Curly Sue wrote:

>
> There is no other explanation for waving a red flag at a bull other
> than to provoke.
>

That may be, but it was not the Danish people or the Danish government that waved
a proverbial red flag. It was the action of the editors of a newspaper. The
government's big sin is that the prime minister refused to have a meeting with
some Islamic embassadors to discuss it because he thought that it was an issue of
free speech.

> >And think...even if it *were* deliberately provocative, as KKK or
> >White supremacists marching in African American areas or neo-nazis
> >marching in Jewish areas, what justification is there from the kinds
> >of behavior seen in Syria, Gaza & Lebanon? Is this merited? Is this
> >not it its own way provocative in a very deliberate way?
>
> The violence is not justified, but it's reactive not provocative.

We like to think not, but when you consider first major attack on an embassy was
in Syria, where people live under an iron fist, and things like this don't happen
expect with the consent of the government, and that the second one was in Lebanon,
which has been heavily influenced by Syria, and that most of the culprits who were
arrested for their involvement were Syrians.

> There is as much of that from the secular "fundies," who get their
> knickers in a knot and don't want to hear any mention of peoples'
> religious beliefs.

I don't know about the others but I can handle hearing about them. I just don't
want my life governed by their various mythologies. I don't want to have to choose
one or the other.


> Well, other people don't have the same beliefs as we do, and the
> newspaper knew it. In fact that is why they commissioned the
> cartoons. Pulling the strings of angry zealots makes that newspaper
> culpable to some degree in the subsequent destruction.

Sorry, but I don't buy that. It just helps to expose them for what they are.

>
> It seems that you don't see the cartoons as "bigoted," only the
> response.

It is interesting that they tend to present an image of behaviour strikingly
similar to that which was the response. Perhaps the truth hurts.