Normally I would spend time writting this myself. However there is just no way I could have said this better.


To risk the scorn of your Jewish peers defending an action that could so easily be shown as the ignorant acts of ignorant people takes courage.

To logically show that no one group has the corner on common sense and are just as likely of being ignorant takes vision.

To make everyone who reads this feel a little guilty for feeling superior over the rioters

TAKES BIG BRASS BALLS!!!!!!!


Thanks Rabbi Gellman. I "WAS" one of the superior ones

-CHefDino-


Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Lessons from the riots over the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad

By Rabbi Mark Gellman from the Newsweek website



Feb. 15, 2006 - When Jews are taught to study the text of the Torah or the Talmud, the first question the teacher always asks is not, “What does this mean?” but rather, “What do we learn from this?” Up to now, most of the commentary on the Prophet Muhammad cartoons has focused on what it means----not what we can learn. What it means depends on who you are and what you fear and hope. What we can learn is independent of what you and I are like. It is not a question about us, but a question about the world we live in, and that is a better, thicker, richer, more pregnant question.

So, what can we learn from the violence that has erupted over the cartoons?

Core beliefs are not funny. Religion, like race and ethnic identity, are core beliefs. Humor that is self-effacing is fine as long as the member is of the faith/race/ethnos, but when outsiders tell the joke, it is usually insulting or at least inappropriate. As a Jew, I can freely tell the joke about how the Yeshiva University crew team always lost to Harvard because the Harvard crew team had eight guys rowing and only one guy shouting (pause for laughter). If a gentile told that joke, I would … plotz (a Yiddish word meaning: to faint at a Jewish joke being told by a gentile). It is just not funny or in good taste or even in bad taste--it is just wrong--for anyone to insult other people's core identity and then hide behind freedom of the press. Yes, we in the West have the right to say any stupid thing we want, but when people get really pissed off about it, we can't hide or blame them because they can't take a joke. Making fun of Muhammad is just a stupid, insensitive thing to do even if you have the right to do it. Showing a cross in a glass of urine is a stupid insensitive thing to do even if you have the right to do it. Defending one's right to do or say something stupid and offensive as if that ends the conversation is more than naive. It just misses the point of respecting what people are at the core of their being. That is why Polish jokes and gay jokes and black jokes are wrong. They are not wrong because they are not funny. Many of them are hilarious. They are wrong because they are not told by the better angels of our nature.
The riots are not about the cartoons. The riots, we now are coming to realize, were almost certainly set up and arranged by Iran and Syria and other Arab states, but the anger on the street was not set up or arranged. It was real anger, and it is all about Muslim rage at being left behind in the eighth century while the world buys plasma TVs and iPods. Rage is not a scalpel. It is a bomb blast, and Muslim rage is exploding as they realize that the diet of hating the West they have been fed by corrupt dictators is like emotional doughnuts. It gives you a sugar high and then a sugar crash as your body realizes that it has been fed junk. I believe the Muslim world will learn to eat their vegetables and everything will be OK. My only fear is that the world will blow up before that happens.
Hypocrisy is best seen from afar. Most Muslim rioters no doubt have no idea of the shameful hypocrisy their rioting has called to mind. You cannot rage against bad cartoons against Islam while allowing bad cartoons against Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Uncle Sam to be published daily in state-run Arab newspapers. You cannot demand respect for the teacher Muhammad while blowing up statues of the teacher Buddha. You cannot claim for yourselves what you deny for others. The rioters are desperate to teach the West a lesson they will not learn themselves and the hypocrisy of all this is just stunning. The Golden Rule was, I now believe, created less to increase virtue than to decrease hypocrisy. What we want, we must also give.
We are not like the rioters, but we are also not as different from them as we may think in our self-righteous fog. Political correctness has given moral standing to what at root is nothing more than being personally uncomfortable. There are many colleges today where disagreement is routinely confused with insult, where honest debate is seen as personal derogation and where dissent is seen as diabolical. Our correct defense of the right of Danish newspapers to publish those cartoons does not always translate into our own toleration of diversity here at home. Try being a Zionist or a political conservative or an evangelical or a Boy Scout troop leader or an Army recruiter on many campuses today and you will soon wish that those who are attempting to silence you in the name of political correctness were as gentle as the rioters we have seen in the Arab street.
Rodney King was right. Can't we all just get along?