I grew up jewish, so I was exposed early to the concept of a *totally forbidden depiction* -- in judaism's case, it's the name of god, not the figure. I'm not religious, but seeing the concept at age seven lets you understand it sort of intuitively. I remember reading a study showing that insulting language activates the same neural paths as when someone is physically harmed; for a religious muslim, seeing an image of muhammad probably feels something like that.
I think we have to take at face value a lot of the plaintive comments in the petition -- "we are people too", etc. Whoever *started* the petition was probably trying to rouse a crowd, but the *signatories* seem mostly to think that the depiction of mohammad is a deliberate insult aimed at them. The least we can do, really, is to make sure that nobody sees a muhammad picture who doesn't want to; if we do that properly, the interface will make it self-evident that we actually care what religious muslims think (at least in terms of not trying to offend them any more than we'd try to offend anyone else), which is partly what this seems to be about.
On Feb 4, 2008 5:05 AM, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com wrote:
On Feb 4, 2008 10:53 AM, Ben Yates ben.louis.yates@gmail.com wrote:
We should provide an alternate "Mohammad" page without any images on it. Telling people to edit their javascript is silly; most people aren't nearly tech savvy enough to understand what that even means (for example, they have to first understand that a web page can be displayed differently for different users).
There is a rather fundamental flaw in this proposal (actually, in both): They don't want a page where they can look at without having to see an image that is said to be that of its founder, they want the picture removed completely. The javascript/css-option is only meant as an alibi, without any chance to actually appease those who prefer censorship over content they don't agree with. The more complicated the option is, the longer it might serve as a diversion. A better choice would be a patch the firefox sources that disables rendering of images that contain "muhammad" (in different spellings) that needs recompilation of firefox.
Mathias
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