Tuesday, February 07, 2006

How ironic that the very people who came to the West for freedom are now trying to impose the same repressive ideology on those who host them

From Los Angeles come the wise words of M Gashan:
As an American Muslim who strongly believes in the basic tenets and the fundamental principles of democracy, I'm stunned to see the response of Muslim immigrants in Europe.

I have every reason to believe that Muslims in the West are people who fled their original homelands because of persecution and for a lack of personal freedom and liberty. They sought refuge in the West.

How ironic that the very people who came to the West for freedom are now trying to impose the same repressive ideology on those who host them and who do not share their views on religion.

The guarantees of democratic principles in the West have long been defined. Muslim immigrants don't get to choose which democratic values they accept and which ones they reject.

The right to free speech was established to ensure against government censorship and the repression of critical and dissenting voices. Freedom of speech is not intended to protect what is popular — it protects what may be unpopular. This includes criticism of government, religions and blasphemy.

Muslims have the right to use their purchasing power to boycott newspapers they find offensive or Danish goods and services. They have the right to exercise any lawful means to punish those who offend them. They don't have the right to perpetrate violence.
Update: From Baghdad, Iraq the Model chimes in:
You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago and we here in the Middle East have tonnes of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

What I want to say is that I think the reactions were planned to be exaggerated this time by some Middle Eastern regimes and are not mere public reaction.

And I think Syria and Iran have the motives to trigger such reactions in order to get away from the pressures applied by the international community on those regimes.

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