Facebook & Cartoons
It should have been a non-event. It is not.
A group of people somewhere want to abuse the freedom of speech and hurt other people’s feeling, that in itself is nothing new. A lot of crazy people do a lot of, well, crazy things. The problem is the kind of attention that craziness gets. In the heat of the moment, people react to things sometimes too strongly, and sometimes no reaction is shown at all. If you think you have been wronged, you have the full right to voice your concerns in the most apt way.
Given the now-growing Facebook page that wants everyone to draw more cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad PBUH, I feel it is worth the effort to take the right kind of action, and also to keep in mind to not get played in the process. If someone wants to piss you off, you lose the moment you get pissed. Also, if you consider that to finish something off, all you have to do is boycott or ban it, then you have another surprise coming your way (I have written before that if you want to make something famous, then just ban it!)
I propose to all my fellow ethically-inclined friends to write to Facebook (email is [email protected]) and request them to take some sort of action against the page that is based on nothing but hatred and its propagation thereof. Creating groups and spamming your friends’ inbox to join the ’cause to condemn this’ is all good, but I feel this is pointless in real terms. I feel it is akin to banning something, which eventually makes it more famous. I have written the an email to Facebook, perhaps you can do the same. And I hope I am right.
(A friend blogger Teeth Maestro has also written on this here.)
