I don't think we have any discussion about the Danish Muhammad cartoons....

Which surely prompts the question where in blue blazes would you find a portrait of the Danish prime minister in the Gaza Strip? And in sufficient quantities to satisfy a baying mob into the bargain?

Er, using copying machines?

xpost

What's Danish for "Get tae fuck oot o' it, ya bampots!"

Henry K is OTM wrt if you cannot take it, do not dish out...

Vive La France (Soir)!

Fuck off! How dare you threaten free speech!?

it R gay.

It would actually be a nice show of solidarity if newspapers in all the secular/liberal countries of the West reprinted those Danish cartoons. Then the fundamentalists would have the choice of boycotting all or none.

-- o. nate (syne_wav...), Today 4:36 PM.

Oh my.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4670370.stm

Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage.

http://image.com.com/tv/images/video/south_super_medvid.jpg

Some people *really* need to get over themselves.

The argument being made here is ever-so-slightly slippery, you know; it's not as if there aren't types of images that would provoke similar ire in pockets of the western world. The trick here is that the cartoons are being used to point up how many Muslims don't fit in to systems of thought in the west, but they're doing it underhandedly: they're provoking frothy-mouth outrage over what will look to westerners like the most innocuous thing in the world. But the difference isn't just between mouth-frothing and western calm; it's a massive cultural difference in terms of what makes an image offensive, and our comfortable blindness to that difference.

And the equivalent wouldn't even have to be, say, a New York Times illustration of Jesus fucking a baby -- remember back around 2002, when handmade rugs showed up in Afghanistan depicting the WTC falling and American planes bombing the mountains? Innucuous, historical stuff, that, a perfectly truthful depiction of events that actually happened -- but some people seemed rather offended. And that's a couple rug-weavers and a transient event -- not a major newspaper and a major religion.

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6337/2188/1600/kw.2.jpg

Oh, the irony.

If the point of the boycott is to force the Danish government and people to rescind freedom of the press, then that end must be resisted vigorously. Generally speaking, the antidote to misguided, harmful or ignorant free speech is a strong dose of more thoughtful and informed free speech. It is far better to convince the Danes that the cartoonist was a crass bigot peddling ignorance and hate than to convert him and his employers into champions of freedom by appeaqring to attack those freedoms.

Kinds of gives a whole new meaning to "Let the little ones come unto me".

A, though the provocateur, is in the right.

This seems to be to be such a necessary, shared assumption of liberal secular society than any parsing or yeah-buts strike me as absurd.

Finnish is part of Finno-Ugrian group along with Hungarian and Estonian, though its true origin are still unknown.

Danish is part North Germanic languages that also include Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese.

In other words, they are two entirely separate languages with no formal similarities whatsoever.

How different is this from The Last Temptation of Christ, for those few of you who were old enough to remember that controversy?

But in both cases I just don't see why the non-religious should be held to the taboos of the religious. People's right to believe what they want should be respected by the law, but not the particular content of those beliefs.

It is time for such stale, regressive beliefs to be aired-out, ridiculed, and confronted for what they are: openly hostile and incompatible to quintessential Western values.

Er, do you think the whole world should succumb to Western values? There are lots of different reformist groups in the Muslim world that speak of tolerance and equality from a Islamic point of view. I think it's possible for reform and peaceful co-existence to take place without assuming everyone should adopt the so-called Western values (which have also be proven hypocritical time after time).

(a.k.a. the French surrender)

Anyway. What I was going to say is apparently nonsense, so I won't.

OTM.

I, for one, am offended by people being stoned to death for being gay or having sex, and am especially ofended by people blowing up Tube trains because their religion is so fucking great.

However, because I'm a sane, rational person, I don't feel the need to start burning copies of the Koran in the street and calling for a boycott of all muslim-owned businesses.

These muppets should grow up.

Which surely prompts the question where in blue blazes would you find a portrait of the Danish prime minister in the Gaza Strip? And in sufficient quantities to satisfy a baying mob into the bargain?

The guys I saw on C4 news a couple of days ago burnings flags were, I'm sure, burning the Norwegian flag, which says plenty about the mindsets involved. They'll move onto Swiss ones soon.

http://thebigstory.org/bigstoryimages/off-osamabert.jpg

Doesn't really fit in with the topic, but always makes me laugh.

Not so strange, really. A fundamentalist Christian paper in Norway saw fit to reproduce the JP drawings shortly before this really took off.

http://zurueckgeschossen.blogspot.com/2006/02/jordanian-newspaper-publishes-jyllands.html

That takes some guts, and the editorial (as translated) is spot on.

Rather loaded language, but I do think that tolerance, pluralism, limited government, and separation of church and state, whether they are 'Western' values or not, are worth defending universally. Let's be quite clear here. if you take the words of the Torah, the Bible, or the Koran at face value a lot of people are going to be denied the basic rights Westerners, among others, have been fighting centuires to obtain. Without in any way denying the misdeeds of the West, the language of victimization often used by Muslims, one that decries the use of the word crusade but fails to have any compunction about complaining about Jews visiting the Temple Mount or fails to note that before the Crusaders invaded Palestine, the Muslims did, falls on deaf ears when it come to me personally. Omar may have been a great guy but nobody invited him to take over Jerusalem. Nobody invited Islam to conquer Persia, or Egypt, or Spain, or Turkey, or the Balkans. There is a strain of Muslim argument that seems to want to have it both ways. They use arguments derived from the Enlightenment to attack liberal societies but they have no intention whatsoever of letting women get the vote (not to mention, in some cases, drive or leave the house unescorted) or allowing people free access to information or the right to express themselves. They feel that God is on their side and anything they can do to win the argument is legitimate. I can be a fundamentalist too about certain values and, regardless of how insolent, provocative and stupid the cartoons may have been, I will, to paraphrase Voltaire, defend to the death the newspaper's right to publish them.

"Another armed Fatah group, called the Abu el-Reesh Brigades, said citizens of Norway, Denmark, France and Germany in Gaza "will be in danger" if their governments do not apologise within 10 hours."

That's the gratitude you get for giving these fuckers billions of dollars in aid.

The main objection seems not to be to the content, but that the cartoons depict Muhammad. And once again, why should non-Muslims be obligated to follow Muslim taboos? To be polite, I guess, but why should political cartoonists be polite? Might as well put "The Family Circus" or "Love Is.." on the editorial page. (But even then the religious nutjobs would object to the naked children in "Love is..." and mommy's tight sweaters in "The Family Circus".)

This issue isn't whether people have a right to not be offended -- it's that they have a right to be offended, for good reasons or bad. (That's not even a granted "right," it's just a basic human ability; stopping people from doing it involves the same processes as stopping them from breathing.)

ok, so it *is* an issue of having a right not to be offended. people have an ability to be offended -- copy that. people have a right not to be -- up for debate.

The argument being made here is ever-so-slightly slippery, you know; it's not as if there aren't types of images that would provoke similar ire in pockets of the western world. The trick here is that the cartoons are being used to point up how many Muslims don't fit in to systems of thought in the west, but they're doing it underhandedly: they're provoking frothy-mouth outrage over what will look to westerners like the most innocuous thing in the world. But the difference isn't just between mouth-frothing and western calm; it's a massive cultural difference in terms of what makes an image offensive, and our comfortable blindness to that difference.

i don't think anyone is going into this blind; they're assrerting thw value of free speech against religious dogma.

And the equivalent wouldn't even have to be, say, a New York Times illustration of Jesus fucking a baby -- remember back around 2002, when handmade rugs showed up in Afghanistan depicting the WTC falling and American planes bombing the mountains? Innucuous, historical stuff, that, a perfectly truthful depiction of events that actually happened -- but some people seemed rather offended. And that's a couple rug-weavers and a transient event -- not a major newspaper and a major religion.

-- nabisco (--...), February 1st, 2006.

they may have seemed 'rather offended' but i'm guessing that fewer death threats were made.

British jihad group: "Mohammed silenced his critics by having them brutally murdered. Surely we should follow his example."

I don't really see how refraining from publishing caricatures whose sole purpose was to be offensive to Muslims is appeasement.

