Mohammad cartoon contest in front of a Phoenix Mosque. What are your thoughts?

While I support the individual rights of those who desire to participate, I just shale my head as all this does is push the stupidity of some to the forefront.

A little over the top, but free speech isn't always pretty. F**k 'em if they can't take a joke. At least nobody is celebrating their extermination like at Skokie, IL, in the '70s.

It was freedom of speech, try it. Guns were okay, kept the Muslim honest. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. The Muslim were fairly quiet and didn't pull no physical actions. The police just made sure everybody just yelled at each other.

It is crazy and should not be done. Who ever is the organizer needs to not do something as crazy as this. You see what trouble this causes all over the world, deaths and the wrong attitude it cause to people about the religion. I am totally 100, 200, 300-1000% against it!!!

Marty K Thompkins SFC (Ret)

Don't start a fight you cannot finish on your own.

It's all symbolism that can that can be read or misread many different ways. It could lead to a discussion and people can get to know one another or it can further divide people. The fears generated , like all fears are real. We need to test them now and then to see if they are fears we can live without. I still see people get emotionally crazy when a flag gets "disrespected". We need to put people first.

Although we have the right to free speech, this just seems antagonistic. Legal yes. Bad idea? Definitely. Christians are to love their enemy (unless they are shooting at you) and certainly not to antagonize people. If you're not a Christian, let common sense be your guide. Don't kick the dog and he won't bite you.

To clarify, I am not calling Muslims dogs. It's just a figure of speech.

I think that with a world full of "characters" that Mohammed was an odd choice as they knew it would be controversial. So, to hold the event right in front of a Mosque they were courting disaster. They had to know.....

My thoughts are they are allowed to exercise free speech.
I think it is dumb to target a random Mosque.
Draw Mohammed, post it online, send it to the ISIS Twitter page. Target the people actually using violence. Instead of the people in your community who are probably on your side.

Now that the protests have concluded peacefully, I think this was really instructive.

I'm not a lawyer, I just read and enjoy the advice of a Constitutional legal scholar I'm happy to call a good friend. In real life I'm a citizen soldier and an IT manager, so please take anything I say as a layman's understanding.

The Supreme Court has set a very high bar for truncating our legal rights with very good reason. In spite of the viscerally emotional response some had to the presence of an armed crowd, they were exercising a trifecta of hard-won liberties in a way that ultimately turned out to be disquieting, yes, but in the end, peaceful.

People talked about "armed posses," "vigilantism," the "potential for harm," when in fact, the only legal standard that applied was a direct call for imminent violence. Surely the protesters said hateful, evil things, but that's not a direct call for violence. Someone even went so far as to call someone an irrational bigot for drawing comparisons with the challenges other religious majorities and minorities face.

None of that is or will be relevant. We have laws for a reason. I don't take any glee in "I told you so," but to have shut these protests down, we would be imposing a new legal standard that could easily be applied to the next thing we have a strong emotional response to. I'm glad for SCOTUS' difficult standard for "incitement," especially after this. Consider what kind of position the ignoramuses protesting this would have today had we taken the easy path and surrendered to emotion and precipitously shut it down!

The Muslim community faces the same challenges that the Jewish people have faced in America for years. I was reading an article in the Jewish War Veterans periodical about a Jewish soldier that was shot by a peer in upstate New York in the run up to WWI, only to have anarchist protests take place at his funeral in Brooklyn. They were armed, as were the counter-protesters, but even in 1917, there was no call to suborn the freedoms of the anarchists. We have our state-assured freedoms, but none of that includes a freedom from being challenged, rightly or wrongly. I believe my own community has become stronger and more tightly woven into the American fabric because of this. So, too, I believe, will our Muslim peers.

All the best,
bk