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Thursday, February 09, 2006

On The Malicious Cartoons

Terrorism in any form is bad. What's being done all over is another more sophisticated form of terrorism. Anti-Islam sentiments show clearly in the cartoons released in the last couple of months. Some of the cartoons are in a deplorable sense of humour. Freedom of press can't be given away to any people claiming to be houses of journalism. The cartoons published show a negative sentiment to a major religion of the world. And the depiction is so vulgar! If it's being taken sentimentally, there's no wonder.

I definitely am not justifying the ensuing violence. But, now it's quite clear that powerful nations and powerful agencies nurturing anti-islam sentiments are publicly acting on them. It's very worrying.

Things happening are not right. But given the history of human-beings, such things can't be ruled out from the list of expected. It's quite evident that there's a growing body of world population that's got directly affected by terror attacks. Their family and friends have been lost. Innocent people have been killed. If the above irrationalities are rooted amongst such a population, things are already beyond right and wrong.

Extreme attrocities done on many muslim communities, clubbed with an unrealistic ambition of a purely Islamic world by many of them has resulted in many of them losing their mind and taking the path of terror. We can't sympathise with them; nor can we downright blame them as terrorists.
But the so called terrorists -- if they have chosen their way with a hope of killing evil -- can see their whiteskin images on the opposite camp. Terror is giving birth to more terror.

The excesses in the form of malicious humour is no different. They are another form of terror. All parties should learn from this. All should understand that both parties are behaving in the same way. They are already at war with each other. It's no more a question of right and wrong. Now's the question 'who'll win?'

It's pathetic! We sane people are helpless.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not sure if this was your own comment. Anyways there are conflicting views on freedom of expression (cartoon being one of modes of that). If we don't want to give freedom and only ration it, based on the judgement of sensible (the degree of which can debated) few. Then, are we not conflicting the very idea of freedom? I take on the whole issue is that, there would be a calous few (or may be many), whether or not their expression conceys anything meaningful shud be used as a parameter of control and not the censor!
-- Ayan

Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti said...

I feel there's nothing sacred about freedom of expression as a basic right. If things turn ugly, government even reserves the right to confiscate the very basic of basic rights -- the right to live.

A general assumption is that a government is assumed to a rational and neutral body above the jitters ans spikes of emotions that an individual or a small clique of people is susceptible to. Hence, it reserves the right to let us exercise our rights. At times it confiscates them.

It's a problem when the government itself loses its neutrality.

But frankly, we aren't talking about enforcement of laws, rights, freedom by a government. We are just talking about the abuse that such freedom is subject to. The cartoons are malicious. They are directed to a very large population which constitutes of many muslims who have nothing to do with terrorism. An expression of anger against such a generalised section of world population is nothing but disruptive.

I am not commenting over whether or how it should be forced to stop. That's a separate issue on which my ideas are quite idealistic and impractical. Hence, I keep them to myself.