ECHR rules that defamation of Mohammed doesn't count as free expression

[dowie]

People are free to express but to abuse perhaps not.

She didn’t abuse anyone, she gave a view on a bloke who lived hundreds of years ago.

 

[Irish_Tom]

That's not how morality should work.

Why do you need to "trust" someone else's morals? You judge for yourself.

It's just a dumbed down way of thinking, isn't it? So if someone rapes someone, but they say something universally moral, that moral saying is suddenly immoral because a rapist is uttering it?

Surely the morality or immorality of a particular quote needs to be construed from the message behind that particular moral itself. If you judge it based on whos uttering it or some "trust" rating then you will get erroneous/illogical results.

So let's say, for example, mo says "don't kill innocent people", by your logic this becomes an immoral saying simply because the person saying it is a rapist. Even though not killing people is something moral. Morals are NOT gauged by some "trust" rating of the person uttering them.

I've psychiatrically evaluated convicted murderers lol, even they have uttered some surprisingly positive morals. The meaning behind a moral remains the same, just because it was a convicted criminal who believed in this moral doesn't suddenly make it immoral nor does it mean any other of his behaviour is immoral. Behaviour needs to be judged independently.

I can't remember the exact psychological term for this fallacious logic, but it is fallacious logic.

Yes, a person who says or does immoral things can also say and do moral things. However, they tend to be judged on balance by 'the sum of their character' (for want of a better expression). Most people would be less likely to trust a convicted murder than a 'pillar of the community', even if that murder was saying or doing something 'good'. Furthermore, when that individual is the figurehead of a global religion, they tend to come under more scrutiny than your average person.

He "married" and then raped her. (Not saying the marriage makes it OK!!! Before anyone thinks that). But for your logic to be fair you need to assume Rotherham rapists were getting married to their victims first. Which they didn't in almost all cases, and no parents in their right mind would allow such a marriage in this day and age!

So this particular case is a bit half-arsed anyway because you can't just ignore half of the story, the marriage part, which never happened and would most likely not happen. And as far as I know sex outside marriage is not allowed in Islam so there is absolutely no way these rapists could possibly justify their behaviour as being in line with Islam.

If you want to talk about setting mo's example, I think there was one case where one of the rapists held some type of "marriage" but then the vast majority of the cases the girls were being passed around from rapist to rapist and that is clearly not how mo did it. (Again not saying marriage aspect suddenly makes it right or any less worse!!!, I'm just saying if you're going to talk about people following mo's example then you can't miss out half of that example)

What these Rotherham rapists did was wrong, even by Mo's/Islam's standards.

And I'd reckon they are going to their own hell. You need to keep in mind that Islam is just a continuation of the worshipping of the Abrahamic idea of God regardless of what some future prophet warlord came along to write about. I reckon at least 80% of the followers are going to their own idea of hell anyway if it really existed.

There are plenty of reasons why the thinking in the second half of 'B' doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but you only have to look at the '1400 children abused by rape gang in UK' thread to see that people are happy to use it. For the record, I don't subscribe to that way of thinking, I simply pointed out the error in your previous post.

 

[B&W]

Well I've spent time in North Africa and had friends who worked in Nigeria and have had friends from Sudan so yes - I have "talked to people from Third World countries." What exactly are you taking issue with that I have said? Because so far the only thing you've said I regard as wrong was that you suggested he married her at nine and consummated later, which is not what we know - the marriage was at six - and I pointed out the correction. Whether it is common parts of the world today (and it wasn't uncommon in Mohammed's time and place), I fail to see the relevance of. Our society would rightfully call that Child Molestation. A 6/9 year old girl cannot meaningfully consent to a 40 year old man and even could she, a 40 year old man should not be pursuing a child. It is fine to say this and I should not be censured for it.
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Have you actually read their ruling and the circumstances of this? An undercover journalist reported her saying "Today Mohammed would be called a paedophile" and she was convicted of a crime for this. That's not abuse of anyone living yet she's arrested. As Dowie points out - this is in practice a blasphemy law, saying criticism of Mohammed is an arrestable offence. And you have Hotwired arguing that you should only be allowed to criticise if you are approved to do so. These are bad things.

