D
Devout Pessimist
Guest
I'd like to provide a little context here.
There is nothing that justifies the use of violence against reporters. Nothing, ever, period. That doesn't change the fact that those cartoons never should have been published, and I'll tell you why.
There is a legitimate sense of fear and distrust in the middle east towards the west. The west has, for the last 60 years, supported brutal tyrants and repressive monarchies in the middle east - and middle eastern people know that. Westerners like to forget about the fact that Saddam was America's puppet, or that the CIA trained Bin Laden - but they know that stuff in the middle east. They haven't forgotten.
The USA likes to brag about their support for the coup in 1953 that led to the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Iran, for example. The CIA still brags about it as an example of a perfectly executed operation.
The brutal, US supported monarchy that replaced Iran's democratically elected government was overthrown in 1979, and now we have the Iran of today. People in the middle east know that, they haven't forgotten, and they aren't happy about it.
Many people in the middle east tend to know that the USA sent money and weapons to support the savage regime of Saddam Hussein. They know the USA supports the house of Saud in Saudi Arabia, another brutal and repressive monarchy. They know the USA supported Mubarak in Egypt. People know these facts. They know the west has a history of almost uniformly supporting dictators and tyrants in the middle east.
People also know that Osama Bin Laden was in Pakistan, and not Afghanistan. The USA invaded Afghanistan to catch Bin Laden, so their invasion was launched under a bullshit pretext. Soon after that invasion, another invasion, in Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - that's the second invasion of a middle eastern country launched for no good reason inside 10 years.
So for the last 60 years the west been supporting brutal tyrants in the middle east. In the last 15 years the leader of the free world, the USA, has committed two major war crimes by invading two middle eastern countries without the backing of the United Nations and without a proper pretext.
Maybe American's don't care about international law, but weaker, more defenseless countries *do*. People in those regions become especially enraged when the west breaks international law in a way that causes pain to their families.
Now they see western newspapers mocking their prophet, their culture and their entire belief system. Those newspapers should never have printed those cartoons - and not because "it's wrong to offend Islam", but because given the context we're operating in here, it's extremely distasteful to print trite garbage like that. It's like shooting someone and stealing their things, then mocking them and spitting on them.
Those newspapers had every right to print those cartoons consequence free, but they should never have printed them in the first place, for the reasons I listed above.