Is this true? Could we not posit that it's an attempt to use satire to point out the relationship between Islam and violence. Would it be more legitimate if it was about Christians bombing abortion clinics or Hindus razing mosques?

NB, that's part of what I meant when I said this was "underhanded" -- notice how they've located the means of offending Muslims that will seem the absolute most innocuous to everyone else? Let's be serious: it's a baiting move. And while it proves what it sets out to prove, that doesn't feel like much of an accomplishment. For one thing, it's not like we didn't know this already. For another, it's totally sleazy to pretend like provoking divisiveness is the first step in "airing" these issues and then solving them; face-rubbing, divide-deepening, and mistrust-building are shit first steps toward cultural peace. This is just smug baiting of the worst parts of the Muslim world and character, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that makes its point by actually working to make that point more true; you may as well prove homelessness exists by evicting poor people.

(Beyond which, on the more academic side of this: what's being proven? That Muslims can be deeply offended by images on paper? They're really not the only ones. That some of them will react strongly and unpleasantly? In that race, yes, some of them are probably winning, but how is that news?)

Is this really what we need? More images that link Islam with violence in the Western mind? Because not enough Westerners already think that Muslims are all a bunch of violent savages.

Western world: "You Muslims are always getting angry and overreacting for no reason."

Muslims: "No, we're not."

Western world: "Yes you are, yes you are, yes you are..."

Muslims: "NO, WE'RE NOT."

Western world: "See! You are! Nyah, nyah!"

By the way: the more I think about it, the more it seems like making comparisons to, e.g., Christianity isn't the way to go here -- that presumes that our interest is some kind of overarching fairness, rather than a decent world. I'd be (very slightly) happier with this kind of nose-rubbing provocation being directed at American fundamentalists because, well -- among other things, I think the public underestimates their radicalism, and I think that when the public gets exposed to that radicalism, the fundamentalists lose power and become steadily more marginalized. That isn't the case here. With those nose-rubbing, a perch in the west tosses out a broad offense to a whole other part of the world, and the reaction doesn't marginalize that element except in the heads of the people doing the nose-rubbing. There are no on-the-fence people to whom it's suddenly revealed that -- contrary to their previous ambivalence -- Muslim radicals aren't quite their style. The exact opposite happens: it energizes that radicalism, it provides some small justification for that radicalism, and it stands a good chance of making theoretical moderate fence-sitters grow more sympathetic to that radicalism.

Note the difference between the reaction of Muslims worldwide to these inept cartoons and the reaction of the head of Sweden's Lutheran church to the trend of buying anti-Christian jeans.

But dude, nobody's arguing that; nobody's defending the frothy-mouthedness; that goes without saying. I don't see how anyone's treating the content of other cultures as being value neutral. I think what's being said is that these cartoons exploit a particular religious proscription in order to manufacture (Muslim) outrage and then counter it with (western) outrage. And that's stupid. Give me a major newspaper and a half-decent cartoonist and I can accomplish that with any group in the world; Muslims might win in terms of strength/violence of response, but why exactly do we need another empirical demonstration of that?

I guess my problem is that I don't want editors to fear what Muslims (or any group) might say to the point of self-censorship. I enjoy heated polemics and the issues they raise and if they are sometimes impolitic, crass, and occasioanally more productive of heat than light, that's a small price to pay.

I don't really think there's any danger of that. If the Danish newspaper had published an article saying that Muslims are overly sensitive about the publication of images of Muhammad, there would be no uproar. The uproar happened because of the images. How does actually publishing the images add to the discourse something that couldn't be said in words? It's like saying, oh the NY Times is censoring my article about the use of obscenities on TV because they won't let me publish the actual obscenities in their pages. Publishing the obscenities wouldn't add anything to the story. In the same way, if newspapers voluntarily refrained from publishing images of Muhammad, it's not like they'd be limiting what they could write or the ideas they could express.

In Holland this intimidation took the form of the murder of Theo Van Gogh and the placing under constant police protection of two members of parliament who received credible death threats for their criticism of aspects of Islamic doctrine. So, in Europe's most tolerant state members of government are reduced to sleeping in prison cells for their own protection, and an artist is nearly beheaded as he rides his bicycle down the street, solely as a consequence of the introduction of Islam in that country.

And nabisco thinks the proper way to respond to this is to avoid any criticism of Islam because that will only alienate the moderates?

xpost

I love all the blasphemous depictions of him in the old Persian paintings where, out of respect, his face is covered in a veil of flame.

I also don't think these cartoons were designed to be as offensive as possible to Muslims. And the Islamic Society of Denmark must agree since according to the Wiki page on this affair they added more offensive illustrations, such as images of Muhammad with a pig's nose, to the propaganda they handed out to help goad the mobs into righteous ire.

http://www.uriasposten.net/pics/JP-011005-Muhammed-Westerga.jpg

I am not so certain about the former; one would have to see the theoretical piece with and without obscenities and in context. Arguments which simply assert that X "would add nothing to the discourse" without a little more specificity rely on a fortune-telling ability that doesn't give much comfort.

As to the latter, aside from the problems of these reactions, is there some reason why newspapers should refrain from publishing images of Muhammed? Why, of all religions in the world, should this one be show some voluntary deference that the others probably don't receive? This is to close, to me, to people arguing in favor of the press ban on photographing soldiers' coffins as they return from Iraq. Why do we need pictures? Can't they just write about it? Obviously, there's something in imagery, whether photographed or drawn, that can convey meaning in a different way or at a different level.

x-post: Compared to what one regularly sees concerning Jews in the Arab-speaking media, that's practically a Disney cartoon.

That it does offend, of course, there can be no doubt.

that's something that bugged me on the thread about google and china, the idea that freedom of speech and free expression are "western" values that cultural imperialists want to ram down the throat of the chinese government, or the world in general. i don't think of human rights as "western" values, and positioning them that way is a huge disservice to dissidents and reformers in lots of nonwestern countries who have gone to jail or even been killed trying to exercise or secure those rights. i have no more sympathy for muslims outraged about a political cartoon than american fundamentalists outraged about 'the book of daniel' or whatever.

xpost: yeah, i don't think the main point of the cartoon was "to offend muslims worldwide." for one thing, who would expect that muslims worldwide would see a cartoon in a danish newspaper? i imagine the audience the cartoonist had in mind was primarily the paper's readership. that's not to say that they are particularly insightful or thought-provoking cartoons, but no, i don't think the cartoonist was sitting there chuckling going 'oh, this'll really piss off the towel-heads.'

(a) It is a deliberate provocation, insofaras the paper has absolutely no everyday course-of-business reason to be publishing images of Mohammed; they were printed not in the course of free speech but as a specific form of free speechintended to cause offense to a minority. Casting this as "we're not going to be intimidated into losing our freedom of speech" is one of the most insane things I have heard all month, and probably says something really interesting about the people behind this: precisely what sort of made-up seige mentality do you need to have going to fear that bold measures need to be taken to keep Danish freedom of speech from falling to radical Islam? Lookit: there is a difference between boldly speaking your views in defiance of some people's offense and boldly speaking views intended solely to provoke that offense. And I'm not even saying the latter is wrong -- I'm just saying that in this case it's stupid.

(2) People with rudimentary English reading skills will probably notice that I have at no point said that we should "avoid any criticism of Islam" -- in fact I think I've offered some criticism of Islam on this thread. I've said that going out of one's way to provoke or draw out the worst sides of the Muslim world do nothing practical to help anyone (except the worst sides of the Muslim world).

(3) Both of you have the cause and effect here absolutely backward, championing this thing as some kind of noble response to the threats it knowingly provoked! This thing wasn't nobly and incidentally published in the face of opposition -- it was published with the intent of creating that opposition and then being outraged by it.

(4) Nemo I don't know who the fuck you think you're arguing with but quit calling him "Nabisco," because there's already someone named that on this thread. I haven't said a damn thing about Western carelessness or insensitivity, and I haven't said a damn thing approving of the fact that some Muslims will go frothy-mouthed about this. What I've questioned is what anyone gains by provoking that frothy-mouthedness. Anyone? All I see is the supposed enemies of radical Islam making common cause with it -- two sets of suckers suckering one another into provoking the same confrontation.

