1. There’s no such thing as the “Church of Islam” and even if there was, it would in no way represent the “estate” of anyone. Do you honestly believe that if I say something nasty about Joseph Smith I could be sued by a Mormon for slander? Or that if I say something horrible about Jesus I’m fair game for a lawsuit by any Christian? These aren’t “hard case[s] to prosecute,” Jamie. They’re not “cases” at all.

2. You continue to fail to perceive the difference between making an artistic statment that happens to offend people and deliberately setting out to cause offense? And you’re falsely imputing the latter motive to Mr. Neuenfels. Perhaps he should sue you?

3. Your misperception that “a few radical Moslem clerics who were offended, who incited their (small) group of followers to riot, in hopes of raising their profile among the Islam community,” doesn’t hold water, and Meryl has shot it down pretty effectively. For further evidence to the contrary: try reading the news.

4. Political power and riot power are not the same thing, Jamie, though you seem to believe they are. And you fail to recognize that pulling pork is only the beginning and that if at any time resistance to the imposition of Sharia in England is met with resistance, the riot option will be threatened.

Enjoy your trolling privileges while they last. Something tells me Meryl’s running out of patience.

As to the rest, I’m done. You insist on putting words in my mouth that I never said, and then want to argue those words.

In your rush to judge Muslims as animals to leap to violence, you are missing what is actually a well-plotted political campaign.

It’s the words in bold that concern me. I never said them. Not here, not anywhere. If you want to argue that way, my only possible response will be: Fuck off.

OK, here it is: slan·der (slăn’dÉ™r)
n. 1. Law. Oral communication of false statements injurious to a person’s reputation. (From: http://www.answers.com/topic/slander?method=26&initiator=answertip:continue)

Note that the injury is to the person’s “reputation”, which I think you’d agree lives on past the person’s death. Further, as a religious leader, his reputation is probably the most valuable asset of his estate, which in this case would be the Church of Islam. As for the rest of your objections in this matter, I did say it would be difficult to prosecute, but that doesn’t change the nature of the act. (The only change I’d make to my original statement is that, as wearing a signboard is techincally publication, it would be libel, not slander.)

The director said he was making a statement against religion. He did not say he was setting out to offend the religious, and then act surprised when they took offense.

OK, If he’s only trying to make a point, and not trying to offend anyone, then please explain this — What exactly is the cold, logical argument he is making by showing beheaded religious leaders? The only rational explanation is that he’s trying to offend people. If he wants to offend people and call it a protest, or even art, I say “Fine”. But don’t try to deny the fact that your art offends people.
Which is exactly why I say he’s being disingenuous…

Your interpretation is the only one I’ve seen to suggest that. I didn’t suggest it.
Precisely- You ignored it. Which is exactly why I said your were being disingenuous. If you wish to dispute that, answer the question posed above.

Then you are a naif. Muslims were offended by the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed; Muslims the world over rioted. Muslims are offended by the false story that a Koran was thrown in a toilet; Muslim the world over rioted.

And you’re being suckered… In both those cases (and possibly the other two you cited; I don’t know the details there), it was a few radical Moslem clerics who were offended, who incited their (small) group of followers to riot, in hopes of raising their profile among the Islam community. You’ll note that much was Muslim-on-Muslim violence — That way the cleric gets “credit” leading two people to “battle” even though one was only defending himself. Actually it was more like 10 people stirred up trouble, and 90 people defended themselves, to which the media reports as “100 people rioted”.

In your rush to judge Muslims as animals to leap to violence, you are missing what is actually a well-plotted political campaign.

Much of Mideast politics in the 80’s & 90’s was a struggle for control of the Arab world between the secluar (Saddam Hussein was the leading candidate) and the religious (largely centering around Osama bin Laden) (Qaddiffi was also trying for control, first as a secularist, then switching to religious when he saw how the tide was turning). With those men largely out of the picture, dozens of other are now springing up, trying to show that they are the dominate voice of the Arab people. Having your supporters forcefully “defending the faith” looks good in the newspapers, and make you look powerful.

It not looney Muslins taking offense to everything — It’s all about politics…

Cafeterias and restaurants in the U.K. and Britain never pulled pork products for Jews. They’re suddenly pulling them for Muslims. Why is that? Why do Muslim religious customs suddenly supercede everyone else’s?

So, are you offended by the political power of the Muslims? Or the lack of political power of the Jews? Muslims are 6X the population of Jew in the UK are growing (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=954), and with the oil name, are probably an even larger economic force. I doubt the thread of violence has anything to do with this. It sounds more like the Brits trying to accommidate their new neighbors, which one would normally consider a good thing.

Being afraid of “offending” someone sounds to me (and, I think, most other people) more like being politically correct, than worrying about inciting violence. This is further evidenced by the fact that as the object of this offense you lump all Muslims, without limiting it to just the tiny portion of them that spring to violence. So, if not disengenious, we’d have to say at least “meaning garbled in flowery prose”.

Then you are a naif. Muslims were offended by the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed; Muslims the world over rioted. Muslims are offended by the false story that a Koran was thrown in a toilet; Muslim the world over rioted. Muslims in the terrortories[sic] hear a rumor that Jews are going to pray on the Temple Mount; Muslims in the terrortories riot. The Pope quotes a centuries-old argument that says Islam is a violent religion; Muslims the world over riot.

