Lego, The Hagia Sophia, and Terrorism

Lego officially stopped production of the Jabba's Palace building set after the Austrian terror group the Turkish Cultural Association (and make no mistake, they are a terror group) made an uproar over the toy. Any units that are still in stores will not be recalled, but no new units will be produced.

Jabba's Palace, which, if you seen the movie, looks like a bunch of nested beige domes on the desert planet of Tattoine, supposedly is insulting to Muslims, who seem to be offended by everything but the slaughter carried out in the name of their religion (I'm STILL waiting, eleven long years, for those so called "moderate" Muslims to appear and speak out against the terrorists).

The TCA claims that Jabba's Palace looks like the Hagia Sophia, which they claim is a mosque in Istanbul. No. The Hagia Sophia is a secular museum. It started out as the largest Christian church in the world, then it was taken over by the Turks when they captured Constantinople in 1453. Sultan Mehmed II was going to tear the building down, but then he decided it would be especially insulting to Christians if he made it a mosque. Hagia Sophia was a church for almost 1100 years, over twice as long as it was just one of many mosques in the city that the Turks didn't take very good care of.

My ancestors - the Romans - did the same. They conquered an area and converted the religious shrines to Roman temples. And they were violent, bloodthirsty, decadant assholes and the only slack I cut them is for preserving and adapting the system of Hellenistic eduation and governance. What did the Turks do but let all the lands they conquered go to ruin?

Let's face it, the worst group of people calling themselves Christians are the Westboro Baptists, and they're just assholes. They haven't killed anyone, as far as I know. Radical Buddhists? Yep, those Tibetan monks who had enough and led an armed uprising against the Chinese overlords and were quickly, and bloodily, stopped. Jains become LESS violent the more radical they become, culminating in the ultimate form of radicalism: starving ones self to death to prevent harming others, including microscopic spores one might accidentally inhale. The few radical Jews there are do kill the Syrians who have invaded their land (they like to call themselves "Palestinians" but they're really Syrians, and the agreement at 1923 stipulated that they were supposed to all live in Jordain - which was the Muslim country - and the Jews were to live in Jewish Palestine - later renamed Israel. The Jordanians have refused, for over 50 years, to let the Syrians settle in their rightful territory, and yet there is no outcry against Jordanian inhumanity, but when Israel exerts its right to exist woo boy is there ever an outcry from the anti-Semetic media and billions of anti-Semites around the world), but if you invaded my house I would kill you too, or at least forcibly make you reconsider your choice.

I'm not even saying there are no moderate Muslims (most people, not just Muslims, but people all over the world, just want to survive and improve the standard of living for their children), I just want to know where the hell they are and why they don't put a stop to the evil people who are ruining their religion? Do they not care? Worse, do they approve of what the radicals are doing? I don't know, but I want to know.

Is it fair to blame Lego? No one wants to appear on a grainy video babbling inanely while masked men point an AK-47 to one's head. No one wants to be decapitated in public like Theo van Gogh. No one wants to get a truck bomb parked in front of their building. I can sympathise with their lack of balls when it comes to standing up to terrorists.

Fuck the Turkish Cultural Association.
Fuck the Turks and their genocide that they neither apologised for or even acknowledged.
Fuck Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, a ghazi (someone who engages in rading, burning farms and villages, extortion, rape, pillage, and - later - killing people who belong to a different religion), and his descendants and all the wanton bloodshed they produced.
And maybe, just maybe, a little fuck to Lego for letting evil win, yet again.