(5) I'd be interested to see someone explain to me what the point of these cartoons was, if not to deliberately provoke Muslim sensibilities. Keep in mind the "deliberate provocation" can include plenty of positive or noble things. Plenty of the non-violent tactics of the civil rights movement involved deliberate provocation, even a particularly dignified form of nose-thumbing. You can try and explain it on those grounds -- and then somehow try to justify how that provocation serves anyone's ebst interests -- but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that these images were printed in the incidental everyday course of the paper, and not intended to create a very specific effect.

I think I'm going to join some other folks I know in trying to avoid reading/posting on this board, even if keeping up with I Love NFL/I Love Games/I Love Music happens to require a bit more investment than just mouthing off at fucking dipshits who don't know how to fucking read or put themselves in any other shoes besides "size 10 privileged whiteboy"

I will concede this at least, but I'm still more pissed at the outraged Muslims than I am by the daft editors.

In an effort to not deliberately misread you, nabisco, is this but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that these images were printed in the incidental everyday course of the paper, and not intended to create a very specific effect a sugestion that they did it to increase circulation? I cannot believe a newspaper would ever sink so low as to do that.

As I said above, I too can be an intemperate fundamentalist: dick around with the right to free speech and I'll likely get pissed off. They're stupid cartoons. That happens in a free country. Get over it and before you look for examples of Western intolerance toward Islam to get outraged about, free your own media and hold them to the same standards.

TOMBOT, I don't think your analogy is exactly appropriate to the situation.

Sorry for the vehemence and typos above, too.

Plus I'm riled by Nemo's mention of an Islamic Society exaggerating the slight, because that's exactly my point here. Every Western action that can be spun as disrespect of Islam gets used for exactly these purposes: those events get used as bread and circus, a way to radicalize people, to justify that radicalism, even to prop up horrid governments and distract their citizens from the issues in their own lives. We know all this very well, and the fact that it's often effective isn't due to any toddlerish qualities among Muslims -- it's due to the same human qualities that allow western leaders, now and in the past, to mobilize their populations the way they want. This sort of thing doesn't, on a practical level, benefit anyone, and if anything it's yeast for the bread and tents for the circus -- it contributes to and bolsters exactly the sort of thing it's meant to oppose.

they were printed not in the course of free speech but as a specific form of free speech intended to cause offense to a minority

a.) they were too printed "in the course of free speech," no matter how you care to qualify it

b.) they were printed in a complex cultural and political context that goes way beyond 'ha, let's piss off the dirty muslims,' and i wish people would stop ignoring that context

c.) it's easy to see why people got offended, and i can imagine being offended myself

d.) but i am bothered by the hyperbolic overreaction to what are JUST A COUPLE OF CARTOONS IN ONE FRIGGIN' NEWSPAPER IN DENMARK, FOR GOD'S SAKE

e.) and i've worked for newspapers all my adult life, and i take this shit seriously. i don't like when the american major media caves to bullying from christian groups -- which it does too often and easily -- and i'd rather not see newspapers cave to the out-of-all-reasonable-proportion outrage of islamic groups either. writing angry letters to the editor, fine. demanding meetings with the editor and publisher to outline the concerns of the islamic community, fine. but hundreds of thousands of people marching in international protests and even the odd death threat because of a couple of cartoons?

f.) 'the satanic verses' was a deliberate provocation too, right? i remember being disgusted when bush sr. and dan quayle joined in the bashing of that book (which they hadn't read) on the grounds that it was 'insensitive.' how is this different?

I find it intersting that the first people that I thought about were not the Danish editors even though I'm a quarter Danish by descent but the Muslims. I have several at least nominally Muslim Arab and Persian friends and what I have said here I have said or would say to them.

Are people seriously arguing that a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad where his turban is a bomb is clever satire?

I don't think I can follow you on the "just a couple cartoons" part, which is still exactly what I meant when I said there was something "underhanded" about the technique (cartoons to westerners are "just" cartoons). Most of us here are in a position where we don't much care about other people's disrespect of our values, not unless it comes from our own government, the only people with real power over us. But "just a cartoon" masks the reality of the way some people are bound to see this: as people in the west kinda smugly going out of their way to print images that are deemed blasphemous in another belief system. (Notice how the reaction isn't about the blasphemy so much -- it's about the perception that this is a deliberate insult, an actual message of disrespect.) Don't get me wrong -- the reaction is not something I approve of. It is, in fact, fucking horrible. But it's not a reaction to "just a couple of cartoons," you know?

well the immediate context is in that wikipedia article linked above:
Jyllands-Posten commissioned and published the cartoons in response to the inability of Danish writer Kåre Bluitgen to find artists to illustrate his children's book about Muhammad, for fear of violent attacks by extremist Muslims. Islamic teachings forbid the depiction of Muhammad as a measure against idolatry (see aniconism), however, in the past there have been non-satirical depictions of Muhammad by Muslims.

but more broadly, yeah, this whole issue of european countries adjusting to being more diverse and multicultural is very complicated. there's a huge amount of racism, on the one hand. and of course serious economic divides on top of the cultural schisms. but there is also the issue of increasingly militant islamic fundamentalism, and after theo van gogh, the question of media intimidation by those factions is a serious one. in addressing it, the newspaper obviously chose stridency over sensitivity (although i haven't seen a translation of the essay that accompanied the cartoons, so i don't know the full context of the presentation). i think the wisdom of that approach is a good subject for a journalism ethics debate. but i don't think western media -- or any media -- should be constrained by the strictures of islam. and to whatever degree they feel intimidated into doing so, i think that's a problem.

xpost: nabisco, i know "just a couple of cartoons" is a simplification, even though it's literally true. but i think what needs to be recognized is that they were a reaction to a sense of being initimidated -- in some cases, physically (from what i've read, i don't think we as americans understand the shock of the theo van gogh case) -- and refusing to buckle to it. and also, in a confrontation between shrill defense of free speech and shrill defense of religious fundamentalism, i just default to free speech. that's my own belief system, fine, but i'll defend it.

I agree.

I want to say something else but I'm probably going to fumble it. Those cartoons would piss off most Muslims who were meaningfully Muslim, I think. Beyond the Muslims=terrorists stereotype and smearing of the Prophet Muhammad, there's something galling about the recent appearance in Western discourse of a certain kind of knowingness about what's wrong with Islam and the Muslim world, when for years and years, though many Western nations had all sorts of investments in the Muslim world, most Westerners had no knowledge of Islam as a system of belief or as lived by its practitioners. I realize that to some extent this is just the inevitable result of September 11th in the US and shifting demographics in Europe (which are the fallout of European imperialism, by and large), but, full disclosure: I was raised Muslim, and it bugs.

The muslim world, complain against the drawings because they, hurt there feelings ?, well what about ?the burning of the danish flag in Gaza, as a Christian i know that the white cross in our flag (Dannebrog), is an symbol of christianity so one could claim that the Muslim society`s in wich, the flagburnings took place should apologize to the worlds christian-society.

But what is this all about, i`ll say it loud and clearly - it`s the beginning of world war three or one might say the beginning of the War of Religion.

For far too many years, we have let fundamentalistic and radical muslims infiltrate our society`s, and giving them the room and space to, practice there systematic brainwash of illiterats and spreading false propaganda in the muslim world as an example i can refer to Imam Abu Bashar who works at the prison where i work as an Prisonguard and Cognitve skills Teacher, he has knowingly twisted the facts on his tour to the middleeast in fall 2005, where he have shown pictures or drawings of there prophet with a pigs snout and ears, but those pictures or drawings never occured on any danish media.

I think the wawe of sympathy, the danish people are getting, from around the world especially from the United States, shows the impor-tance of the western world standing up for not only our, freedom of exspression but standing up for our democratic rights to live in a free and openminded, enlightend society, where no one can claim the right to impose his cultural or religious opinion or believe on me, he has the right to speak his case and make arguments for his case through reason not through violent acts, threats or economic pressure.

