Skip to main content

GSOH

"The man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, and, further, as he ought, when he ought, and as long as he ought, is praised. This will be the good-tempered man, then, since good temper is praised. For the good-tempered man tends to be unperturbed and not to be led by passion, but to be angry in the manner, at the things, and for the length of time, that the rule dictates; but he is thought to err rather in the direction of deficiency; for the good-tempered man is not revengeful, but rather tends to make allowances." Aristotle.

A cartoon is usually considered to be funny. It is rarely considered as art, and is essentially, with the exception perhaps of Gilray or Hogarth, ephemera. Three months ago, some cartoons were published in a Danish newspaper. To strict Muslims, the depiction of the Prophet is anathema. A satirical depiction is highly insulting. OK- now several people have been killed, the Danish Embassies in Damascus and Beirut have sacked by a mob. At a demonstration in London, barely six months after suicide bombers killed 56 people and injured 700, some young idiot dressed as a suicide bomber to "make his point". I was in London that day, and do not forgive the monstrous ideology of hate that inspired those immature and foolish young men to destroy themselves and others.

Some may argue that "the West" should make the allowances in dealing with Islamic extremism. Yes- the cartoon was ill judged and we must recognise that fault. However, if there is to be a cultural divide over the right to free speech, then I will hoist the flag of civilised, honest and free Denmark over any perversion of any religion. We can make the allowances for the idiocy of the mob and not press charges against the 22 year old, Omar Khayam for his stupidity. However, those that called for death and violence - and have achieved their goal- should understand that intolerance does not have free reign. There is a limit to tolerance, and when there are those whose creed of blind hatred leads them away from debate and into violence: they are the enemies of a free society. As for God: many crimes are committed in the name of an all loving creator, but these crimes are committed by humans. Yet with tolerance, humanity and humour, we can all make our own way.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...