Quotables

[drcuriosity]

isaacfreeman, cartoonist and Baha'i:

A non-Muslim cannot do any harm whatsoever to Islam by publishing a picture of Muhammad, no matter how insulting. In fact, there is nothing a non-Muslim can make that can harm Islam. Islam can only be harmed by Muslims, just as Christianity can only be harmed by Christians, and the Baha'i Faith by Baha'is. No number of bad cartoons drawn by a non-Muslim can ever match the damage caused by a single violent act committed by a Muslim. That's simply the responsibility you bear when you belong to a religion.

[More here.]

cavalorn, British writer:

To descend into the facile, the problem with a global village is that you then get a global brouhaha kicking off round the back of the global Asda because of what someone said, globally, about Our Becky being a slaaaag.

I don't know about anyone else, but I live on an island. I utterly reject the notion of mutual citizenry, and thus mutual acceptance of some sort of implicit social contract between myself and any other bugger on the globe. We are diverse sovereign nations bound by a delicate web of treaty and history, not the population of some new boundary-less ubernation floating on the celestial Internet like some vision of the New Jerusalem. If the cartoon debacle has proved anything, it's not that the Dutch are fascists or the Muslims are nutjobs or any other comfortable, erroneous generalisation; it's proved that the 'global village' is a fucking small-town nightmare.

[More here.]