Originally Posted by Trollheart

Okay I'm going to try this again. I wrote a response yesterday but the damn thing disappeared into cyberspace. Here we go:

The thing that annoys me most about this is the reaction, the sudden belief that this is/was an attack on free speech. Hell it was. This was not some people defending free speech. Free speech is still alive and you can say anything you want, but some subjects are and always will be taboo. If you set out deliberately to insult, mock or hurt someone whom you KNOW is going to take it badly --- and I mean badly --- then are you not setting yourself up for something like this? Everyone is now jumping on the bandwagon, rabbiting on about free speech. Nobody is considering saying “these guys were knobs: they pushed and poked Islamic fundamentalism until finally they provoked a reaction, and in this case a fatal one.”

I would not want to cheapen the memory of those who died, but consider this: there were police officers killed too, and they were only there to protect these idiots, who had already received death threats. So essentially, the journalists and cartoonists were saying that the lives of these public servants were worth less than their vaunted “right to express themselves”. Does that not say something in itself?

Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.