What do you call thousands of Muslims exercising their free speech rights to demand that the free speech rights of others be shut down? If you said ironic hypocrisy on steroids, you’d be right. After the riots at various U.S. embassies last month, the Obama administration attempted to get Google to take down the Innocence of Muslims video. Google refused.
Now, thousands of Muslims are protesting outside Google’s UK Headquarters.
Via Telegraph:
A protest by 10,000 Muslims outside the offices of Google in London today is just the first in an orchestrated attempt to force the company to remove an anti-Islamic film from website YouTube in Britain.
Thousands had travelled from as far afield as Glasgow to take part in the demonstration, ahead of a planned million-strong march in Hyde Park in coming weeks.
Anger over ‘The Innocence of Muslims’, an American-produced film which insults the Prophet Mohammad and demeans Muslims, according to protesters, remains available to watch on the website YouTube, a subsidiary of Google.
Organiser Masoud Alam said: “Our next protest will be at the offices of Google and YouTube across the world. We are looking to ban this film.
“This is not freedom of expression, there is a limit for that. This insult of the Prophet will not be allowed.
The group’s next action was a march Mr Alam hoped would be “a million strong” would take place in Hyde Park “in the next few weeks”, he said.
“Until it is banned we will keep protesting,” he added.
Today’s demonstration was the third organised in a month, and took place on the central London street where the website search giant has its UK headquarters. A demonstration outside the American Embassy in London last month drew little attention as protests in Libya, Tunisia and Yemen dominated headlines, including the storming of embassy in Benghazi, Libya, that led to the death of the US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.
Barricades were erected in front of Google’s headquarters and a crowd bearing placards with the words “We love our prophet more than our lives” and “Prophet Muhammad is the founder of freedom of speech” had amassed by lunchtime.
Uh, how exactly does one honor the founder of freedom of speech by attempting to shut it down?
The protests outside of Google come on the heels of al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri calling for more protests outside more American embassies.
All that aside, perhaps more people should demand to know the truth about who was behind the film? The fact is that much remains unknown about who is truly behind the making of the film and these protests might ring a bit more hollow if we got to the bottom of the motives behind those who made it instead of blindly accepting the narrative that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is a Coptic Christian.
h/t Jihad Watch