So, bigots, if Islam is so horrible, why aren't you walking or biking to work?

[jobycom]

180. The illusion of religious extremism provides excuses for bigots.

Take Charlie Hebdo as an example. They print cartoons that mock an oppressed, voiceless minority in France and pretend it's some free speech issue, even though months before they had fired a writer for a work considered anti-Semitic. When .0000000000001% of those being targeted react in a horrific way, the magazine and half the world takes that as an excuse to rerun the very cartoons that mocked the oppressed minorities the first time, ostensibly to show the killers that Charlie Hebdo would not bow.

But bow to who? They were championing the majority opinion and backed by the government, so they were hardly rebels. The people who attacked them were dead. The only people they were sending any message to were the 99.9999999999% of the oppressed minority that had been attacked by them in the first place and who had refused to retaliate, and the only message was "We still hate all of you." In short, they were bigots who used the horrific crimes against them to justify greater bigotry.

There are many cartoons this nation would not accept. If I drew a picture of Barack Obama explicitly giving a naked and erect Jesus Christ a blow job, several groups would be offended, and government would censure them for "obscenity". If I drew a picture of Barack Obama with exaggerated racial features eating watermelon while masturbating to a National Geographic with naked tribal pictures from Kenya on the cover, a completely different subset of US citizens would be outraged, and again the government would get involved.

But if I'm a French magazine who draws pictures EVERY BIT as offensive to Muslim ideas of obscenity, the government supports the magazine and the world tells those offended to "get over it."

We have our limits in the west. We have our sacred cows you can't mock. You can't deny the Holocaust. You can't portray graphic or explicit sex. You can't mock phenotypes. Those of us at the top of the privilege hierarchy find it easy to criticize those at the bottom. Which is exactly what racism is.

But until we have a society that has some right to brag about our own human rights record, we are hypocrites attacking others'.