Like I said it still happens now, your Western moral compass has not been the moral code for all time and shall never be.

It is your 21st century outlook which makes you call him a peadophile, back then this thing was common and it wasn't Hidden in Islamic history or portrayed as exceptional.

Perhaps it was the nature of her whole seminar which led to the ban. There is a fine line between criticism and hate.

I don't think she should be censured at all nor should you but I do understand that the court may feel she was doing the whole seminar just to insult.

Whether she really was I don't know.

 

[Energize]

Like I said it still happens now, your Western moral compass has not been the moral code for all time and shall never be.

It is your 21st century outlook which makes you call him a peadophile, back then this thing was common and it wasn't Hidden in Islamic history or portrayed as exceptional.

Perhaps it was the nature of her whole seminar which led to the ban. There is a fine line between criticism and hate.

I don't think she should be censured at all nor should you but I do understand that the court may feel she was doing the whole seminar just to insult.

Whether she really was I don't know.

It's not really a "western moral compass" to hold humans to basic standards of humanity, not to molest, murder, steal etc. These are timeless, universal moral principals that should apply to anyone, moral relativism is just an apologist philosophy.

 

[B&W]

It's not really a "western moral compass" to hold humans to basic standards of humanity, not to molest, murder, steal etc. These are timeless, universal moral principals that should apply to anyone, moral relativism is just an apologist philosophy.

We were specifically talking about the age of consent not the other examples your talking about.

Harmony is throwing out 9/10 like it is a fact, when in fact it is far from it. The age is still debated amongst scholars now, roughly 9 or 10 is what they say but they all say it was WHEN she reached puberty not before.

 

[Hotwired]

She didn’t abuse anyone, she gave a view on a bloke who lived hundreds of years ago.

Which was considered to have the primary purpose of being abusive to living Muslims, the man in question being being strongly associated with Islam.

Hence the crime was not against a dead guy but:

Presenting objects of religious worship in a provocative way capable of hurting the feelings of the followers of that religion could be conceived as a malicious violation of the spirit of tolerance, which was one of the bases of a democratic society.

The UK already puts criminal weight on verbal abuse of protected categories when in connection with a crime (you can get a worse sentence for it). Austria is doing it differently by saying abusing specific categories itself is a crime.

E.S. even gave up trying to make it stick as reasonable and tried to pass it off as it being fair game "that a few individual statements had to be tolerated" to which the answer was still no.

 

[dowie]

It was fair game tbh.. it is a stupid decision by the court.

Worrying about hurting the feelings of religious people when their religion or religious figures are attacked is stupid.

You might as well fine monty python for making the life of Brian.

The mental gymnastics you’ve had to go through in order to support the decision are ridiculous.

 

[Energize]

We were specifically talking about the age of consent not the other examples your talking about.

Harmony is throwing out 9/10 like it is a fact, when in fact it is far from it. The age is still debated amongst scholars now, roughly 9 or 10 is what they say but they all say it was WHEN she reached puberty not before.

I specially mentioned molestation, the other things like murder are another problem with Islam as the Quran advocates it, honour killings etc.

The pedantry here is ridiculous, in common parlance the term "paedophile" is used to refer to child molesters, the dictionary definition is somewhat irrelevant as that's not how the term is used anymore, the English language has evolved.

If the ECHR is anything to go by, people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins would be executed for their level of "hate crime".

 

[h4rm0ny]

Had to dig this thread out to post a retraction. Recently watched this very interesting video with Tommy Robinson and Imam Tawhidi

In it, Imam Tawhidi presents an alternate take on Mohammed's marriage to Aisha that I'd not heard before. Which prompted me to read a bit more on what he talks about. Earlier I remarked that the historical evidence we have available suggests that Mohammed did molest a child. We have no solid way of knowing but following this video I now see a plausible alternative that matches historical writing. It's somewhat academic because it still doesn't change the wrong of this woman being convicted or that what she said is what is publicly professed in Islam itself so absurd to chastise her for saying the same. But still, it's good to be as factually accurate as we can.