In my 7 years of employment within the Danish Judicial system,i none the less have to admit, that some of my otherwise openminded and re-spectfull thoughts of the country`s muslim population has been degraded because of these facts :
90% of all street muggings and violent attacks in Copenhagen and other bigger cities are committed by gangs of young 2. generation immigrants.
70% of all rapes are committed by immigrants although they only make up 8-10% of the danish population.
30% of all murders are committed by immigrants.
80% of youths (age 15-25) charged with committing a violent crime is 2. gen. immigrants.
The drug market in Copenhagen is controlled by 2. gen. immigrants.
90% of all group rapes are committed by 2. gen. immigrants.
Aproximatly 30-40 percent of the danish inmate population, are persons with another ethnical background than danish, at my section we currently have 78% inmates with ethnical background in countrys like Palestine, Morocco, Algeria, Iran, Somalia, Iraq and other arab countries
Etc etc.

I think the numbers, talks for themselves it ain`t a coincidence and can`t be explained only by picturing the muslim society as the weak and marginalized, socially and economically outcasts of the western world, it has to do with the structure within the islamic society, where they give the Imam`s the privileague of religous power, in-stead of letting the holy Quran and Islam as religion, speak for it self.

As a last comment, i`d like to thank all the muslim`s that practice Islam, in a way that don`t cloud there mind`s and prohibit them from thinking clearly.

My deepest thanks for your sympathy with my country

Prisonguard and Cognitive skills Teacher

Michael Overgård Madsen
Nyborg Denmark

I have books on Islam that I bought back in the 80's but I studied the Crusades a lot as a kid (I highly recommend Amin Maloouf's 'The Crusades as seen by the Arabs' btw). However, and I'm sorry to state the obvious, much of what I don't like about Islam is the same as what I don't like about Christianity and Judaism.

I am reminded of Gore Vidal's warning that we have entered a period of fundamentalism and theocracy in the global cycles of history.

I also highly recommend the 3 volume 'Venture of Islam' by Marshall G. S. Hodgson, which was, incidentally, given to me by a Syrian friend.

my point is merely that the cartoon wasn't published just to annoy or agitate muslims in the middle east (hence the muslim-community who actually lives *in* europe remains rather silent about the matter), but it was a reaction to events happening in europe (and, i suppose, they happen in america today as well). we had and still have cartoons ridiculing the christian god, the christian jesus, whenever religion and politics, religion and freedom of speech, crossed paths. and i think we should respect the freedom of the cartoonists, of commentators, to use this in public debate.

The context you guys are describing is reason for a whole lot of discussion about free speech and assimilation and a whole lot of other things, but I still don't in the least see why it would call for someone to publish images that will be considered blasphemous by a whole lot of people. You know what I mean? There's not much point to this apart from cheeky blasphemizing.

I believe that lack has certainly been remedied. Big time - to quote our dearly beloved president of vice.

I would. The more people that buy it, the bigger the demoralizing message to the fundies is. Good.

i agree. i think the point would have been made better with a simple portrait of muhammad -- which still would have violated the prohibition on idolatry, but in a less gratuitous way. but as juvenile as the cartoons may be, they did have a point and it's a legitimate one. and the massive sense of injury and outrage is many times more unreasonable than the publication of the cartoons, and when i see people saying things like "No one can say a bad word about our prophet," which is what one of the new Hamas legislators said about this, i think, get a grip, lady. (the legislator actually is female, btw, i'm not besmirching someone's masculinity)

I think the one reason would be something like: because a matter of principle is at stake where one is being forbidden to use a whole particular medium of expression (visual depiction, in this case) for a particular subject.

So if I wrote to the government demanding a meeting with Tony Blair because I disagreed with a Daily Mail editorial about asylum seekers, would it be strange and wrong of him not to meet me?

Apparently the BBC are now being threatened with all kinds of unpleasantness after they showed a brief shot of one of the papers. As I said upthread, I just wish these people would just grow up. But what is beginning to trouble me more is the reaction of some supposedly 'liberal' people who are unable to contemplate any school of thought that is vaguely critical of poor, oppressed muslims.

These very same people were outraged when Christian fundies swamped the BBC with complaints about Jerry Springer The Musical without even watching it first, but they're giving their backing to a bunch of violent bigots who are utterly convinced of their own righteousness yet are unable to cope with any criticism of their views or debate the issues logically.

It's like that Sikh temple play in Brum all over again.

HOWEVER the Danish paper in question is on the right, eg. the Danish version of the Torygraph so may be guilty of a certain amount of mean-spiritedness.

The Sikh play was written by a Sikh woman and that furore boils down to a scene where there is a rape in a gurdwara. One of my closest friends is...another Sikh playwright and she was offended by it mostly because staging that scene that way was a case of cack-handed attempt at symbolism (not the expression of male power or the questioning of the religion - all that was fine).

Stewart Lee (Jerry Springer the Opera librettist) was on the radio this morning and demurred that he personally wouldn't lampoon Islam because he is not as knowledgeable about it as Xtianity.

there's offense and offense, though amirite?

i don't agree with tombot's analogy. is listening to offensive rap lyrics the same thing as calling female coworkers 'bitch'?

fundamentalists are automatically wrong.

This is part of the same continuum as the withdrawal of the Sikh play last year and the lobbying against Jerry Springer. All need to be resisted with equal vigour. If you live in a society which has enshrined freedom of expression then you accept that that elements of that society's expressions may offend you. end of. It's a moral absolute. Following a different course, let alone legislating one, is only going to enshrine inequality.

"islam" and "muslim" at this point just seem to me to be the same as "internet" and "information superhighway" or whatever in 1995 - something EVERY SINGLE MEDIA OUTLET goes on and on and on about, but has little to no impact on anything (and i live in nyc, home of good ol' 9/11, don'tchaknow). i mean, maybe if you live in a nearly homogenous society like denmark you'd feel threatened by muslims, but even with attacks against the west (9/11, 7/7, 3/11), i could give a fuck. it's a tiny, tiny, tiny majority.

See - this is why I choose to live in Europe, and not the Middle East.

Fundamentalists should also note:

Article 9
Freedom of thought, conscience and religion



1


Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.


2


Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Will be drinking Danish beers tonight in support - may even dig out my Ace of Bass CD

nabisco, I think this is precisely why the publication of the cartoons - AND the reproduction of them across europe in the show of solidarity, which I hope spreads even further - was a good thing. political satire is supposed to be offensive, spiteful and unpleasant - and its potential to be all of these things has to be protected otherwise it's useless as a medium. sure, I guess they knew that this would rile muslims - what of it? I don't understand why anyone should refrain from this sort of deliberate provocation.

(If fundamentalist Christians were going after gay pornographers, neither would I think the answer was to make and publicize gay pornography in which the apostles gangbang Jesus. Funnier than these cartoons, but not a very practical idea.)

I WANT TO MAKE THIS FILM!

ok that's dumber than the ace of bass thing.

i think y'all are missing something: the fact that the west is the most powerful hegemonic force in the world. yes, denmark ain't america, but do y'all ever think for a second that, ya know, since muslims have been defined as "other" by the west for a long fucking time now, maybe, just maybe, they have a right to object to it continuing? a lot on this thread to me reads like suburban homeslice whitebread people in america (takes one to know one, as i am one) complaining about how "black people can't just move on."

But then don't complain when your provocation actually incites violence. Post the Van Gogh murder, the Danish should know more than anyone that they're playing with fire with this sort of thing. That's all I'm trying to point out. There is a thin, possibly invisible line between Brave and Stupid with this sort of thing and its position is determined by who, why and how you pull it off. The bomb turban, as CURTIS UR HYPES pointed out, doesn't really put these cartoons in the brave category, because courage has dignity as a prerequisite.

who has stabbed anyone related to this fucking dumb cartoon?!? as for death threats, meh.

WEST WARWICK -- The Secret Service is investigating a seventh-grade Deering Middle School student who allegedly threatened President Bush in an essay describing his perfect day.

