i’m nearly sick to death of discussing the muslim cartoon thing, as i feel i’ve been arguing it all day with some other expats, but it seems i have a few other points to make after all.

there’s been a lot of anger over the protesters in london who are holding up signs calling for beheading, execution, etc., and much of the prevailing opinion is that it is “incitement to murder” and the protesters should have been arrested.

to which I say: Holding up a piece of cardboard is incitement to murder? If I thought I could actually get people to do something that crazy on my behalf, I’d be out there holding up a placard that says “The EuroMillions winner must give me all their money!”

I’m exaggerating, of course. But the outraged public give them too much credit. Someone who’s crazy enough they’re actually going to commit murder certainly doesn’t neet a cardboard sign to “incite” them to do anything. They already have bigger mental problems, and i don’t think anyone seriously believes someone would commit violence on the say-so of a stranger with a sign. the real reason they want them arrested is not that they think it effectively incites murder, but because it *does* effectively incite fear.

the other thing which seems absolutely blatantly obvious, is that *none* of this is over cartoons. the cartoon were published in september, for crying out loud. this is about recognition and fear. a small group of crazies out of *a billion* muslims worldwide manage to gain notoriety, and suddenly everyone is shocked and scared of everyone who’s of middle-eastern descent and abuzz once again over the “fundamentalism islamic agenda”.

Violence, while abhorrent, is hardly unique to Muslims, nor is it part of a religion – it is part of *politics*. Whenever you hear about radical WTO protesters who set shops on fire, or guerilla movements in South America that kidnap people, or the IRA executes someone, no one runs around saying “I’m growing suspicious of Catholicism/Protestantism/etc and its followers.”

People have to stop lumping the entirety of a religion in with the radical politics of a few, because that kind of irrational fear only exacerbates the situation. when people stop distinguishing between the individual zealots and the mass faithful, suddenly people who were not invested in a situation which had nothing to do with them, feel the need to take a stand.

irrational fear is just as harmful as irrational belief, and neither is helping anything to calm down.

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protest, fear, london, muslim cartoons