Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Lee C. Bollinger, Foreignpolicy.com, June 1, 2011
.....In February, more than 1,000 people stormed an Indonesian court protesting what they believed was too lenient a sentence for a Christian found guilty of blasphemy. Last summer, a professor in Kerala, India, accused of blasphemy and suspended from teaching for distributing an exam question with an allegedly derogatory reference to the Prophet Mohammed was attacked with an ax on his way home from church. The list goes on and on in countries stretching from Europe to Southeast Asia. More than 70 recent cases of violence resulting from blasphemy laws have been documented by the organization Human Rights First.
For years now, laws that criminalize statements impugning religion (commonly referred to as "defamation of religion" or "blasphemy" laws) implicitly have condoned violence against those who depart from a country's dominant sectarian views. These government sanctions have contributed to the preservation of intolerant cultures antithetical to open debate and democracy. It is therefore of great significance to the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa that U.S. efforts within the U.N. Human Rights Council recently have succeeded in putting the council on record as repudiating defamation-of-religion laws....
Comments
It is often easier to tolerate dessent and blasphemy than the in-your-face rudeness and provocation that often accompanies it, e.g. Westboro.
by EmmaZahn on Thu, 06/02/2011 - 2:22pm
Westboro is a poor illustration to use when talking about this, mho, because they target and disrupt what most people consider religious ceremonies themselves: funerals. They are in that way like those targeting those they consider blasphemers. Their tactics are intolerant, so they themselves should not expect tolerance..
by artappraiser on Thu, 06/02/2011 - 4:39pm