In the one-page, hand-written essay, the student says his ideal day involves doing violence to President Bush as well as executives at Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart, Detective Sgt. Fernando Araujo, the head of the Police Department's juvenile division, said yesterday.

perhaps the danish don't have massively overrun federal government budget deficits! this could be a great way to stimulate the economy - free ("free" meaning paid by the public) protection for "threatened" newspaper publishers!

there wasn't a crusade against buddha, he ain't called lawrence of the fucking yangtze, etc., etc.

...why more than anyone?

'fear of violence' is no reason to withhold this kind of criticism at all, and EVEN IF the lunatic response could have been predicted it still doesn't shift any blame whatsoever on to the people who published the cartoons.

Basically I think that the cartoons were meant to be provocative if one thinks of the average reader of JP and Denmark at times. I think there has been an overreaction and that apologies were unneccessary but I'd be unsure what I would have done differently to be honest.

"In what the Beirut Daily Star calls a bold move, the Arabic-language Jordanian tabloid Al-Shihan defiantly published three of the cartoons. But the weekly's publishing company decided to pull the tabloid from newsstands and 'open an investigation to identify those responsible for this abominable and reprehensible behavior,' it said."

I mean, this is the part that everyone, in their eagerness to criticize European Muslims for not playing by western rules, forgets: part of what it means to live in the progressive "enlightened" pluralistic societies we're so proud of is that other people's values become a part of your culture -- what offends them because offensive to the public sphere. I think this is the source of a lot of my vehemence here. A pluralistic society may give people the right to go on doing whatever they want, but there are things they can do that actually run against the grain of a pluralistic society; I think this is kind of one of them. The real spirit of an enlightened pluralistic society is that if people show up with taboos you don't share, you're going to wind up having to respect those taboos -- and you're certainly not standing up for enlightened pluralism by defiantly tweaking them.

In this sense, the extremists are a red herring. The tweak here isn't to extremism, it's to a basic Muslim taboo. This is what's underhanded about it -- the knowledge that flipping the bird to a Muslim taboo will bring froth to the mouth of the worst extremists, and thereby color perception of the whole. And the biggest insult is to European Muslims who'll feel marginalized and assaulted and rejected by this, but would never lift a finger against anyone about it. Flipping the bird at Muslims -- and rejecting the idea that their sensibilities could ever be reflected in a pluralistic society -- is not the same thing as defying extremists, and it's not the same thing as defending pluralism.

OTM

there wasn't a crusade against buddha, he ain't called lawrence of the fucking yangtze, etc., etc.

That doesn't exactly contradict his point, it simply means that the West's defining of "otherness" relative to cultures that are not Muslims has manifested itself in different ways. I mean, Exhibit A, FFS.

He's also right that these cultures define themselves as other to a large extent too. Why distinguish between Muslims and kaffir, if not? Or between Jews and goyim? If one doesn't want to be "other," one assimilates.

I don't agree. You may be impelled to respect their right to their own taboos but not their right to impose their taboos on society.

...why more than anyone?

Exaclty. Bear in mind, Van Gogh was Dutch, not Danish (unless TOMBOT said this because they're both European countries, which is true but would make a strange reason to say they, more than anything, should know better).

http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/

Well, M. White gets to it before me, but this has to be a matter of degree and sensibility. We don't print "G-d" in the newspaper in case Orthodox Jews are reading, you know? And we don't require all restaurants to provide kosher, and we certainly don't allow the fundamentalist Christian taboos to control the popular culture.

No way. Not automatically. You are right that it's possible for a change to occur in the mores of a pluralistic society, but there are some things it may not choose to give up. I think that in general we respect religion, all religion, too much, and have given up to much of the Enlightenment tradition of free criticism and even ridicule.

it should be pretty clear i'm not talking about either/or here, but longevity and intensity. there is NO WAY there could possibly be any comparison of 4 years of american anti-japanese propaganda posters to thousands of years of western christian-based oppression. and no, virginia, that does not excuse the anti-japanese stuff.

Dadaismus is right. If you are a believer, any representation of the prophet is prohibited. It's not so much a taboo as something very specific in the Koran.

It's not a matter of imposing Muslim taboos on anyone. It's simply a matter of realizing that Muslims are a part of the audience and being sensitive to their cultural standards. American newspapers, by and large, don't publish words like "fuck" and "shit" and they don't print pictures of topless women on page three. There is no objective rational reason for this - it's simply deference to the majority's cultural standards. No one goes around complaining about this being censorship because we all take it for granted. Refraining from publishing images of Muhammad is no different in substance or reality from refraining from publishing pictures of tits (or dicks) - they're both simply matters of choosing not to offend. However, the problem is, and I don't think this is purely a Western phenomenon, that it's only the majority standards that editors refrain from offending - if you are in a minority that has different standards, you're shit out of luck. There's nothing particularly enlightened or liberal or secular about this, it's just a reflection of who holds political and economic power - and it happens in every country in the world.

not if they don't buy the paper they're not

cold day for a protest in london though - glad to see they wrapped up warm.

we certainly don't allow the fundamentalist Christian taboos to control the popular culture

To echo Dada: this cartoon does not violate an "extremist" taboo. The fact that some of you are acting as if it does means that the cartoon has accomplished exactly the underhanded subtext I'm talking about here -- the cartoon, in conception and in action, works to eliminate the distinction between Islam and extremism. And if you let it do that, you're being suckered by it just as much as the extremists who rise to its bait.

Second, we come back to the conception of the cartoon. Let's run with the pork-eating analogy. No, a pluralistic society has no good reason to stop consuming pork simply because significant numbers of Jews or Muslims enter its ranks. Note that this isn't like that, like I've been saying since the beginning. This paper does not have a longstanding tradition of printing these images. It didn't, in this case, have a very demanding news-related reason to print the images. So let's reframe your analogy: imagine we live in a country that doesn't really eat pork; imagine that country is struggling with the extremism of (say) Jews regarding other issues, like (say) homosexuality; and then imagine that country's response to it involves saying something very much like "hey, you guys are against eating pork, right? Looky here at this bacon! Omigod, yummy yummy, mmmm, look at me chewing this delicious swiny bacon!"

And third, WTF, we don't let Christian taboos run the culture? Are you fucking insane? Do you live in a place where two men can make out a whole bunch on network television? Do you live in a place where you can shout "I want to have sex with Jesus" on the street without fear of reprisal? Do you live in a place a woman can bare her breasts on the street? Do you live in a place where abortion isn't an issue? Do you live in a place where the money and pledge of allegiance don't say "under god?" (Similarly: do you live in a place where white people didn't casually use words like "nigger," up until a black minority "imposed" its word-taboo onto the public?) You're doing that typical white-western thing where you pretend like you don't actually have a culture, which is completely bullshit: you have a culture, and it contains taboos just as significant as the one in question here, whether you recognize them as such or not. New people bring new ones and contribute them to that culture. Usually this happens economically; typically a paper would refrain from printing this not for reasons of principle or threat but because it would turn off a market of potential consumers. And usually, between that and the headache of having people offended by you all the time, other people's taboos do work their way into your culture -- not because they've been "imposed" or codified in law, but because you start recognizing the reality that a portion of the public believes something, and that that makes a difference in your actions and the effects they'll have. This isn't about black-and-white "rights" -- it's about culture, which is much more complicated.

(a) Muslims who are offended by these images and don't think you have a right to print them (your enemy), and

(b) Muslims who respect your right to print them but are offended by them nonetheless (bystanders)?

Which is why, if I assume any brain-power went into this, I have to assume that there was actual underhanded intent here to conflate the two groups, to cast (b) as (a) -- (and incidentally, and in action, maybe even convert a few fence-sitting Bs into As).

But how would it be any different if I chose to satirize the belief that reproductive organs are somehow "dirty" by publishing pictures of dicks on the front page of my newspaper?

I demand more nude press conferences, UN gangbangs, Page 3 editorials, butt plug accessorized weather reports, etc... I'll draw the line at naked coooking shows, however. I happen to know how dangerous that can be.

This applies equally to both sides, as both sides feel strongly aggrieved.

[cues up Both Sides Now]

yes (I think, following your syntax)... I think I do

To echo Dada: this cartoon does not violate an "extremist" taboo.

