I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
Syrian Mufti warns that media can cause war
January 16, 2008
From our bulging ‘Oh God how I wish we were making this stuff up‘ file:
Syria’s top Sunni Muslim cleric urged the media Tuesday to use caution when reporting on religion, saying that the choice and timing of a report can cause a war.
“A simple piece of information can spark a war. If a man dies because of information that you have made public, his death will be on your conscience,” Shiekh Ahmed Badreddin Hassun told reporters at the European Parliament.
His remarks came in response to questions about the 2005 crisis when satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad first published in Denmark caused an uproar in the Muslim world, resulting in protests and several deaths.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t think the media are the ones who would be causing the war in the Shiekh’s example here; this is not a Wag the Dog situation. Rather, as Kathy Shaidle notes, in the example that the Mufti gives, it is Muslims themselves who are causing conflict and wars, by their seeming willingness in many regions of the world to riot and engage in murder at the slightest provocation. If a man dies because a group of exciteable ‘youths’ decided to riot over a perceived slight published in a foreign newspaper that only has readership in most Middle Eastern nations due to the pervasiveness of the Internet, it’s not the fault of the publishing newspaper that the man is dead — it’s the fault of the mob that kills him.
