If someone is willing to murder over religious offense, over a depiction of a holy person the issue is theirs. Blaming the victim for doing something that incited them to murder (especially when there is no argument of “fighting words” causing direct escalation, we’re talking premeditated murder planned at a distance in response to hearing about something indirectly and executed after more than enough time to regain a cool head) is disgusting.

As someone brought up in this thread, the whole Mohammad cartoon controversy reminds me of the perennial debate “why would a black person get violent if you call them the n-word, it’s just a word.” Context matters, when you purposely provoke an oppressed minority by shoving the thing they find most offensive in their face, you may get a violent reaction.

Do not act like this disgusting act of murder is some sort of expression of righteous rage on the behalf the oppressed, like it is some blow against imperialism, colonialism, capitalism etc.

The teacher gave warning, allowed Muslims students to leave if they would be offended or to avert their eyes. The student chose not to, chose to demand their religious sensibilities be imposed on everyone else.

Also for point of lazy comparison. It might be different (in minecraft) if the teacher was themselves a racist and using the N-word or showing the class say a racist cartoon with an approving tone. But this is akin to a teacher in the US showing a picture of someone holding a sign saying the n-word in the context of a freedom of speech discussion, which whether you’re a liberal in favor of US freedom of speech or not, is a fact on the ground, but before doing so telling the students it might be triggering and offering to let students of color leave the room if it would be too hurtful for them to view. Let’s not even get into how rare such a show of sensitivity in the US would be for PoC.

It is religious fundamentalism and extremism pure and simple. Now the root causes of that as Marxists we can analyze and discover the connections back to material conditions and so on of course (poverty, alienation, breed extremism and fundamentalism, the effects of colonialism, etc). However, these terrorists and hooligans as China would refer to them would have no qualms butchering a communist who lives in a nation that has never engaged in imperialism for doing the same.

And importantly the n-word was used as a hateful word, as a denigration against enslaved people, to other them and to demean them, it was spat hatefully for decades by white supremacists (often accompanied by actual spit) on black people in the US as part of the systemic brutalization and dehumanization of a people that started with the importation of slaves and the system of slavery, continued formally with Jim Crow, and continues to this day in less up-front ways. It was created and popularized and used as a slur. The comparison to that in this instance is quite offensive.

This is quite literally a result of a teacher within a class showing a cartoon that contains a depiction of a religious figure that some people believe is against the rules of the religion and against the laws of their god. The teacher was attempting to teach liberal secularism and to be sure I of course object to liberalism but not as much to secularism, there was no intent of offensive nor could any reasonable person take enough to cause them to become violent. And importantly as I stressed above the teacher went out of their way to give students who might be offended the chance to not see it.

Whence and where has Muhammad been used as a symbol, signifier, etc to oppress Muslims or colonized peoples? I do not recall the British or French erecting giant statues or paintings of Muhammad to demean and demoralize and other Muslims or colonized peoples. I do not recall instances of it being a thing found closely in association with any structures of oppression. In fact there are a number of depictions, paintings, etc of Muhammad that originate from the middle east of many centuries ago during a different age when it was not quite seen as so forbidden. The depiction of Muhammad on the US Supreme Court for instance was not put there to demean Islam or Muslims but as a show of secularism with other “great law givers”. There has not been much in the way of systemic attempts at destroying Islam by colonizers historically as the culture of black people was destroyed.

If anything colonizers tried to get in the good graces of local religious leaders (or install their own) to keep the populace in line, to use the religion to keep a certain order, to get it interpreted a certain way to benefit them (and before you try and use that last point, Christianity and all other religions have been equally subject to this). Now of course this was not a respectful depiction of Muhammad, this was an incendiary cartoon. The problem with cartoons that satirize is they’re rarely respectful to their subject. Jesus of the Christian religion is often depicted in unflattering ways and by many of the same publications, as are other religious icons from the Buddha to Hindu gods and I would not be surprised if insensitive cartoons of other religious figures were also shown (it wouldn’t probably even bear reporting if an image of Jesus in sado-masochism gear was shown as an example). Unless you’re trying to argue that atheism and religious criticism is itself a western colonizer construct at which point I am going to laugh at you and point derisively given the history of disbelief and the number of Arabs from past centuries who wrote blasphemous works of mocking.

Yes attack France for its blood drenched colonialist history but defending this reaction as some sort of knee-jerk response is inexcusable. These men did not kill for the sake of their community, for the sake of justice, for the sake of a better world, for the sake of punishing someone upholding a historical evil, for the sake of someone upholding bigotry. THEY KILLED FOR HONOR AND GOD Period. Honor is a horrible concept and I’m not even going to get started on the amount of murder done in the name of a god or gods by people.

Now, should society allow such incendiary things that cause tensions? I don’t know. China would say no and they have some solid reasoning and a solid-track-record. What I do know is France as a liberal capitalist state, as a colonizer, as an imperialist nation cannot use the tools that China uses successfully to bring about harmony and peace. And as a result they’re bound to do smooth-brained and foolish things as they are doing.

And you must remember France was once heavily Christian but has a different concept of secularism than the US or most of the west which is enforced secularism, that religion is a private thing, not something to wave around in public, that it must be kept out of schools to prevent division and religious sectarianism and strife, that in public all French persons are basically secular and what they do when they go to the Church, Mosque, Synagogue, etc are separate from what they’re expected to do in school, at work, in public. Of course this is somewhat naive. Religious people who are actually religious cannot just put away their beliefs but anyways that’s their system and the teacher was not being insensitive nor was the lesson as I understand it particularly problematic for a liberal nation.

I get that it’s supposed to be a demonstration of liberal values, but shouldn’t they demonstrate free speech in a way that makes it look good? The message here seems to be, “We love liberal values because it lets us be rude to minorities.”