Wednesday, February 08, 2006

The politics of hatred

"Mohammed cartoons" is the latest big controversy in the world. If you read the vandalised and now protected Wikipedia page, you'll be amazed at how this started. Today, we saw a fresh salvo: the announcement of a Holocaust cartoon contest from Iran. The Iran angle makes it all the more dangerous. The "contest of contests" continues with a SEO contest from Israel.

Depicting Mohammed may not be new, but portraying him in the form of the image you have of Muslims / Islamic terrorists cannot be justified.

Freedom of speech may be treasured in the West. Then why complain about a rival cartoon contest? If something can be dear to your heart, can't it be something else for the other person?

Whichever way it is argued, there is no solution till you treat the other person as a fellow human and talk to him / her with compassion. Freedom of speech is fine, but does that mean you can abuse anyone? If you really care, get friendly with the other person and then give suggestions on what you think (s)he should do.

Politicians will be politicians. But I agree with Clinton on the portion that anti-Semitism seems to be taken over by anti-Islamism of late.

The Blogosphere has been buzzing -- Technorati clocks upto 5 posts per hour and 100+ per day, now topping the search terms. Sample a fellow Blogger page for what people post, comment and debate. There are some who are posting just to get attention. Nevertheless, you can get a peek into the Western and Muslim minds [see Syriana post] through these. Of course, (blogging-related) SEO too has been drawn into the muddle now.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bush goes ballistic about other countries being evil and dangerous, because they have weapons of mass destruction. But, he insists on building up even a more deadly supply of nuclear arms right here in the US. What do you think? What is he doing to us, and what is he doing to the world?
What happened to us, people? When did we become such lemmings?
The more people that the government puts in jails, the safer we are told to think we are. The real terrorists are wherever they are, but they aren't living in a country with bars on the windows. We are.

15 February, 2007 21:41  

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