Thanks Jaga for the interesting articles I read with great interest.
Under here the reaction of the American Chris on a Haaretz article,
and the reactions of other readers before his reply.
"Here`s a thought. How about those secularists/atheists in the western world
who insist on blasphemous attacks on other people`s faith, how about thinking
about what you`re doing? Whether it`s "artists" in New York city putting a crucifix
upside down in a bottle of urine or putting dung on a picture of the Virgin Mary or
those drawings picturing Mohammed as a terrorist, how about you stop and
think before you act?
Would you ever do such things against a race of people, say Africans or Chinese?
No, you wouldn`t because then you would be considered fascists or Nazis.
How about against gays? No, then you would be considered homophobic.
How about against women? Nope again, then you?d be sexists.
But it is OK to do this type of thing against people of faith, against people who believe in God?
Freedom of speech is an important right that we hold dear in the west.
Tolerance and respect of others, including of those with religious faith,
should be a value that we hold just as dearly."
The Haaretz article
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/678527.htmlDozens of Palestinians storm European institutions in Gaza
By News Agencies
For the first time since the international crisis began, Israeli Arabs took to the streets
Saturday afternoon to protest against cartoons deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad
that were published in the European press.
Some 500 protestors marched through the city of Nazareth in the Galilee, expressing their
solidarity with the rest of the Muslim world.
Meanwhile in the Palestinian Authority, Hundreds of Palestinians stormed European institutions
and burned German and Danish flags in Gaza City.
About two dozen protesters stormed the German cultural center Saturday morning, smashing windows,
breaking doors and burning the German flag. Down the street, about 30 Palestinians threw stones at
the European Commission building, and replaced the EU flag with a Palestinian flag,
before police brought them under control.
About 50 schoolchildren and teenagers gathered at one corner of the street shortly after to try
to resume the attacks on the two buildings, but Palestinian riot police, armed with batons,
pushed them back. The youths threw stones at the police, then fled.
Later in the day, about 400 protesters marched to the European Commission building,
accompanied by a loudspeaker car that blared, "Insulting the prophet means insulting
every Muslim," and urged merchants to boycott Danish products:
"With our blood and souls we defend you, O Prophet." Protesters also set fire to a Danish flag.
Police set up a cordon at the building to prevent stone-throwing, but protesters heeded organizers
' appeals and didn't attack the building. Most of the demonstrators were merchants who called for
a boycott of European goods, and many carried small books of the Quran, the Islamic holy book.
Elsewhere in Gaza City, armed men with links to the Fatah Party handed out red carnations to students,
nuns and the priest at a Roman catholic school, to apologize for other Fatah gunmen who threatened
earlier in the week to target churches as part of their protests.
"We came to show that we are united, Muslims and Christians, and that we oppose assaulting our
Christian brothers," said one gunman, flowers in hand.
The cartoons have caused a furor across the Muslim world, in part because Islamic law is
interpreted to forbid any depictions of Islam's holiest figure. Aggravating the affront was
one caricature of Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse.
The cartoons were first published in Denmark, and then in newspapers elsewhere in
Europe in a show of solidarity with press freedoms.
In Brussels on Saturday, the European Union called on the Palestinian Authority to
protect EU buildings from attack.
"The Commission expects the Palestinian authorities to ensure that European premises
are properly protected," the EU said. "The Commission deeply regrets that Europeans
who are working to bring a better life to Palestinians should be the subject of such attacks."
In the West Bank town of Hebron, about 50 Palestinians marched to the headquarters of
the international observer mission there, burned a Danish flag, and demanded a boycott
of Danish goods.
"We will redeem our prophet, Muhammad, with our blood,' they chanted.
At least 500 demonstrators gathered peacefully in Nazareth for the first protest against
the caricatures in Israel. A procession set off from the As-Salam mosque toward the Basilica
of the Annunciation, where Christian tradition says Mary was informed of Jesus'
impending birth. Sheik Raed Salah, a radical leader of the Islamic Movement,
was to address the crowd later.
"Allah is the only God, and Muhammad is his prophet," loudspeakers blared as the march began.
European leaders called on Friday for restraint as Muslims staged growing protests over the cartoons.
"I am concerned ... about this escalation we have seen over the last few days," said Austrian
Foreign Minister Ursula
Plassnik, whose country holds the European Union's presidency. "From my point of view it is high
time to take a step back and make an effort to see things with each other's eyes and heart,"
she told a news conference in Vienna.
The United States condemned the cartoons, siding with Muslims outraged that newspapers
put press freedom over respect for religion. "We ... respect freedom of the press and expression
but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this
manner is not acceptable," said State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper.
Major U.S. publications have not republished the cartoons.
In contrast, some European media responded to the criticism against the
Danish newspaper that originally printed the caricatures by reproducing
the images and fueled anger that has led to boycotts of Danish products
and widespread protests.
The U.S. response contrasted with European governments, which have
tended to acknowledge the tension between free speech and respect
for religion but have generally accepted the newspapers' rights to print the cartoons.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations,
applauded the U.S. position.