There's a difference here between "fundamentalist" and "extremist" that you're eliding here.

Similarly:

And third, WTF, we don't let Christian taboos run the culture?

There's also a difference between "Christian taboos" and "fundamentalist Christian taboos" that you're also eliding. And half of your "Do you live . . . ?" questions have NOTHING TO DO with Christianit taboos in general and fundamentalist taboos in particular.

US media shy away from reproducing Mohammed cartoons

"If I were faced with something that I know is gonna be offensive to many of our readers, I would think twice about whether the benefit of publication outweighed the offense it might give," Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor at the Washington Post, told AFP.

Keith Richburg, the paper's foreign editor, said he had ruled out running the cartoons, even to better illustrate news articles about the row, as they would likely offend readers.

"This is a clear example where people would find those offensive so we don't see any particular reason to do it just for shock value," he said.

...

Peter Gavrilovich, foreign editor of the daily Detroit Free Press in the state of Michigan, which has one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East, said it was out of the question for his paper to reprint the cartoons, either to illustrate the story or to show solidarity with counterparts in Europe.

"I don't think we would run a cartoon in this newspaper that would be deemed offensive to any religious figure," Gavrilovich told AFP. "We're very careful in terms of any photo or any caricature that we run."

Why is this kind of common sense apparently so rare in the newspaper business?

No, ya big dope, that's the difference I'm saying you're ignoring. So far as I know about Muslims -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- it's not at all extreme or fundamentalist to be wary of depictions of Mohammed, especially if they're being done by Danish people to annoy you. So it's not equivalent to say fundamentalist Christian taboos don't affect our culture. Regular-old Christian values do.

but hardline muslims have already done that conflating! just as hardline christians in the u.s. purport (and are too often allowed) to speak for all of christianity. and the level of totally disproportionate, virulent anger engendered in this case doesn't exactly make moderate muslims seem like much of a presence, any more than moderate christians seem like enough of a presence in the u.s. these days.

but again, the issue isn't how tasteful or not the newspaper was. that's a side discussion. the question ultimately is which value is more important in a pluralistic society: freedom of expression, or respect for religious taboos? and you're right, nabsico, we have that same fight all the time in the u.s., and i'm on the same side of it in those cases that i am in this one. if we want to talk about the history of east-west relations, the legitimate grievances of the muslim world, the rank idiocy of the bush administration's policies, the endemic problems of european racism, fine, i'm all for that. but i'm suspicious of people using those things as excuses or cover for fundamentalist zealotry.

anyway, there's a pretty good op-ed in the nyt today -- about the pope and relativism, of all things -- which has a few grafs that seem a propos:

What Pope Benedict calls relativism are actually the values of secular liberalism: individual autonomy, equal rights and freedom of conscience. But it is easy to conflate what liberals affirm with the way they affirm it. Liberalism tells us that our way of life is up to us (within limits), not that the truth of liberalism is up to us. It entails that we tolerate even claims that we doubt, not that we doubt even the claims of tolerance. Many liberals themselves are guilty of this confusion, which can manifest as all-values-are-equal relativism (especially common among freshmen in ethics classes, at least until the instructor informs them that because all grades are equally valid, everyone will be receiving a D for the course).

...Perhaps a future encyclical will concentrate on the truly harmful kind of relativism. This is the misguided multiculturalism that keeps Western liberals from criticizing the oppression of women, religious minorities and apostates in Islamic societies for fear of being accused of Islamophobia. In such cases we should not shrink from the ideals of autonomy and equality but affirm them openly for what they are: objectively defensible principles of conscience.

Ha, and yes, American newspapers outlining exactly the kind of pluralistic-minded reasons people don't print this stuff unless there's a specific line-of-duty reason to do so. (Unfortunately, they've been put in a trap, because as this discussion moves around the world it'll become more and more a part of a publication's "line of duty" to let readers see the offensive image for themselves.)

-- full frontal nudity on page one
-- a movie with Jesus getting gangbanged by men
-- peppering the newspaper with "fuck" and "shit"*

If something so innocuous as "artist's depiction of $DEITY" (YES INNOCUOUS ACCORDING TO OUR WHITE WESTERN CULTURAL STANDARDS I GET IT) is that level of shocking, maybe it's a taboo not worth adopting? I mean, all your "Do you live . . . ?" questions appear to imply that those are taboos you'd like to see dropped, as would I.

It's not that I don't see your points, I just think you're making too strong an argument towards accommodating cultural restrictions that aren't always a net plus and are sometimes actually inimical towards the values we purport to hold.

*Interestingly, I have seen the latter in a routine news article in the Washington Post, uttered by the DC police chief; the former gets asterisked out.

x-post to nate: The Post has problems of its own, seemingly.

TOMBOT: Yes, I can. Did you have another pointless question, or was that pretty much it?

as for using legitimate grievances as a cover for extremism, i don't think anybody on this thread is doing that. but i think an awful lot of imams and muslim religious/political leaders are, and that's a big part of all this outrage and protests.

This isn't argumentative, it's a genuine question: please explain to me why the solution to this issue is to deliberately do something that might be deemed offensive to Muslims. For the time being I won't comment beyond asking the question.

This is argumentative: Phil, why are you unwilling to accept that a depiction of Mohammed -- lines on a page -- might be as offensive to members of one culture as the word "cunt" -- lines on a page -- might be to another? Why is it so hard to accept that -- just as an innocuous word like "cunt" can be used as a weapon to act aggressively toward people, a cartoon can be used for the same (bad) purpose? And why do you insist on perching up in the black-and-white space of "rights" and "restrictions," instead of accepting that we live in societies of people, who believe all sorts of different things, and this confers on our actions meaning? Liberties mean that we can take certain actions. Culture means that those actions have a context, that they don't happen in a vacuum, and that we have to actually think about whether taking them is good or bad, worthwhile or not-worthwhile, in keeping with the spirit of a pluralistic society or in attacking them.

xpost: Gypsy I don't in the least disagree with you that frothy-mouthed outrage over this is (a) immoderate, (b) being misdirected by plenty of people, and (c) in most cases not in keeping with the principles of a secular society. I'd like to think this was clear from the beginning. I'm mostly attempting to move beyond that point -- because I imagine every single person on this thread takes it for granted -- and talk about something slightly different.

Yes, the citizens of Denmark are under daily danger of being harmed by their enormous Muslim community

to preserve the principle of being able to. because, yes, i think the principle of being able to print things offensive to muslims, christians, jews, buddhists, atheists and commie pinkos is important. like i said, if it was my newspaper, i would have preferred a less gratuitous demonstration, like a simple portrait of muhammad.

Yes, the citizens of Denmark are under daily danger of being harmed by their enormous Muslim community

again, see the paper's own stated reasons for the cartoons. it didn't take an enormous community to kill theo van gogh, and it doesn't take many theo van goghs to scare the shit out of people. intimidation is not just a matter of numbers.

I'm not unwilling to accept it -- I accept that it does, and as such I'm saying that sometimes there are taboos where people are going to have to suck it up and realize they aren't going to be catered to. Christians are going to have to accept that they're going to be egregiously offended sometimes, and so are Jews, and so are Muslims.

I understand where you're coming from as far as having a good reason; I think gypsy has done a good job in explaining in this particular instance what some of that reason was. Along with your arguments about culture, we all have to understand that the Danes and other European cultures have their own, too, and are dealing with problems with their Muslims populations that we aren't, so if we're going to judge, judge from within the perspective of their culture, not America's. Does that make what they did provocative? Yes. Unnecessarily so? Mmmmmmaybe, maybe not.

(I am not, btw, unaware this all makes me sound kinda shitty, nor am I unaware how much of it stems from my own personal bugaboos about religion generally.)

