Edit: Damn, did not expect this to turn into today’s struggle sesh.
Here’s my both sides/both sides take. Should people be executed for drawing, publishing or showing hateful cartoons? Probably not.
What grosses me out is how Enlightened Secular France has spent centuries colonizing and brutalizing muslims and continues to oppress them with discriminatory laws while acting like the entire point of Free Speech TM is the right to degrade a profoundly marginalized minority.
As someone brought up in this thread, the whole Mohammad cartoon controversy reminds me of the perennial debate “why would a black person get violent if you call them the n-word, it’s just a word.” Context matters, when you purposely provoke an oppressed minority by shoving the thing they find most offensive in their face, you may get a violent reaction.
I don’t think this guy deserves to die at all, but Charlie Hebdo is very racist and it’s gross how people rally around it like it’s this bastion of free speech.
That said, death to A Wyatt Mann. Inshallah.
This is the stupidest shit
For a supposed secular, rational nation, the government giving the go-ahead to broadcast a dumb cartoon and then say "we will break the will of the Islamists" is complete fucking posturing
What does this accomplish? "Let's alienate our most important population in this struggle--the ordinary Muslims that can act as informants or the voice of reason for the maniacs in their community. Let's treat this like a huge cultural attack as opposed to a conventional crime. Let's show that their attacks will cause our entire country to stop what it's doing and freak out. Look at us, look at us"
It's the idealized victimhood narrative of Christendom writ onto a state
Good lord do I hate Christian Aggrievement. They've had nothing but softballs lobbed at them since the fall of the Roman Empire and they do nothing but bitch about it.
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Good points on Ottomans and Mongols, though I'll contest Umayyad Caliphate and say they were a softball too. Their expansion largely wasn't into Christendom, and they treated non-muslim citizens WAY better than you would expect for the time.
Apparently they were still majority christian.
And in return the Muslims were ethnically cleaned from Spain. Loads after they converted.
I think the "Majority Christian" claim depends on what point in history you are looking at. In the height their empire was basically Persia + Arabia + North Africa + Andalusia which I am skeptical of being majority Christian, however later on when their territory dwindled to just Andalusia I would certainly believe they were a majority Christian state. If you have something I can read to convince me otherwise I'd love to have at it, though!
Yeah this part really pisses me off.
Just wiki, but wouldn't it be the opposite?
An expanding empire would be adding people of other religions, so wouldn't their greatest extent be when they were likely to have more christians?
Those are historically Muslim or pagan* regions, with Andalusia being the exception. I don't think they were moving christians into these areas because non-muslims were still second-class citizens of sorts and even though Christians would be a protected class there would still be cultural prejudices. Wikipedia doesn't have a source for that claim, so while I look into it more I am going to assume they are referring to post-Abassid-Rebellion Umayyad Caliphate when they lost much of their African/Arabian territories.
*Pagan meaning any religion not of the Islam/Christianity dichotomy we're talking about
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Wasn't Augustine from "Algeria"?
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Good points, I forgot that Byzantines held Egypt, Syria, and Northern Africa prior to Umayyad rule.
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Was it the government who did this or was it private citizens projecting onto government buildings?
From what I've seen, it was regional governments who either organised this, or gave the go ahead for it to be projected onto their buildings.
Didn't say on the article.