As though the world isn’t messed up enough with struggling world economies, violence everywhere, we also have Muslim extremism infecting the world with fear. It’s a sad day when people have to censor themselves because they are afraid of death fatwas. It never used to be that way, but with the recent increase in religious Islamic fundamentalism one now has to be careful what one says (or does) for fear of violent retaliation.

Even Hollywood is falling prey to that fear. Writer/director Roland Emmerich (of “Independence day”, “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Godzilla” fame) had planned on destroying both Christ The Redeemer Statue in Rio De Janeiro and the Kaaba in Mecca, for the soon-to-be released movie “2012″, but opted not to because he feared a fatwa. Actually, it was his co-writer, Harald Kloser, who persuaded him not to. In an interview with Scifiwire.com he said,

“Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit,” Emmerich says. “But my co-writer Harald said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right. ... We have to all ... in the Western world ... think about this. You can actually ... let ... Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it’s just something which I kind of didn’t [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out.”

Apparently, the end-of-the-world disaster film includes the decimation of many religious, cultural and political sites, which is something he does in most of his movies. And though it is just a film, Islamic extremists seem to find everything offensive. And ironically, they have no problem destroying religious landmarks in real life. Remember when the Taliban blew up ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan in 2001, because it was un-Islamic.

“We are not against culture but we don’t believe in these things. They are against Islam,” the Taliban’s Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil is reported to have said.

So, it’s okay for them to offend those of other religions, but not okay for others to offend them.

It’s understandable why Emmerich and Kloser would be afraid, since fatwas are thrown around like pennies in a fountain, and we’ve witnessed the violent reaction to some ’supposed’ offences. But it’s truly pathetic that it has come to this.