I think everyone needs to see it. When we edit it from our TV screens and leave nothing but a list of the dead, we're sanitising the barbarism possessed by these people.
I'd say this about any religion that lunatics were claiming to represent, but Islam needs a reformation or it cannot say it truly belongs in Europe.
To put that a better way - all nations and all wars are related. On the continent now called Europe we've come from disparate tribes, fallen under many different kingdoms, and lived through the Holy Roman Empire. Since the Western Schism began to divorce us from the Vatican, and since the French Revolution / Napoleonic Code -- the proliferation of individual rights and freedom of religion have been the bedrock of continental Europe. Ancient feudal systems and fiefdoms gave way to inclusive, modern democracies. Protecting ourselves and our rights as constituents in that Europe has been the cause over which we have rallied people to fight in both world wars. If there's one thing that can move different European peoples to action, its threats made against freedom. Those democracies have now formed a European Union, and its entire ethos is one of freedom. Freedom of trade, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, personal security. It is a hairs breath from being a federation of states like the United States (much to the dismay of some).
This radical fundamentalist view of Islam is counter to everything that Europe stands for, and it is no wonder that when things like this happen - the spectre of Fascism rises like a ghost and takes Islam in its crosshairs. No significant quantity of people are going to want to stand up in its defence when acts like these take place either. That's why the cartoon depicting the bullets going through the magazine building and straight in to a mosque is so good... it's the truth that these idiots are harming Islam.
The thing that frustrates the fuck out of me about any religious scripture is that none of it has a shared origin. Faith snowballed in simpler times and solidified our religious texts into the consciousness of religious diaspora, and although they were no doubt collated and rewritten many times over the centuries by many many different people - we have nut bars like these assholes interpreting them in this way.
The remedy is to remove the idiots, or make it inconvenient for them to exist and proliferate. The hand wringing over 'Islamaphobia' is important, because I don't believe innocent, moderate practitioners of faith should be oppressed -- to the contrary, they should be free people in a free Europe -- but there is a problem in this world, right now, with disenfranchised individuals turning to Islam. They feel they can use it to endorse their horrific beliefs and their horrific acts, and no matter which hellish shithole on Earth you look to, no matter which decadent Western society - the people perpetrating the worst acts of barbarism are flying its flag. So yeah, we need a reformation. An Islamic schism. Something that will cast people like this in to the toilet bowl of history. Sort the wheat from the chaff, the sane from the insane.
If I had my own way, we just wouldn't be practising religion at all.
I don't believe for a moment that it begets better morals or understanding. The New Testament is 27 books. Lord knows where they really came from, or what the personal or political motivations were for writing them. Hadith literature? Same thing. Who the FUCK knows.
These editors, satirists and cartoonists did their work in full knowledge of how insane religion is and how insane these people are. RIP, every one of them - they did not deserve to die. May their legacy be that more and more people shine a light of truth on all religions and this crazy crazy world.
