Word: prophetic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...critics believe could snare not only those who groom teenage suicide bombers, but also a sincere, peaceful advocate of revolution in, say, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Kim Jong Il's North Korea. Even in liberal Denmark, at the center of the row over the cartoons of the Prophet, you can do jail time for publicly "ridiculing or insulting" any recognized community's religious beliefs. That's the problem with free speech: the principle is fine, the application is very tricky, and never more so than in the age of cultural rage. Statutes writ in black and white transmute...
...When applied evenhandedly, free speech is not the enemy of minorities, it's their protection." So does that mean the answer to the tensions free speech can unleash is more free speech? It's not an argument that would win over those to whom some matters, like lampooning the Prophet or depicting Jesus as a woman, are literally unspeakable. But in a Continent with plenty of centuries-old minorities, as well as millions of Muslims who are now part of a volatile, Internet-speed global conversation between Islam and the West that can turn a cartoon into a casus belli...
...Band's I'm Your Boogie Man and the Village People's Y.M.C.A. Are these the Winter Olympic Games or a disco inferno? It does make some sense. For this is a country particularly proud of Infernos. Indeed, after the thump-thump-thumping came a reading from the poet-prophet Dante, with the Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi reciting an inspiring passage from The Divine Comedy. In it, Ulysses urges his aging and tired band of sailors to go on with him to search for new worlds. In a fiery scene, scores of legs kicked in the air evoked the sinners...
...does make some sense. For this is Italy, a country particularly proud of infernos. Indeed, after the thump, thump, thumping came a reading from the peninsula's poet-prophet, with the Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi reciting an inspiring passage from Dante's Divine Comedy. In a fiery scene, scores of legs kicked in the air, evoking the sinners' feet in the Inferno's Canto XX. How unholy is the thrill when you sense that the circles of hell have, in the end, been transformed into the Olympic rings...
Reminders of the harsher realities were perceptible, however. The Olympics are about the pride of the host country, but the Games also bring in worldly and cruel anxieties. Danish athletes reportedly received special protection because of the global swirl of threats surrounding the publication of cartoons inimical to the Prophet Muhammad. Everywhere in Torino and around the stadium, soldiers and police were visible. And until the disco music drowned them out, helicopters whirred loudly over the proceedings...