.
Now, if someone drew cartoons of Obama as a chimpanzee, that's a race-wank dog-whistle, because of the history of depicting black people as simians. That's especially insulting to a black fellow. But it is ALSO LEGAL, because both "offending someone a little bit" and "offending someone a lot" are part of free expression.
Because it's more than just insulting. If you know enough about the Muslim belief system you know certain people in that belief system are fundamentalists who believe in the concept of holywar. To certain Muslims this issue is as critical as the abortion issue is to Christian fundamentalists. I don't support either extremist group but I don't think it's fair to treat Muslim terrorists any different from Christian terrorists. The Egyptian film maker is associated with a Christian domestic terrorist group that hasn't paid it's taxes in decades and that does not support or believe it is a part of the United States. Look deeper into this story because it's not a simple matter of an innocent film maker who made a film which insulted Islam, this particular film maker is very organized, very deliberate, and associated with or may be a part of a domestic terrorist group.
This film doesn't call for violence. Bin Laden and al-Awlaki do. There is a big, big difference between "Mohammed is a goat-fucking paedophile" and "We should go murder some infidels".
A big difference to you because you're not a Muslim. Even if you were a Muslim I doubt either of us could read the translations. So once again it's all in how the film is translated and what subliminal messages it contained. It might not directly call for violence but it could indirectly do it. The result is the same in the viewers minds with the only difference being the semantics used to achieve it.
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.
Memes are powerful. And that is what we have to understand as freespeech supporters.People are going to die for freespeech and sometimes they will be innocent people. The effect of certain memes on certain people can be very negative, as images, words, films can provoke people to act. Religious memes are among the most powerful.
I believe that your mistake was to hold the above viewpoint and yet still to live in the US.
Supporting Muslim countries in resisting US occupation sounds at least faintly reasonable. Doing the same while living in the US does not seem reasonable; it arguably meets the definition of treason.
So why isn't the anti-Muslim film maker guilty of Treason? He produced a film which set of attacks against troops all around the world but that isn't treason? It resulted in deaths but that isn't treason?
To be fair why not allow fundamentalist Muslims to release their Jihad videos to Youtube translated into english for American audiences? Freespeech right?
So you think CERTAIN information should be free, hmmmm? Information of which you approve.
They can put all information up, even threats. They can even let known terrorists put up videos on Youtube.
But since they don't let Muslim terrorists put their videos up, why let Christian terrorists put videos up?
This is actually a fascinating distinction.
Calling the President a "poopyhead" doesn't actually hold any implied physical danger what-so-ever. Saying I am gonna _________ is a future tense action statement with a verb, sure, that would be worth looking at.
The fun starts when "loss of honor" becomes worth retaliation, as another poster below mentioned. So while there's no physical action planned, "the loss of honor is unforgiveable" etc etc.
That is all subjective. Calling the President a name isn't a threat, but it could be perceived as a threat depending on the context and culture.
Understanding this distinction is key to this whole situation (the Muslim rioters don't get it, either), and the Preacher's post merits many Insightful/Informative mods.
Huh ? They get it perfectly well. The whole rioting thing ... is a threat. It's the "don't laugh with me or I'll beat you up" from kindergarten, except with moronic adults and killing.
It's more complicated than that. Depending on how the film is interpreted is what determines the reaction to it. If the film tells believes to attack then they'll attack because they'll believe that is what Allah wants. If the film is designed in such a way to make people subconsciously think Allah wants those actions and they are the most fundamentalist Muslims there are, what do you think the result will be?
The film was calculated in such a way that if it's shown to enough Muslims eventually someone would be affected by it in that way. It's not merely like making a violent movie in the USA, it's more about making films to see just what it would take to get people to go violent. Films can make some people violent, as can scripture, or anything else, and when you have a billion people and millions see something then of course a few hundred out of millions could take it the wrong way.
It's not all that different than nuts in this country who think George Bush is an alien.
You don't understand this because you're seeing insults and threats as being one and the same thing. They are not...
*dingdingdingding* We have a winner!
Understanding this distinction is key to this whole situation (the Muslim rioters don't get it, either), and the Preacher's post merits many Insightful/Informative mods.
Whether the film is an insult or threat is a matter of how you interpret it. The film if you're a Muslim contains subliminal messages that only a Muslim or someone with some background would understand. For that reason the film is like a dogwhistle in that the true nature of the film is only going to be understood by the most fundamentalist Muslim believers.
I don't believe this film was just created to inspire anger. I believe it was designed to inspire and trigger terrorist attacks.
If you go online and threaten the president it wont take long for your free speech to put you in a cell. So how some right wing nutjobs can be allowed to kill an ambassador and hundreds of thick rioting foriegners I dont understand at all
You don't understand this because you're seeing insults and threats as being one and the same thing. They are not, and that's why you're confused. The film is pretty shitty, but no excuse for the violent responses its seen. Any government censoring in order to protect hypersensitive and violent people from taking offence is going to be very busy indeed.
