The flood of messages of love and compassion from the Islamic lands continues unabated. What is perhaps even more disturbing, is that it is by no means limited to the fringes and the uneducated. A recent example is demands made on the US government by a political party in Pakistan:
The party is lead by Pakistani cricket legend Imran Khan, and boasts a significant following among the country’s Western educated upper class. Arif Alvi, the party’s Secretary General, said the western, Christian world should understand that Pakistanis, and Muslims in general, have a distinct way of thinking.
“Its not good enough to say the U.S. government has nothing to do with it. I know they have nothing to do with it,” he said, “but it is their responsibility because a US citizen is involved in this. It has the responsibility to curb such actions and legislate in the U.S.”
Isn’t this sweet. A foreigner, many thousands of miles away, demanding OUR GOVERNMENT making laws restricting things we can and cannot do HERE. The message seems clear: they don’t want their rules to apply to them, they want those rules to apply to everyone. It doesn’t matter if you subscribe to the Islamic doctrine or not; they will still seek to force it on you.
And why? Because people in a foreign land not respecting Mohammad hurts the poor guy’s feelings.
“You can’t come in to a society and say ‘this should be painful and this should not be painful.’ What is painful to us is painful to us. And we expect countries to recognize that,” Alvi said.
Rather interesting. Well what about what is painful to us? Loss of our freedoms because Mr Alvi doesn’t like them is not painful? After all, we didn’t demand they change their laws, they demanded we change ours.
Unfortunately such ravings cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. We see “moderate” Islamic nations demand changes in the international law, banning speech they don’t like. We see Arab, African and European nations issue joint statements saying it is important to respect all religions and all prophets. Shouldn’t be genuinely concerned about how this is going to affect freedom of expression at a global level?
As an aside, since “all religions” should be respected, I am demanding respect (and tax exempt status) for my religion of pastafarianism.