The State Department reaction "was a strong statement in support of
Muslims around the world. It's a reflection of the concern felt by millions of Muslims
and I think it will be appreciated," he said.
The furor cuts to the question of which is more sacred in the Western world
- freedom of expression or respect for religious beliefs. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
the protests came just a week after Hamas defeated the ruling Fatah party in
parliament elections and prepared to form the next government.
Newspapers in France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Hungary have reprinted
caricatures originally published in Denmark, arguing that press freedom is more
important than the protests and boycotts they have provoked. One cartoon shows
the Muslim prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse.
Muslims consider any images of Muhammad to be blasphemous.
The Danish foreign ministry in Copenhagen said all Danes, except for two diplomats,
have left the West Bank and Gaza in recent days. The Danish representative office
in the West Bank was to be closed Friday because of the threats, a local diplomat said,
and the situation would be reassessed after the weekend.
Norway closed its representative office in the West Bank to the public on Thursday
because of the threats, but said the 23-member staff remains on the job.
Danish and French members of international observer team at the Rafah crossing
between Gaza and Egypt stayed away from Gaza on Thursday, and instead worked
from the group's headquarters in the nearby Israeli city of Ashkelon,
said a spokesman, Julio de La Guardia.
Foreign reporters either pulled out of Gaza or canceled plans to go to the volatile coastal strip.
In my opinion you have intolerant and fanatal extremists under every faith, who caused or
are still causing a lot of victims under people of their own faith and other faiths.
In India you have extremist Hindu's who attacked Muslims, Sikhs and even Christians,
and Muslims and Sikhs attacked Hindu's from their side.
In Sri-Lanka the Buddhist army of the majority killed Tamils, and Tamils (Hindu people)
killed moderate Tamils, Buddhists and even people from the Muslim minority.
Jews killed or wounded Muslims and Brits in the Middle-East (Palestine, Lebanon, Tunesia,
Egypt, Iraq) and Europe, and killed some of their own people.
Christians have a very bloodthirsty past in killing a lot of fellow christians in Europe,
and killing Jews and Muslims in that same Europe in the Middle ages and the 20th century,
and christians killed people of other faith in the Middle-east (the crussades), Africa,
Asia and the America's (killing native Americans who had their nature relgion).
But next to the religious violent Fundementalisms, you have a violent anti-religious
Fundamentalist atheïsm, which is rooted in the French Jacobinism (the French revolution),
Marxism-Leninism (relgion if opium for the people), anarchism (in Russia, Spain, parts
of France, Italy and Belgium), Nazism (the core of Nazism was pure headen, and anti-christian,
because christian was considered a jewsih sect) and left (radical) liberalism (of parties,
unions, organisations, humanists and media).
This anti-religious secularism is centuries old and has deep roots in Europe with David Hume
(1694-1778), who rejected the exsistance of God, his friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778),
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1892), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831), Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804 - 1872), Friedrich Nietsche (the concept of the
Übermensch.1844-1900), Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (Communist Manifest and the Capital) and
Jean-Paul Sartre (L'être et le néant.1905-1980) and Martin Heidegger ("Dasein". (1889-1976).
Jaga mind you that the French are strongly influenced by German atheist philosophy, by Nietsche,
Feuerbach, Marx and Heidegger. Sartre dechristianised Kierkegaards christian existentialism and
mixed the secular existentialism that remained with Nietschian and Heideggers Dasein.
The very inluential French Postmodernists (Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida)
are secular philosophers who criticise absolute truths or identities and "grand narratives," i.e.,
totalizing systems of thought. The generation of '68 (Rudi Dutschke and Daniel-Cohn Bendit),
and the New Left movement are rooted in this secular, French-German European atheïsm
or humanism. And this influence of European secular-humanist thought is not limitized to Europe alone,
in China Marx and Engels were translated from the original German versions (previous Chinese
Marxist literature was translated out of Russian, so influenced by Leninism and Stalinism),
and in America and Canada, liberal, libertarian and secular-conservative scientists, students and
professors, grassrootsactivists, politicians and civilians are influenced by this European secular-humanist
Atheism too. Secular Nationalism in Russia, Arab world, Iran, India, Asia and Africa too.
I think we see in the world a conflict that is bigger than the Middle-East conflict and the tensions
between the Muslim world and the Western world (Europe in this case).
There is a conflict between people with a religious conviction and an atheïst conviction inside
the Western world (see the differant reaction on the Danish cartoons between for instance
France/Norway and America/England), and inside every world religion.
The tension between secular and religious christians, secular and relgious jews
and secular and religious Muslims. The biggest criticizers of Islam in the Netherlands
are often liberal Muslims or former Muslims (see Ayaan Hirsi Ali).
I just saw the six 'O clock news and saw the Danish embassy burning in Syria's
capital Damascus, after the masses stormed the building.
In the news coverage we see Danish Embassy personel escaping the building
at the last moment. Luckily nobody was hurt.
Pieter