By American standards of a) respect and b) humor, the cartoons are mostly a) obnoxious and b) stupid. I don't see why newspapers should be running them just because Muslims are wildly overreacting to them.
What I _would_ like to see, because it would be journalism, not self-important silliness, is an explanation of how this issue from months ago suddenly jumped back into the news, and who is orchestrating it.
The Muslim "prophet" spread his religion by murder, rape, pillage, and general mayhem and then, in his crowing achievement, went on to wed and bed a 9-year old girl. 1400 years later, his followers are active, offensive participants in the vast majority of the world's conflicts, while majority Muslim nations are backward, oppressive hellholes where women are treated like chattel and the human condition has barely improved in centuries. Now, Muslims are "outraged" and "offended" by some lame cartoons, yet stay utterly silent when their co-religionists behead infidels on video and proudly display the heads on al-Jazeera.
These are the people we're afraid of offending ? We have something to learn from them ?
"Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound." Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Posted at 2006-02-02 14:12:21 [PermaLink]Well, it was only a matter of time...
BEIRUT (AFP) - The leader of the Lebanese fundamentalist Shiite movement Hezbollah claimed that if Muslims had executed British novelist Salman Rushdie others would not dare to insult Islam.
[External Link]
Oh, and this great sentence towards the bottom:
An Iranian charitable foundation has offered a 2.8 million dollar bounty for Rushdie's head.
A charitable foundation? From Dictionary.com:
# Generous in giving money or other help to the needy.
# Mild or tolerant in judging others; lenient.
Why can't these people be called what they are?
ABC World News Tonight showed the fuzed turban.
Mark
Ottawa
A billion people hoodwinked into thinking this dirt bag con-artist is some kind of prophet. How can there be that many stupid people in the world. Opium of the masses indeed.
Posted at 2006-02-02 22:16:50 [PermaLink]EXCERPTS FROM AN OP-ED IN THE TORONTO STAR
The protracted, still-raging controversy over a Danish newspaper's caricature of the Prophet Muhammad is a case study of the West's troubled relations with Muslims.
It features the easy clichés of the age — freedom of speech vs. Islamic intolerance, and open democratic debate vs. politically correct cravenness.
But what it has actually exposed is the European media's tendency to exploit anti-immigrant, particularly anti-Muslim, bigotry, as well as the Danes' readiness to bow to the gods of commerce.
But the issue goes well beyond the old debate over whether freedom of expression has limits. It does in countries like Canada, which have anti-hate laws. But regardless of the presence or absence of legislated limits, every society has its own notions of what is acceptable and what is not.
We can be certain that the editors publishing the Muhammad caricatures would not smear their pages with anti-Semitic graffiti. Or commission drawings maligning the Pope, by depicting him, say, in compromising sexual positions.
And had the editors opted to be that offensive, we can be equally certain that not too many people would have been rushing to their defence.
It is this double standard that's at the heart of the repeated conflicts between the West and the world of Islam over how far anti-Islamic provocateurs can go in baiting Muslims, repeatedly, knowing full well the depth of Muslim feelings about their most cherished beliefs.
Invoking freedom of speech or the need to puncture political correctness are no more than smokescreens to hide that larger, and uglier, truth.
AND FROM THE SAME PAPER
Critics say the drawings were particularly insulting because some appeared to ridicule Muhammad. One cartoon showed the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb.
France’s Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk said he shared Muslim anger.
“We gain nothing by lowering religions, humiliating them and making caricatures of them. It’s a lack of honesty and respect,” he said. He said freedom of expression “is not a right without limits.”
Ajsuhail,
I assume you're muslim ? You're part of a religion that demands respect on pain of death, and which threatens death to any member of the religion who wishes to leave it. You know what that's called ? It's called a "cult".
Islam will be taken seriously when it grows up and its adherents stop behaving like a bunch of psychotic children. You're offended by the cartoon ? I don't give a rat's ass. I don't like the vile anti-Semitic cartoons the muslim press publishes daily, or the exhortations to jihad that the lunatics clerics in Saudi mosques intone every day. You've insulted my beloved civilization -- Western -- at every turn and we still haven't turned you into a pane of glass. Now you expect us to care that your feelings are "hurt" ? Grow the %$&( up !
gapper
like most of the assholes who populate this site you are racist scum.
AND YES, I AM MUSLIM AND PROUD OF IT
Islam is a "race" ? Who knew ?
But if by racist you mean that I don't see how a sane person would want to follow a death cult founded by a murderous pedophile, a death cult which makes childish promises of a male teen fantasy paradise, a death cult that tries to ban every expressions of human joy and creativity, then I admit that you have me pegged.
Enjoy living in the middle-ages, sucker !
This is the funniest link I've ever seen.
[External Link]
racist scum
Islam is a religion not a race. So who is the arsehole now? Nice to see another Muslim able to talk about this in a rational and calm way.
Is it really rational to threaten people with death merely because they write something you don't agree with?
ajsuhail: Diplomatic protests and boycotts are fine. However taking hostages and threatening violence against innocent citizens of some European states is an unacceptable response. So is attempting to storm European diplomatic missions (as opposed to peaceful demonstration).
Indeed, this is the kind of response that simply confirms the impression in many Western minds that at least some Muslims have a very different standard of the appropriate response to offence.
That the actions of some Muslims should create an impression that may negatively affect views of Muslims in general is unfortunate and one expects those actions to be condemned by other Muslims--see "What would Prophet Mohammed have done?", Tarek Fatah, Globe and Mail, Feb. 3 (full text not online:
[External Link]
The wider Muslim response to the cartoons suggests that Muslims are unwilling to accept the range of discourse that Western societies generally have decided to permit within themselves. These are societies that now permit what until recently would be considered sacreligious depictions of Christ, not to mention many other actions by the media and artistic community that cause pain to many Christians.
While Muslims have every right to be offended they do not have the right to impose their view of acceptable discourse on non-Islamic societies. Debate and democratic political action are always open to them.
Mark
Ottawa
Ajsuhail appears to be an educated and intelligent person...except in his reflexive defense of the indefensible.
Apparently stating indisputable facts now makes one "racist" (I'd have used 'bigotted' but that's just me...)
I guess that anyone who opposed Hitler's Aryan mission could rightly be called "racist" by that token.
Very sad, Ajsuhail. What a waste of an education.
Ajsuhail. Wasallami.
Unlike Gapper, I am a true racist in this manner. I believe it's not so much Islam that is the problem. It's Arabs. Islam was actually a mollifing influence on that dirty bunch of sand monkeys. If you can believe it. Other Islamic nations have ethnic pressures from within that would eventually destroy or emasculate Islam without any help from us.
I live in hopeful anticipation of the day when the entire middle east is, as Gapper most poetically puts it, "turned into a pane of glass"