This is an appeal by Aziz Noorani.

What a sensible way to explain the hatred that such idiotic few do in this world!

Dear Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews,

You're living in the age of the Internet. Your religion will be
mocked, and the mockery will find its way to you. Get over it.
If you don't, what's happening this week will happen again and again.
A couple of idiots with a video camera and an Internet connection will
trigger riots across the globe. They'll bait you into killing one
another.
Stop it. Stop following their script.
Today, fury, violence, and bloodshed are consuming the Muslim world.
Why? Because a bank fraud artist in California offered people $75 a
day to come to his house and act out scenes that ostensibly had
nothing to do with Islam. Then he replaced the audio, putting words in
the actors' mouths, and stitched together the scenes to make an
absurdly bad movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed. He put out fliers
to promote the movie. Nobody -literally nobody-came to watch it.
He posted a 14-minute video excerpt of the movie on YouTube, but
hardly anyone noticed. Then, a week ago, an anti-Muslim activist in
Virginia reposted the video with an Arabic translation and sent the
link to activists and journalists in Egypt. An Egyptian TV show aired
part of the video. An Egyptian politician denounced it. Clerics
sounded the alarm. Through Facebook and Twitter, protesters were
mobilized to descend on the U.S. embassy in Cairo. The uprising
spread. The U.S. ambassador to Libya has been killed, and violence has
engulfed other countries.
When the protests broke out, the guy who made the movie claimed to be
an Israeli Jew funded by other Jews. That turned out be a lie. Now he
says he's a Coptic Christian, even though Coptic Christian leaders in
Egypt and the United States despise the movie and want nothing to do
with him. Another guy who helped make the movie claims to be a
Buddhist. The movie was made in the United States, yet Sudanese mobs
have attacked British and German embassies. Some Egyptians targeted
the Dutch embassy, mistakenly thinking the Netherlands was behind the
movie.. Everyone is looking for a group to blame and attack.
The men behind the movie said it would expose Islam as a violent
religion. Now they're pointing to the riots as proof. Muslims are
"pre-programmed" to rage and kill, says the movie's promoter. "Islam
is a cancer," says the director.
According to the distributor, "The violence that it caused in Egypt is
further evidence of how violent the religion and people are and it is
evidence that everything in the film is factual."
Congratulations, rioters. You followed the script perfectly. You did
the propagandists' work for them.
And the provocations won't end here. Laws and censors won't protect
you from them. Liberal democracies allow freedom of expression. Our
leaders and people condemn garbage like this video, but we don't
censor it. Even if we did, the diffusion of media technology makes
suppression impossible. The director of this movie was forbidden,
under his bank-fraud probation rules, from using computers or the
Internet without approval. That didn't stop him. Nor did it stop the
Arabic-language distributor from reposting the video and disseminating
it abroad.
Online propaganda is speech. But it's also part of the global rise of
lethal empowerment. It's easier than ever to kill people. In Muslim
countries, mass murderers favor bombs. In the United States, they
prefer guns. In Japan, they've tried sarin nerve gas. The Oklahoma
City bomber used fertilizer. The Sept. 11 hijackers used box cutters
and passenger planes. Then came the letters filled with anthrax.
Derision is that much harder to control. The spread of digital
technology and Internet bandwidth makes it possible to reach every
corner of the globe almost instantly with homemade video defaming any
faith tradition. It can become an incendiary weapon. But it has a
weakness: It depends on you. You're the detonator. If you don't
cooperate, the bomb doesn't explode.
This isn't just a Muslim problem, though that's been the pattern
lately. On YouTube, you can find videos insulting every religion on
the planet: Jews, Christians, Hindus, Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists,
and more. Some clips are ironic. Others are simply disgusting. Many
were posted to bait one group into fighting another. The baiters are
indiscriminate.. The promoter of the Mohammed movie founded a group
that also protests at Mormon temples.
The hatred and bloodshed will go on until you stop taking the bait.
Mockery of your prophet on a computer with an Internet address
somewhere in the world can no longer be your master. Nor can the
puppet clerics who tell you to respond with violence. Lay down your
stones and your anger. Go home and pray. God is too great to be
troubled by the insults of fools. Follow Him.
Aziz Noorani