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Carnival attracts 3 million in Germany - Muslims offended (Roundup)
Feb 19, 2007, 18:15 GMT
Cologne - Carnival parades accompanied by the shrieks of crowds and the thump of loud music drew crowds of an estimated 3 million people to three of Germany's western cities Monday, but there were also complaints at crude humour by float designers.
A Muslim leader criticized a float in the city of Dusseldorf that satirically suggested Islam was not peaceful.
The float carried two identical cartoon-style papier-mache figures, each wearing a suicide-bomber's belt and carrying a dagger and a pistol. The first was labelled 'the cliche,' the second was labelled 'the reality.'
Both scowling figures were labelled 'mullahs,' a term used to describe both Shiite and Sunni clergy. The float was part of a carnival parade watched by more than half a million people in the western city of Dusseldorf.
'This hasn't got anything to do with humour,' said Aiman A Mazyek, general secretary of the National Council of Muslims in Germany. 'The message it gives me is: 'We love our prejudices, we'll stand up for them, even if they are flagrantly untrue.''
However 'as a born-and-bred Rhinelander, I wouldn't get too upset about it,' said Mazyek. 'I'm sure most of the revellers don't want to spread anti-Islam cynicism.'
Mockery and rule-breaking is a key element in carnival, which is celebrated mainly in Germany's heavily populated Rhineland where Catholics form a majority. The floats, built by clubs of amateurs for the Dusseldorf parade, often have crude messages.
Another float showed Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler with his pants off and represented a far-right-wing German party as his bodily waste.
In Mainz, a float depicted US President George W Bush being held down and spanked by the Statue of Liberty.
The biggest parade of carnival floats, bands and clowns, in Cologne, was too long to fit on the 6.5-kilometre route.
The head of the procession reached the dispersal zone before the tail of the parade had departed from the marshalling area.
Sigrid Krebs, an organizer of the Cologne parade, said it comprised 99 floats, 124 bands, 440 horses and about 10,000 people who were occupied during the parade throwing gifts of flowers, chocolates and sweets to the crowds.
The festivities climax on Monday, known in German as Rosenmontag. The event has its origins as a prelude to the Catholic fasting season of Lent, which begins in 2007 on Wednesday, but many area Protestants and Muslims attend the parades.
Many of the revellers in the three cities dressed as pirates, reflecting the popularity in Germany of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-AgenturCOMMENT
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Older Talkback
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The message it gives me is: 'We love our prejudices, we'll stand up for them, even if they are flagrantly untrue.''
Uh..first THEY ARE TRUE, and second Germany is where Germans live - its their country, they can defend and stand up for their prejudices. We don't react when Muslims parade in their streets shouting death to _insert person/country here_ and burning flags and effigies.
Carnival around the world is about airing out subjects that are considered taboo. In that same parade was a float that made fun of a far right party (being depicted as Hitler's excrement) and of George Bush being spanked by the Statue of Liberty. I didn't know the Germans had such a sense of humour; those are funny!
These days it appears that the world's muslims are having a real sense of humour failure, along with thier sense of honour failures. Hiding behind women and children and blowing up civilians (and oneselves) is not bravery; it's cowardice. Islam will not win this Jihad against the rest of the world and all of its diverse religions; 1.2 billion Islamic Cowards will never triumph over the other 4.8 billion of us once we all are outraged enough by this Islamo/fascist Extremism. I currently count all the world's muslims as cowards because none of them have stood up to the extremists yet but at some point the extremists will do something outrageous enough to turn even the vast majority of muslims against them and that will really be the end of it.
Is their anything these religious nut bags cant take offence to? If your so insulted by living in a secular country then go back to hell holes that spawned you.
When will we learn to have respect for one another? Have your fun, but crude is crude, rude is rude, trash talk is trash talk, and killers are killers. How can we overcome our degrading ways, when we continue to class all members of racial/faith/non-faith groups in the same, stereotyped mold?
The effects of our judgments today will carry into the furthest reaches of future generations. The cycle of intolerance needs to be broken somewhere by others much wiser than us.
Intolerance does not produce a float or a cartoon that someone else finds offensive. Intolerance is the inability to accept and respect someone else's views, their cartoons or thier floats, even when they differ from your own. Intolerance is when you take offence to criticism to the extent that your reaction turns violent. Intolerance is the willingness blow up innocent people simply because they do not share the same beliefs (religious, political, etc.) as you. Intolerance is ignorance.
Rightly or wrongly, Islam is becoming universally associated with intolerance and ignorance by the world's non-believers (I believe muslims call us 'infidels'). The longer it takes for the world's tolerant muslims (assuming there are some) to stand up and denounce, and perhaps even fight back against these extremely intolerant strains of Islam, the more the rest of the world is going to lump all muslims together as ignorant, intolerant, extremists. If the majority of the world's muslims want to be included in the world community instead of perceived as against it then I suggest they stop whining and start helping us to deal with these abherrant, intolerant, ignorant strains of Islam that are waging war on the rest of the world.
Muslims offended? Horrors! Perhaps when the Islamic world can go even a single day without a Buddhist ice cream vendor getting his lopped off in Thailand for being in the 'Muslim' zone, without daughters being stabbed to death by their fathers who had doubts about their virginity, without taking to the streets threatening to kill over not very good cartoons, without killing movie directors for their films, without issuing death fatwas from caves, without strapping bombs onto children sending them into bakeries and pizza parlors and then celebrating the carnage by passing out candy, without girls walking home from school in Sulawesi hacked to death for having the audacity to be Christians, without boarding jets with the intent to send it plunging into skyscrapers, without sending 18 wheelers into crowded markets full of tons of explosives, without demanding that people of other faiths recognize and respect Islam while at the same time banning those people of other faiths from their own holy sites and worse, and without demanding that every other part of the non-Islamic world kowtow to its ever growing list of sensitivities as its followers flee 7th century backward nations and for some bizarre reason attempt to instill the same primitive nonsense at their new host nations...then, and only then, will civilized nations give Islam the respect its followers seem to feel should be dished out by default.
Congrats to the inventors of the float that compares the characterization with reality. Well Done!
Any pictures of this float?
I think it would have far more appropriate that the float depicting Hitler should have shown the excrement to be some Sieg Heiling mullahs, as it is well known that Islam was a very close ally and shares many things in common with Nazism. Except Nazis seemed to try to hide their atrocities, as if they sensed they were something to be ashamed of, unlike their more hateful modern adherents. Oh well, at least Islam is an ethnically/racially diverse form of Nazism. Sadly, there will now probably be a wave of terrorist attacks sweeping Germany as the Religion of Peace vents their seething rage and hate for all of humanity.
I'm outraged! A float depicting a party - which, regardless of its program, is part of the democratic process in its country - as excrement! How dare they! And - I'm even worse: the elected president of the world's last remaining superpower depicted as being spanked by a symbol of the same country! Even worse: that National symbol was once donated by the French, so these Krauts are actually offending two nations on one float! Bad! Bad! Bad!... Oh, sorry, I see I'm getting worked up about the wrong thing. It's normal and correct to make fun of these. It's good to talk down democracy. It's great to poke fun at Christianity. My mistake.... ?
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Writers need to think more.Feb 20th, 2007 - 00:05:49
the article said:
'The event has its origins as a prelude to the Catholic fasting season of Lent, which begins in 2007 on Wednesday, ...'
Fasting season always begins on Ash-Wednesday, not just in 2007 -- idiot!
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