I find something very disturbing here. How is it that something so simple will always degrade into something complicated enough to make my constant migraine seem like a soothing background noise? If you've been away for quite a while, here are some posts that would help you put things into perspective.

1. A call to wipe out Christianity, ‘In The Name of Allah?’
2. An Open Letter to MENJ
3. Stand up and take pride!
4. Why I’m not about to ‘let it be’
5. Jesus Christ and Prophet Muhammad
6. Religious Genocide Is Never Right
7. Doing The Right, Honourable Thing
8. Horror
9. Mutual Respect Again
10. Tidak Apa, MENJ
11. Why we love cache / The Changing Post
12. It Doesn’t Change Anything
13. MENJ's fantasy
14. MENJ bans Malaysians
15. What Menj Has To Say
16. MENJ: Gone too far
17. Open letter to MENJ
18. My view on the whole MenJ furor
19. In Defense of MENJ

I know it's a lot, but it would help to take a look at every one of them to get the idea of things before you make up your own mind. Though…what disturbs me is that for the most part, there are some people that can summise this entire Menj issue into nothing more than the right to the freedom of speech.

Ok, I'm all for freedom of speech. I like the fact that we aren't oppressed like monkeys in the zoo who can do nothing but eat, sleep and fling dung at tourists. Then again, there is a very large loophole in the right to the freedom of speech, it just happens to be called…flinging dung at tourists. Let me explain in a long winded way which you can skip until the bottom line.

Say we're all monkeys in the zoo. We're a bored bunch that are forced to do things like steal bananas from unsuspecting visitors. To amuse ourselves (as monkeys) even further, we wait till those hoard of kids on a school trip come over to our cage where we put our name on the map by flinging dung at them while they take cover. We get into trouble and somehow it all ends with us getting neutered.

Now what if we're set free? Can you imagine that? Can you imagine the kind if crap that will be flung around everywhere? Would you want to clean that crap up? Are you going to crap up? Do monkeys even clean their own crap up?

Now imagine that we're in some large natural reserve or open zoo. We're free to go wherever we want but in the compound. We're maintained by the man. Since we have a system to govern the reserve, we can spend more time picking bugs off each other, having delirious animal sex and on occassion fling dung at tourists because at the end of it, it all gets cleaned up.

That's freedom of speech for you, the right to throw crap around when it's appropriate because there is a system in place to make sure that crap flinging is maintained and cleaned up. If everyone has the right to say anything they want, you're going to have a lot of crap to clean up. So you can say you are all in favour of freedom to express hatred, if things go bad and too messy…are you going to be the one that cleans it up?

In fact, the bottom line here isn't even about the freedom of speech. It's very simply what's right and wrong. If a child does the wrong thing or says inappropriate things in public. What…are you going to tell the rest of us that it's freedom of speech? That your child has the right to say whatever he wants? Come on, I like to see one decent civillised parent say that it's what they would do.

The same goes for those that just want to ignore the whole thing. Would you ignore your child should he say something wrong. Well…would you? And before someone says Menj is not our child, consider this, we're all human. We're all related to each other on a genetic level. Whatever happens in my backyard will affect that of my neighbour. No matter what my family may have done to tick me off, they will always be family and we have that obiligation as family, as a society and as a species to make sure mistakes are taken to light and learnt.

This is quite simply something black and white that even a child would know better. Religious genocide is never something to claim to be the right thing. It's not even something you can claim to a satire especially when you're known to have your own motives behind it. It's just something that should have a set tone that it's wrong and there is a line drawn across it which is why we do what we do. Like what any decent civillised parent would do to a child that knows no better. I should think you're old enough to know that.

Or at least I hope that you do.