If you read anything about how actual assassination attempts take place it usually never is a situation where some guy makes a video threatening the President. What happens is some cult makes a video quoting scriptures that only the cult can make sense of and something in the message acts as a subliminal artifact to sleeper agents who act on it.
The CIA knows how to do this. Intelligence agencies know how to do this. The film maker according to reports I've read on Wired and the SmokingGun is a former FBI informant. So he actually would have the sort of background and training to pull that off and you cannot rule out that he could be an actual terrorist or part of a terrorist cell. The entire situation is as fishy as Sirhan Sirhan.
Could he be a double agent? I find it very difficult to believe this entire chain of events wasn't planned. It looks planned in such a way so as to seem spontaneous when if you look closely at it you realize it's not.
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...
I think there is a line which must be drawn with regard to hosting films. If Google did not take down this film then Google would not be justified in taking down the next Bin Laden video or Anwar al-Awlaki video. I think from a business perspective and a global security perspective it makes sense for Google to take down any material which is inciting terrorist attacks or assassinations.
We might not know certain things about that material. It might contain signals to trained sleeper cells and for that reason alone it should be removed.
within the same paragraph, can you use up all the oxygen in the room?
The term is misused in much the same way as "conspiracy theorist" is used to denigrate anyone holding suspicions against the wealthy and the powerful (even while the latter have their professional conspiracy theory corps working full time to fill the prisons) no matter how well founded in fact.
In this case, its a bias against individuals who become very reputable/trusted among a subgroup without any accompanying transition to society's inner circles.
Its also interesting to see who gets a pass in this regard, despite their cult-like behavior. Ayn Rand required ideological purity from her associates, and made pronouncements of excommunication of individuals from her Objectivist movement but I don't recall any persistent charges of personality cultism against her and her followers.
Objectivists are a cult too. Any time you put a person above a mission it starts looking like a personality cult. Julian Assange has made many questionable and selfish decisions such as that decision to conduct the troll hoax operation.
Didn't he threaten the FBI the other day to reveal all kinds of information unless he got his laptops back from the FBI taken in the first raids? There were two videos on his Youtube channel (can't check now).
Yeah real smart, threaten the FBI and think they wont do anything.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49031630
are you saying he shouldn't be arrested for that?
From this point on Mr. Brown is irrelevant. He's part of the system now.
he threatened an fbi agent
it's really not that complicated
If he did that then he's a friggin idiot and deserves what he got. Doesn't he know the law? Doesn't he know what happened to Jim Bell?
So he's an attention whore. That's all fine and dandy, but the last time I checked the FBI had better things to do. You just said it yourself: There's no evidence at all that he had anything to do with anonymous, its activities, or any of its affiliated groups, everything about the guy can be laid at the feet of the media, who are more than happy to sensationalize lies. If the layman on the internet knows that, the FBI knows that. So why are they raiding his house? What's there to gain? Well, it sends a strong message. It scares people. Oh right, that's what the FBI is for these days.
Barrett Brown's lack of affiliation with anonymous isn't what makes this newsworthy, it's that despite knowing that, the FBI were more than happy to ruin him in order to send a message.
Do you think that matters? If the FBI is at war with Anonymous they can make use of Mr. Brown.
Barrett Brown is not Anonymous. Most of the Anons I know worth their salt think of him as a fraud. This is the problem of a leaderless, hierarchyless political movement: anyone can claim affiliation. All Barrett did was claim to orchestrate some invisible campaign against Mexican drug gangs, of which no evidence was ever actually presented, and idiot reporters lined up to print his lies verbatim.
Barrett Brown claimed affiliation with Encyclopedia Dramatica, another Internet community, on Twitter recently. Current and former ED admins lined up to denounce him as never being known there.
Barrett Brown is a liar and a fraud. His days are up now that he's finally committed the crime of threatening an FBI agent. There's no way he's getting bail.
What I mean is he will never again be considered a part of any serious activist movement. Once they know he got raided by the FBI they know he's the new FBI bitch. Many people suspected that Sabu was the FBI bitch after he got raided but somehow people still trusted him and look what happened there?
If an activist gets raided by the FBI they need to find a new profession because their activism days are over. They can look forward to lifetime surveillance from that point on and pressure potentially for 10 or 20 years straight by the FBI to cooperate and that is if they don't go to prison. Since I doubt Mr. Brown will be going to prison it's much more likely that he will cooperate and what does that mean?
Anyone with common sense at this point will watch what they say and do around Mr. Brown or anyone associated with him. You can bet if the FBI raids someone they had that someone under surveillance for a long time and will continue to have that someone under surveillance or control for the foreseeable future.
"In other news, the spokesperson for an organization responsible for dozens of high profile electronic attacks, distributing classified data, and hundreds of other felonies was taken into custody today..."
Agree or disagree with Anonymous, it shouldn't be a surprise that he took the ride.
Yeah but at this point he cannot be considered as the spokesperson anymore. He just got raided, why would any active hacker or activist trust him now that he has been raided and arrested by the FBI? They can plant bugs in his house, they can force him to cooperate, so it's basically over for him. His days as an online spokesperson/activist are over and he will be lucky if he avoids prison.