OK - before i start today’s rant, the obligatory disclaimer:
“…i personally am an atheist. i clearly remember that, as a kid, i believed in santa claus long after i stopped believing in god [on the whole, i find the santa myth a lot more credible]. however i believe totally in religious freedom. people should be able to believe whatever the fuck they want - no matter how ridiculous their primitive superstitions seem to me - as long as it doesn’t impinge on my rights and freedoms as a citizen of a european country. in other words religion should have absolutely ZERO influence on the framing of the laws which govern us.
i grew up in ireland in the seventies, where the whole of belfast was like a ghost-town on sundays - every shop and business closed - because “god” didn’t like people working on the sabbath. i couldnae wait to emigrate to “heathen england” where you could go and get a curry, have a pint or three and even take in a nightclub of a sunday, without some right-wing religious nutter haranguing you for your sins.
i opposed the invasion of iraq; that latest act of american imperialism and oil-supply line protection, thinly veiled as the “spreading of demaaacracy and freeeeedum!”…”
OK - end of disclaimer. let ranting begin:
what in the name of fuck is going on with regard to these supposedly “anti-islamic cartoons“, that were published in the danish newspaper jyllands-posten, last september?! i’ve heard story after story of newspapers across europe [with one or two brave exceptions] refusing to print said cartoons for fear of offending moslems, tales of editors being sacked for printing them and, of course, our own beloved foreign secretary, jack straw, crawling, squirming, toadying and only just stopping himself from declaring “jihad” over the whole incident.
did i miss something here? - did we have a snap election last week, while i was asleep, and vote in a taliban government? so now you cannae print a fuckin’ cartoon, without checking first whether or not it offends some humourless religious fanatic? and you cannae make a joke or write a piece of comedy, without first making sure “god” finds it funny. what’s next? are our women going to have to start wearing “hijab” in public, lest some bearded fundamentalist nazi finds their appearance offensive to his religion?… will we all have to fling ourselves to our knees at the first sound of the friday evening call to prayer, lest by remaining upright we offend someone else’s god?… am i still alright to enjoy a nice bacon buttie as an occasional treat? - or should i moderate my eating habits, lest one of my fellow-citizens worries about being contaminated by my unclean flesh?… and is it still OK to have homosexual friends? - or should i stone those accursed sodomites to death and send them to their eternal hell?
IMHO the solution for the west is quite simple:
stay the fuck out of other people’s countries and let them get on with running their lives the way they see fit. that way, we won’t have to undermine the very values on which our own society is founded, in some pathetically sycophantic attempt to state that “hey man!- we may be bombing, your country back into the stone-age, but we really respect your religion!”
the right to offend and to be offended goes under many names - “taking the piss out of someone”, “winding someone up”, “getting the rise out of someone”, “having someone on” - but whichever form it takes, it is one of the fundamental [pun intended] building blocks of western society.
all across europe and the new world, at this very minute, people are being laughed at for being “a fat bastard”, “a skinny weed” , “a lanky get”, “a shortarse”, “a baldy git”, “a long-haired freak”, “a tight-arsed scot”, “a proddy bugger”, “a fenian bastard”, “a jewish bastard”, “a smarmy frog”, “a goddamned kraut” , “a greasy spic” , “a yankee swine”, “a chinless wonder”, “a faggot”, “a thick paddy”, “a welsh sheep-shagger” - or any one of a thousand other epithets in a score of other languages - that say “you’re not like me” - and yet, for every miserable po-faced bastard who feels himself deeply insulted and mutters darkly of “official complaints” there must be a dozen others where the hurler of the insult and the recipient are the best of mates, where the ‘hurlee’ will give back as good as he or she gets and where both parties will end up laughing together, with no offence meant or taken.
that is one of our fundamental values, and personally i think it has as much right, if not more so, to be defended, as the fragile sensibilities of an alien religion!
i saw a programme a couple of weeks ago, where various fundamentalist islamists were enjoying their right to free speech to the full by ranting and raving against the western society they had chosen to live in, and one of their oft-stated claims was that within a century britain would be an islamic state. on the face of it a fanciful notion, but now i’m not so sure - another hundred years of this politically correct insanity and the green flag might well be flying over downing street!
10 March 2006 at 13:06
I can only agree. My mum taught me early on that everything was valid topic for a joke: She often laughed at my misfortune. Did it offend me? Hell, yeah, why was my mum laughing at me falling head over heels instead of helping? But I grew up to realise that the only way to get through life is to have a laugh and that laughing at other’s misfortune is as valid as anything else. so as far as jokes go, any subject is fairplay. All jokes are offensive to someone, the point is not to take offense. Just laugh along, and be damn sure to think of a jolly good retort (a sign of intelligence) rather than physically fight back.