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Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

And when is everybody draw Yahweh day? Or do we defend our precious freedoms of speech by only insulting Muslims.

I think the point is we only respond when a response is necessary. Avoiding offence is important, but standing up for our rights is more important.

So why decide to insult one giant group of people who didn't threaten anyone (all the Muslims that didn't send out death threats) instead of another (all the Christians that didn't send out death threats)?

The outcry is about censorship of a "depiction" of Mohammed on Comedy Central. In order to respond to this censorship we are drawing Mohammed. We're not targeting a particular group of people. Offence is a side-effect. The aim is to stand up against censorship.

That's great, but you are aiming very broadly. The vast majority of people won't know or care what was your aim and what was the side-effect. You are responding to censorship by Comedy Central caused by a subset of Muslims by doing something that offends many Muslims. My point was - if you are already broadening the people you intend to attack for the cause of defending freedom of speech, why limit it to only some that are innocent? You may not be aiming for every Muslim, but that's like me blowing up a building and claiming I was only aiming for one guy in the building that we can all agree was a bad guy.

I disagree. If I really was killing other people your argument would be valid. Causing "offence", whatever that means, doesn't even rank on the scale upon which killing is bad.

A more accurate analogy would be like blowing up one bad guy and the blast knocking the hats off some nearby good guys. They might get mortally offended that you knocked their hats off, but they should get over themselves. There are more important things to worry about in life.

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