JCC ''That movie'' in Benghazi.

Just a simple question

Anyone found it a bit bizarre that the alleged filmmaker took a pseudonym and got into hiding AFTER taking care of mentionning that he was Jewish and the backers of the films were Jewish ?

 

I'd like to know why they poured oil onto the fire in the first place. It's much worse than yelling fire in a crowded theater.

Not only depicting Mohammed, but depicting him as an adulter, a pedophile, and a homosexual?

Yeah, you have the right to free speech... but don't abuse that right. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

The reaction is even more ridiculous than the movie, of course. Nobody knew about this movie until the embassy attacks. I think there should be an investigation as to why Egyptian and Libyan TV were supposedly showing clips of this movie and working the people into a frenzy on 9/11. Probably didn't mention how nobody in the country had even seen or heard of this movie before too.

 

They're like the Westboro Baptist Church, they deliberately do crap that they fully know will shock, provoke and offend a particular audience. The difference is that the WBC doesn't have a button they can press to instantly and reliably cause major international incidents.

 

It's an anti-American marketing piece. The whole "$5 million production paid for by 100 jews" is just part of the marketing.

 

Those crowds, TBH, like extremely easy to anger.

 

I don't suppose saying "This man does not represent us" will calm them down?

 

And it tuns out he's an Eygptian con artist who lived in California. Also, not a Jew, as he previously presented himself apparently.

 

What is delicious is to think how easily truthers believed the tale about the eeevil jooo making the film.

 

Those Muslims need to stop taking their religion so damn seriously. It's just a movie. It doesn't hurt anybody.

 

Islam needs a Life of Brian, or a Last Temptation of Christ.

Or really just a period of Enlightenment.

 

Even if it offends you, peaceful protest is fine. Murdering people and assaulitng foreign property is not acceptable.

I know people who hate South Park because it mocks their religion, but they don't go around trying to murder the makers of the show or other people. If it offends you, don't watch it.

 

Or a south park.

I read an article where a protester justified his actions by saying Christian Americans would be just as pissed off if Muslims mocked the Pope or Abe Lincoln. Ha, as if.

 

Some would. Sadly.

 

If they really want to get to us then they just need to spoil the next episode of Breaking Bad....

 

Did you see how they're trashing Sydney because of this film. All this hate over an imaginary friend!

 

They already had one. While Europe was busy burning its books and trying to ensure that no one other than monks could be literate, Ibn Sina et al were preserving and building on the work of Aristotle. The problem is that in the modern era, an excessively large percentage of the population lacks access to education and socioeconomic opportunity. Desperate and directionless people in general will try violence when they see no other possibilities.

 

Yeah, it's too bad America's education system is going down the drain and the unemployment rate is so high. Wait, we are talking about America right?

 

That wasn't a period of Enlightenment: it was a foreshadowing (of a period of Enlightenment). One without a future. This period--we call it the Renaissance, of course--never blossomed into an Enlightenment as we know it, it didn't have the effects ours had, and it wasn't as widespread, as inevitable. Why--what caused this promising set-up to stall? What stopped the notion of free will to break through; how could dogma triumph over reason in the end? Historical events and attitudes are part of it.

You say that some Islamic literary freethinkers were preserving the works of the Greeks: and that, precisely that, also may be part of the answer. All this knowledge was preserved. It was memorized, protected--kept away--whereas it could have been fuel for dynamic change, revolution, rupture. It was centuries before the invention of that useful tool, the printing press.

A similar phase of "foreshadowing" (a willingness to change to modernity in different fields) happened later in the 19th century, but there was no technology, no science, to match it. Then, in the 20th century, the advent of anti-Westernism began.

Thick tomes could be written about this... But not by me.

Today, in Islam, there are hundreds of potential Voltaires, Montesquieus, even Spinozas and Erasmuses, but in the current political climate they will have little chance of succeeding. That climate feeds on riots, dissatisfaction, poverty, imaginary opponents.

 

Sure. I'm not an expert on that, but yes, of course. I didn't mean to suggest all knowledge was literally stored and guarded somewhere in a high tower. Obviously much of it spreads, especially in the field of science.

 

OK but if people in, say, rioted over the results of a Premier League match, then your analogy fits.

Debo is right about the Enlightenment and how the Islamic world desperately needs one.

 

I don't think it's anywhere near that simple or even necessarily desirable (at least not for the Westerners who are calling for such a thing). The Europe that experienced the Enlightenment was an economic and political powerhouse on its way to world domination. Especially with regards to politics, the ideals of the Enlightenment produced violent upheavals and governmental changes on a much greater scale and for much longer than the so-called Arab Spring. It also produced a severe backlash that lasted for a good long while. And, contrary to popular belief, Enlightenment thought was very diverse and it'd be easy to argue that it hasn't been fully applied in the modern West anyway.