Reuters
May 20th was 'Everybody Draw Muhammed Day', contrary to belief, this was not a campaign led by
Molly Norris. Instead it was the 'brainchild' of a pathetic idiot who thought it would some how symbolise the war against censorship.
In reaction to the facebook page, the
Pakistani authorities put a temporary ban on facebook and a number of other facebook pages were started calling for the boycott of facebook by muslims.
I totally understand the issues around censorship and freedom of speech. What Molly Norris did was in reaction to what she thought was censorship. However she was pretty naive or stupid to think that this would not somehow attract the anti-Islam brigade. On the other side of this issue is the reaction of Muslims. Creating a page to call for a boycott of facebook is a bit of an own goal since you'd join the page and then boycott facebook only to come back to it a day later? The point of that being? Or totally denying access to facebook to Pakistani users because of this 'conspiracy' against Islam. Why not give people the choice to be offended or not?
I for one don't believe that any painting or drawing of the Prophet (peace be upon him) is a correct one. Therefore you could draw or paint anything and it would not be offensive because you haven't got it right. The same goes for any imagery of Jesus, Moses, Abraham etc etc.
This is neither the first nor the last time something like this is going to happen and I think the Muslim world and muslims alike need to learn how to engage in effective discourse. If someone wants to resort to being offensive, why do we react? They are doing it in order to inflame and we're stupid enough to fall for it.
We may cry that the media, the West, the U.S.A or whoever is anti Muslim, but instead of waving banners denouncing all of the above, why not rise above it and quit being so reactionary.
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I absolutely agree with you on all points!!
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