UK Muslims not as polite as Irish Muslims

After the other week's Muslim protest at Google's HQ in Dublin, today we had 10,000 UK Muslims protesting at Google's HQ in London on the same topic - they were more direct in what they thought of Youtube hosting the video than the Irish group were.

Posters such as "Muslims Campaign For Global Civility" were, I think, quite well put. "Larry Page supports Terrorism" and "Eric Schmidt supports Terrorism", perhaps less so. I didn't spot any "Sergey Brin supports Terrorism", perhaps because it's widely recognised that Sergey Brin is Batman. "Don't they teach manners in Google?" of course begged the response "Maybe, maybe not, but they're certainly very keen on freedom of expression"

One Sheikh speaker commented:

Organisations like Google are key players and have to take responsibility for civility. You can't just say it doesn't matter that it's freedom of speech.

Oh, but you can. You can. You can argue about whether that's necessarily true, or a good idea, but it's quite possible to say that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, for instance.

I do however wonder how useful protesting outside Google HQ on a Sunday might be; I don't expect many Google staff are around then. They're probably all home, or out at church...

It does however seem that certain people's free speech is less important than others':

When asked where where the women attending the protest were, one protester replied: "Right at the back".