Forgive me if some of us have some problems respecting (or swallowing) provocative right-wing rags' stated reasons for some of their actions

For once, I'm going to disagree with you Nitsuh. I think this is a rhetorical conceit in the extreme. I understand the argument and agree that Western culture and values are incredibly powerful ideologically (especially on an unconscious level), but I don't think anyone can argue the real physical consequences of these actions (and other similarly 'outrageous' acts) are very different in Karachi and Los Angeles. I would more likely say that Western culture's tolerance can be insidious in a different way (i.e. it's a sieve for dissent and leads to apathy etc).

yes i do! maybe not the tits thing, but otherwise, yes.

Okay. We live in a country (the U.S.) with various cultural constituencies, including, let's say, Catholics. We have a country in which people are at liberty to criticize the actions, thinking, or culture of those constituencies. Let's imagine for a second that some Catholics -- like some Muslims -- did not respect that liberty when it came to criticizing them. Let's imagine that a Catholic man murdered a filmmaker who made an expose about priests abusing children, and that extremist Catholics threatened to firebomb newspapers for running editorials criticizing Catholic opposition to contraception. This would be a very large problem. Let's even say that this had a chilling effect on free speech, such that people were afraid of offending Catholics for fear of violent reprisal.

If I owned a paper in this environment, and I wanted to stand up for free speech against the actions of these extremist Catholics, I would do that specifically. That would strike me as the moral, dignified thing to do. I'm not sure it would cross my mind to deliberately run an image that would be offensive to Catholics -- say, the Pope wearing a condom -- simply to stand up for my right to do so. Nothing in the situation would seem to call for me to do that. Beyond which it would be childish and counterproductive, because it would be bizarrely misdirected. I would be fighting these extremist, violent Catholics by opposing myself to all Catholics -- by going out of my way to exhibit my disdain for the beliefs of even the ones who support my rights! I would be making enemies of my friends. And all when there were a million very specific things I could have done to (haha) "fight the real enemy," and address my actual issue of extremist violence and my freedom to do something I actually want to do, on my own -- which is to publish reasoned criticism of this theoretical Catholic extremism and maybe even Catholicism itself. In the process, I'll be standing up for people's right to publish the Pope-with-condom picture, even though I don't feel a need to print it myself. I'll stand up for people's rights to do lots of things I'd never personally dream of doing; I don't have to actually do the things in question. The fact that extremists would violently assaults someone's right to do something doesn't make the thing itself a good or necessary idea.

To follow up two ideas that have been cross-posted with mine. Gypsy, you're exactly right about the neo-Nazis, which I've mentioned upthread. If extremist blacks, Latinos, and Catholics were murdering neo-Nazis -- infringing on their given right to distribute neo-Nazi literature -- it would not occur to me that one way to make a noble stand against this violence would be to ... distribute neo-Nazi literature! And concerning violence against abortion doctors: these cartoons strike me as the equivalent of the editor of the New York Times, at the peak of those abortion protest shootings, going out, getting a woman pregnant, having an abortion, and then printing a big article about it -- "we have every right to do this! haha!" Which would offend people well beyond pro-life extremists, especially when the implied follow-up story was "look at them get all mad, see how they have no place in our society."

Sorry, but I do pick and choose my cases. I don't defend the right of a white college professor to call one of his black students a "N******". He might call it free speech, but I don't think it's right.

And Nabisco's long post above is OTM. I'm not disagreeing about the right of free speech in general, I'm disagreeing with this particular instance of it. I think these caricatures were designed to sow division, not understanding, and I think that publishing them was neither admirable nor wise.

(Not all protected speech is good speech, is I think most of what Nate and I are saying, and the good news is that with Gypsy at least I think we're on the same page about being suspicious of the paper's speech-choices here, if to different extents.)

Because there's been a lot of useless bickering about this so far: by saying this I'm not defending the reactions to the cartoon that involve sanctions, measures against the Danish government, etc. Some of the comments on this thread read to me as, "that's it, Muslims have to learn to stop being so Muslim." As hstencil points out upthread, that is not going to happen. If relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West is going to get better (and the contact between the two is a given: there's no undoing that), both groups are going to have to drop the posturing of the utter insupportability of all of the values of the other group. That's why the cartoons are so unfortunate, on my view. (There are, of course, hundreds of stances that have been taken by various groups of Muslims that are similarly unfortunate.)

It's the toxic portrayal of Muhammad that is really driving the outrage

The radicals aside, this is what most of my Muslim friends are saying.

I agree, this was an inflammatory action - I see the attraction of Gypsy Mothra's theory but I don't really believe it. This was specifically targeting Muslims to widen an already huge cultural gulf. Because I can think of instances where British people would behave in just as ugly a manner. If the Indpendent published a provocative picture of a naked child tomorrow even if it had a stated reason for doing so, I'd bet everything I own there'd be a baying mob outside its office saying and possibly doing some pretty fucking ugly things. Would the editor stand there going "I'm going to defend my right not to be intimidated?" or would he be sacked?

This is a facile analogy I know, but then again I'm typing this in a country where footballers get death threats for moving from one club to another so maybe we're not all so fucking enlightened after all?

The other thing that depresses me is that the BNP are going to do really fucking well out of this.

Yeah, I probably made too much of that in my various analogies. I agree it's the sort of blanket insult against all Muslims that I find more offensive.

Hmmm. Everything I have found agrees with that. Only Allah should be worshipped.

I am going to work on shutting the fuck up now.

Also I'm glad you're reasonable and not devolved into ILX-snippy like I am: I'd have said the same thing to Bnad in a much ruder way. Which also has to do with the weird personal proximity stuff, but whatever.

my bottom line is, if i ran a newspaper, i wouldn't run the cartoons and would look for another way to make the same point. but that said, i respect the reasons for doing it if not the execution, and if we have to ultimately choose sides between the newspaper and the people waving banners saying "slay those who insult islam," i'm on the side of the newspaper. and if we don't have to choose sides and can just find fault all around, fine. but i'm still more with the newspaper.

'On the blackboard it says in Persian with Arabic letters that 'Jyllands-Posten's journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs',' Refn said. 'Of course we shouldn't let ourselves be censored by a few extremist Muslims, but Jyllands-Posten's only goal is to vent the fires as soon as they get the opportunity. There's nothing constructive in that.

Hee hee.

And there's where we slide into my personal stuff, of which I'll just give you the short version. I have a particular consciousness here: I grew up in a situation where the people "like me" were immigrants from a big bloc stretching from, say, Senegal to Bangladesh, a bloc not always much internally distinguished-between in the country I'm from. It's inevitable; it's much easier for white westerners to align themselves against that bloc, in parts or as a whole, than it's going to be for me. I can't take sides with myself (secular westerner) against myself (person from a place). And these cartoons, by aiming themselves at the religion instead of the extremism, ask me to do that. And more importantly, these cartoons read to me -- and this is talking-to-your-spouse "how I feel" part, not so much an argument -- to be very much in the same spirit as a lot of very indefensible insults and disdain that get directed more generally at my whole bloc. I guess some people here don't feel that. I don't even know if Horseshoe feels that, and she's closer in than I am. But that's what I feel lurking in this.

The general thing, on this thread and others, is that I'm not against reasoned criticism of other cultures. My problem tends to be that the people who are happiest to do this are often my enemies, and they often do it with a glee that I can't stand, and they do it in a way that promotes and leaves room for very bad things beyond the reasoned-criticism part.

I was proud of him.

I want this precious little bubble of freedom, that an infinitesimal number of humans have had the privilege to exist in, destroyed. Fk everyone else who is, or was, excluded from this. I've got this freedom and I take it for granted, so I should show it contempt.

I don't want freedom of speech, I don't wanna be free to satirise what I choose, I don't want my mum to do what she chooses.

What I want is to condemn the west.

I want girls to grow up and know they'll never be allowed to feel the sun on their face, and that they'll be kept ineducated and housebound. The concept of liberty means I'll defend this position even though it doesn't affect me, yet there are hundreds of millions of women living this life that I'm free from, yet I will defend to the death the rights of the people who keep these souls in such grim supplication.

At 7 I climbed trees, fished in the nearby stream, felt the sun shine on my gangly awkward limbs, kissed a boy, rode my bike, had my first crush, and even watched the Dukes of Hazzard. I'm proud that I support systems that will condemn girls like me to grow up beneath a black woollen rag, forever denied such pleasures and afraid to even contemplate them. My time could be better spent contemplating consumating my marriage at 9, like in Iran, following the teachings of the good book.

