Good news about horrible news?

[Tev]

I'm not really sure where to put this thread as it is really about an Onion article taking a jab at the current real news about the recent Middle East uprisings over a crappy Youtube video "movie" that lead to the tragic deaths of our Libyan Ambassador and a few of his guards this week. I'm really surprised that news doesn't have it's own thready by now, but since it doesn't, you can talk about it here too I guess.

Anyway, good news from the Onion (Redacted picture below totally not safe for work!)

[IMAGE REDACTED]
WASHINGTON—Following the publication of the image above, in which the most cherished figures from multiple religious faiths were depicted engaging in a lascivious sex act of considerable depravity, no one was murdered, beaten, or had their lives threatened, sources reported Thursday. 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.

While I am aware that the latest crop of uprisings is either just a very small cross section of fundamentalists getting out of hand or a cover for actual terrorist activities, and that, if I looked hard enough, I could find a few hundred equally destructive fundamentalist Christians here in America, I just don't understand why people get so up in arms and destructive over stuff like this. Maybe it's just that I've grown up in a country that holds the illusion of free speech so well?

[phil_]

Originally Posted by Tev

I just don't understand why people get so up in arms and destructive over stuff like this. Maybe it's just that I've grown up in a country that holds the illusion of free speech so well?

There's a difference between living in a developed country with an untouchable military and having your religious figures mocked by those living in the same; and living in a developing country and having your religious figures mocked by those living in developed countries which have kept your country and every country in the continent in poverty for centuries while erasing your history from human memory.

At least, I'd assume it feels a bit different. Never been born in Africa myself.

[Magus]

Well the article is not only satirizing extremist behavior from some segments of the Muslim population in third-world countries, but also our own society here in the first world's reaction of total apathetic indifference to such a thing, so inundated are we with thoughtless/pointless "shock" humor or ridiculously over-the-top imagery created solely to induce knee-jerk reactions in religious conservatives, which have become so prevalent as to be rendered, well, quaint, almost.

Besides which it is not particularly accurate--there has in recent years been an upsurge in Hindu extremism in India, for example. I could see certain extremist elements in India rioting or protesting if they were to see Ganesha fisting Buddha. But it would only be a minority, much like it is in these mostly Muslim countries--it's not as if literally the entire population of Libya stormed the U.S. embassy, nor the entire population of the various other countries where these protests/attacks are occurring literally are in on it--I assume the actual protestors are a sizable minority, with an even smaller minority actually committing violence. And in Libya specifically initial reports said it was planned by a terrorist group using the protestors as a cover--regular people don't show up with assault rifles and rocket propelled grenades. I don't care where you live.

Finally, the idea that extremist Christians are not committing acts of violence based on their beliefs is also untrue, it is just that their energies seem channeled towards anti-abortion violence and murders, such as the Tiller shooting or abortion clinic bombings of the past. I suppose the article feels that ultimately the idea that a mere blasphemous image is frivolous and shouldn't cause the kind of outbursts and violence it has in the Muslim world, but context matters. Is violence justified by abortion somehow objectively less frivolous or more understandable than violence justified by blasphemous imagery?

In any case, while this has certainly been bad for us in particular, since four Americans were killed, and other Western nations, such as Germany who had their embassy set on fire, I shudder at the thought of the kind of violence that would have happened if the Muslim world were aware of the real author of the video. It was originally attributed to an affluent Jewish-American supposedly backed by 100 Jewish donors, but obviously the crude nature and budget of the video (which I haven't watched, BTW) attested to this being an obvious falsity. The actual creator was an Egyptian Coptic Christian, and I assume Coptic Christians in Egypt are far less secure than American diplomats, and a vulnerable minority in Egyptian society. While we mourn the deaths of four of our own, we have to keep in mind if the violence had not been misdirected towards the West, possibly hundreds of innocent Coptic Christians might have gotten hurt or killed instead.

I'm not sure what my main point in all of this was...just that it's not a cut-and-dried issue. It's mostly a socio-economic issue, not just a religious issue, as well.

[Bells]

i just took one look at all the related articles that showed up with the one linked above, and i honestly think that this website (and thus, this story) are NOT the proper starting point or mindset to start this conversation.

My honest suggestion is that you look somewhere else.

I can watch Youtube vlogs to add "salad" to the steak of my argument, but it will never be a meal alone. I can search wikipedia to ferment a few extra points and corrections around my line of thought, but not to form my thesis.

I don't look at facebook for moral grounding or logical reasoning (Equating the Japanese tsunami as payback for pearl harbor?) . I don't follow twitter trying to find a quantum of elightment, if a youtube video has a lot of comments that are responses to other comments i just flat out skip them. I don't step on 9gag expecting to find a realistic outlook of my own views.

It's never worth it, and it's never something worth building on.

Here is the thing though... we live in a special privileged world. You and i? We are part of that real minority (really, really tiny minority on global scale) of people with full, free access to the internet as ONE of our means of communication.

With Broader frontiers of freedom, comes broader strokes of extremes and a much diluted environment and a truckload of grains of salt and shades of grey over every information we get.

[POS Industries]

Originally Posted by Tev

America, I just don't understand why people get so up in arms and destructive over stuff like this. Maybe it's just that I've grown up in a country that holds the illusion of free speech so well?

The reason that it's such a big deal for them while being pretty completely unknown here in the US is because production of the movie was specifically executed to hide its existence here while all of its promotional efforts were directed toward the muslim populations of volatile middle eastern countries.

The cast and crew of the movie, "Innocence of Muslims," were told they were making a movie called, at different times during production, "Desert Warrior" or "Desert Storm" set in ancient Egypt. The scripts they were given had the names of key characters changed in order to keep them in the dark (Muhammad was changed to "Master George," for instance) and all religious references were dubbed in later, and the producer/director--a man who has previously served jail time for bank fraud and meth dealing--used numerous synonyms to hide his identity and pin his actions on Israel. The trailer was then dubbed again into Arabic and put on Youtube by a vocal Egyptian islamophobe named Morris Sadek, and word of its existence reached Egyptian television host Sheikh Khalad Abdalla (who is apparently something of a muslim Glenn Beck, near as I can tell), who went on to manufacture as much of a scandal about it as Fox News is known to do about conservative issues in our neck of the planet.

Having whipped up a proper outrage, the ensuing peaceful protests gave a pro-al Qaeda terrorist group adequate cover to launch an attack that they'd apparently already been planning since before this was even an issue, and now our own conservative media is doing what it can to manufacture the same sort of outrage within our own borders and perpetuate the cycle to further their own agenda.

In short, we are being played on a global level by a handful of very bad men who, while perhaps not all in league with one another, do understand how they each benefit from taking advantage. And this Onion article, by basically just going "Hahaha those wacky thin-skinned muslims! Will they ever stop killing people for no reason?" isn't helping. In fact, it's playing right into the hands of the psychotic hucksters who are actually responsible for all this and they should be ashamed for falling for it.