The people reading this weblog—except for you, apparently—know that when Muslims take offense, violence follows. However, even that was not the premise of my post. The premise of my post was that they are trying to force non-Muslims to respect their “prophet.”

I don’t give a rat’s ass about Mohammed. He’s nothing to do with my religion. I am not required to respect him, nor cease from ridiculing him, nor am I required to forego carrying a bottle of wine into a cab because the driver is Muslim.

Cafeterias and restaurants in the U.K. and Britain never pulled pork products for Jews. They’re suddenly pulling them for Muslims. Why is that? Why do Muslim religious customs suddenly supercede everyone else’s?

That would be the tyranny of the minority that they are attempting to impose on us.

And Jamie, before you ever call me a liar again, you’d better count to a thousand. Make it two thousand. Then turn off your computer and think really heard about posting that I am being “disingenuous.”

If you were anyone else, instead of someone I knew in college, I’d have banned your ass for that comment alone.

Now go back and look up the meaning of “disingenuous.” Here, let me save you the trouble: “lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically ingenuous; insincere.”

The director said he was making a statement against religion. He did not say he was setting out to offend the religious, and then act surprised when they took offense. Your interpretation is the only one I’ve seen to suggest that. I didn’t suggest it. The director didn’t suggest it. It’s just little old you.

Generally, when one says one is making a statement against something, it’s called “protesting.” When people say they’re making a statement against the war in Iraq, they pretty much mean they’re protesting it. Not that they want to offend everyone who disagrees with them.

“Piss Christ” didn’t cause riots…It is … the Muslims ONLY who seem to feel it is their right to be offended at anything a kuffar does and to therefore be within their rights to kill him for it.

First of all, it’s not “The Muslims”, but “certain (so-called) Muslims” who feel that way, as it is “certain (so-called) Christians ” who bomb abortion clinics and blow-up Okalhoman federal buildings, and “certain straight men” who kill gay men who make a pass at them. And “certain Germans” who felt it right to sent Jews to concentration camps.

Ephraim : I should be able to stand out in the street in Dearborn the middle of Ramadan eating a ham sandwich and drinking a beer, wearing a sandwich board that says “Mohammed Has Sex With Pigs In Hell” and I should be secure in the knowledge that if anyone should raise their hand against me they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

You can, and they would — with the only problem being that the prosecution would come only after they raised a hand to you — by which time your skull is probably cracked open.

Which bring us to the biggest fallacy of the 1st Amendment — “Freedom of Speech” means only that no one can stop you from saying something; It does not relieve you from the consequences of saying it. For example, your sandwich board is slandering Mohammed, and therefore leaves you open to a lawsuit (granted, a very difficult case to prosecute, but let’s skip that for now).

Whcih brings us back to my original point about the opera’s director being disingenious. He basically want to committ a “drive-by slander” and then deny responsibility as it’s “just art”.

The last time I checked this is still the US of A. People are supposed to be free to say what they want without fear of violent retaliation.

Meryl is right. The only religious group people are afraid of is the Muslims. “Piss Christ” didn’t cause riots, murders and fatwas. It is the Muslims and the Muslims ONLY who seem to feel it is their right to be offended at anything a kuffar does and to therefore be within their rights to kill him for it.

This has to stop, and people should stop kowtowing to “Muslim sensibilities”. Every single newspaper in the free world should have printed the Mohammed Cartoons, and when the Muslims rioted, they should have been arrested and prosecuted like any other common criminals. They have no right to impose their views on us.

Jews and the Jewish religion are insulted and humiliated at every turn, everywhere you look. Do we riot? No. We shrug, say “Nu, goyish kop” and get on with our lives. Or we start blogs. But we do not kill people because we think they’re “uppity”. That is for Ku Kluxers (and Muslims, apparently).

An artist should have every right to produce a work of art that insults organized religion or anything he wants to insult. We have the right to ignore him. That is what being civilized means. It’s time the Muslims learned it.

Slinging around egregious insults is not nice, and all things being equal, I would not support it. But when a Muslim says I should shut up because he has the right to physically attack me if I say something he doesn’t like, then the society as a whole must stand up against this kind of fascism and bring it to a screeching halt. If that means forcing the Muslims’ hand by insulting them on purpose, so be it.

Let’s go back a week or so, to Berlin, where an opera house pulled a Mozart production because it included a scene featuring the severed heads of Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, and Poseidon. The opera house administration weren’t afraid of offended Greeks wielding pitchforks. They were afraid of—say it with me, folks—offending Muslims.

Show me where that is disingenuous. I point out that the administration isn’t afraid of the reaction from Christians, Buddhists, or polytheists who worship Poseidon. My “premise” in that paragraph is that the opera house was afraid of the Muslim reaction—not that the producers were afraid of offending people.

Don’t put words into my posts that aren’t there. I’m not the one pretending that this has anything to do with being PC. It has everything to do with the culture of fear that some Muslims are trying to engender. What part of this sentence

It’s time to stop catering to a narrow-minded few who think the world should bend its rules to fit them.

do you not get? Where are you reading anything to do with political correctness in my piece?

Kindly respond to the post that I wrote, rather than the post in your head. I don’t do disingenuous. I say exactly what I mean. The words “political correctness” don’t exist in my post. That’s because it isn’t the issue at all.