I say we give a government grant to assist in a fatwa for the cartoon protesters, like we should have done with salman rushdie. This freedom sh1t that the few of us have indulged in is crap. We should give in to the dogma of a preaching bully boys. I want my daughters to grow up under it's rule, rather than the freedom of the west.

Go boys, lets read the good book and figure out how to diminish and pollute this beautiful ephemeral tapestry we call life.

Oh wow. I've felt exactly this so many times, though it's less about being from somewhere than being weirdly entangled with people who are identified as a problem within the secular West. it's almost like my existence, given the narrative of west v. islam, is impossible, which makes you feel odd after a while.

nabisco, you haven't been snippy, as evidenced by the fact that you persuaded someone to think differently about something with words, something I sometimes worry is impossible. yay reasoned debate!

and yeah, I'd like to kiss this Lars Refn dude on the mouth.

I said upthread that I didn't agree with TOMBOT's analogy and I am leery of the allusions he made but it really does amount to a giant, unwise and unnecessary 'fuck you'.

Yeah, "person from a place" doesn't quite capture it, but there's something there. I think maybe what I'm trying to say is that I feel (I feel) like I have a decent radar for the difference between principled criticism of extremism and blurrier aggression toward a whole. I feel (I feel) like I can tell the difference between someone who's attacking extremism and someone who's attacking, in a way, and by several degrees, me and mine. And for obvious reasons I'm not content with blurry edges on that distinction. For some people, it seems like a little sloppiness there is okay, so long as the general thrust is right. I don't feel comfortable with that, because in the end it'll mean making common cause with people who are against me.

that said, i can't help finding the overall drift of this conversation a little depressing. it really just adds to my concern about who exactly is going to defend the values i think are most important to civil society.

Doesn't the Koran have something to say about Muslims living under non-Muslim rule?

The other question I'll ask when I can formulate it more elegantly.

xpost: M White, honestly, I don't think it's easy to read the Qur'an in terms of contemporary geopolitics (or at all, frankly; it can be kind of opaque.) The period the Qur'an comes from is so different from our own, where there's national sovereignty and at least ideally some international protection of human rights. I have definitely encountered (smart, historicist) interpretations of it that state that Muslims living under non-Muslim rule must conform to the laws of the nation in which they live: Khalid abu-Fadl makes such an interpretation, I think. I'm sure there are many crazy interpretations, too, though.

i know. it's just that you and nabisco are choosing a somewhat different value to defend than me. which is fine. but when i see the bush administration joining the chorus of people condemning the cartoons, it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

right, no, that's not pollyanna-ish, it's essential. and ok, newspapers printing cartoons that insult the prophet aren't a great step in that direction. but neither is publishers feeling intimidated about what might happen to them if they violate someone else's religious taboos. especially when those taboos' most vocal, vociferous defenders are also wedded to a reactionary worldview that subjagates women, castigates jews, etc. etc. it's all very complicated.

1.) cherish free speech;
2.) agree that a newspaper has the right to criticise Muslims;
3.) largely think that the paper's effort was sub-par at best; and
4.) condemn people who call for death threats or who confuse the Danish government with a privately owned newspaper

Am I at least right about this?

horseshoe are you in the U.S?

Do you as someone raised Muslim have a conception of how modernity and Islam can be made compatible? You know how, after the Reformation, there evolved brands of Xtianity that were more conducive to progress than others. I have a prejudice that Islam and perhaps pre-diaspora Judaism, so closely regulate daily life and conduct, law, and government that they aren't as well suited to pluralism and limited government as a religion that can be subsumed by some as 'Belief in jesus is the only way to heaven, and, uh, would it kill you to love each other a little?' I recognize that, while having read a lot of the Koran, I understood very little and that more than just the book of words, the believer's traditions and relationship with it is paramount? Is their a recognizable form of progressive Islam equivalent to that seen in Xtianity and Judaism? If so, do we hear them less 'cause they're not funded by the Saudis or something.

I think all forms of religion (or at least monotheistic religion) are really problematized by modernity (fundamentalisms are a reaction to that), so no, I wouldn't distinguish between Islam and Christianity on that score.

There is no institutionalized progressive Islam in the same way as reform Judaism, no. (There are progressive Muslims.) The reasons why are pretty complicated, I think, having to do with the power of tradition, the lack of a centralized clergy, and with geopolitics. In those Muslim countries with pretensions to theocracy, any "progressive" interpretations of religious scriptures are treated with great hostility. And at the level of lived Islam, I think a lot of people are suspicious of beliefs that seem to contradict their understanding of scripture--people are quick to call such interpretations apostasy. The thing is, religion is tradition, at a certain level, so it gets hard to separate the unproblematic traditions from the noxious ones. I do think pluralist societies like the US have enabled the closest thing to what you're talking about, like the PMU: http://www.pmuna.org/ (I also have heard that there are some interesting Muslim organizations in South Africa, but I know less about that.)

Obviously the corrupt governments of many Muslim countries have a lot to answer for in this regard. But again, I'm no expert; I think books could and have been written on these issues.

Yup bout right.

If the Danish government should apologise for what was printed should not the governments of various Arab and Asian countries apologise for the overreaction?

so should we draw some qualitative distinction between protests in minority-muslim countries and protests in majority-muslim countries (countries where the media is routinely filled with jew-bashing)?

i understand the eagerness to decry euro-western racism and hegemony, but i think that's a really simplistic way to look at all this.

i.e. in the u.s. the issue of whether or not arab folx respect "speech" at the moment is kind of moot, given that you've already decided they hate "freedom" or they don't in a far more general sense and given that free speech and pluralistic values haven't been high on the right-wing's ideological checklist for sometime anyway.

Am I drunk? What's it to ya, buddy?

how is the u.s. not pluralistic, tho? i think it's more the obverse. because the u.s. is more comfortable and confident in its pluralism than western europe, the society has been sensitized to the point where it's a little hard to imagine any major newspaper publishing those cartoons. and sure, american fundamentalists can imagine being offended by disrespect for their faith, but as this thread demonstrates, plenty of american liberals can find offense too. not that i'm positing america as some multicultural utopia, but i think it's kind of weird to suggest that it's less pluralistic than western europe.

I don't want to imply this is only a Muslims versus modernity issue. I know not all Muslims embrace these views. More to the point, it's not only Muslims who do. You see it among the haredim in Israel. And I see it with an increasing frequency here in the US. Is it just me or does it seem that more and more often there are public controversies in which 'blasphemy' is considered some sort of legitimate cause of action -- as if 'blasphemy' can actually have any civic meaning in a society like ours.

However, as a Jew I've seen plenty of offensive cartoons from all over the world. I've suffered plenty of "deliberate provocations," and I'm not out burning anyone's flag, and I'm certainly not out calling for anyone's head on a pike.

Sorry, but that's bullshit. Muslims are generally much more tolerated and integrated into society in the U.S. than in Europe.

it seems to me (though im not sure) that it is easier for muslims to integrate into a christian country (US) than de facto atheist countries (northern europe).

thats partly why i couldnt see this flying in america, the way it has in europe (where there is an anti-religious bent running through society, making lampooning of religion much more likely).

the failure of much of europe, when it comes to islam, seems to be a, sort of, 'psuedo-tolerance' , a kind of a 'ok do your own thing, over there, just dont bother us with it' approach. and i think, coupled with our seeming desire to attack religion, it makes for an uncomfortable situation.

many argue that anti-islam, isnt really another manifestation of anti-religiousness, or pro-secularity, but the 'acceptable' face of racism, a sort of disingenious racism. i think theres a lot of truth in that, we seem very concerned with being able to attack muslims, but not jews/sikhs/hindus. on the one side i can see the logic in this, as muslims, like christians are not so entwined with any particular race, but i think thats a black and white way of looking at things, and doesnt really map onto reality

i guess what im interested in here, is the integration of muslims into america, and why it (seems?) to work better than in europe.

also, great thread, i found myself changing minds back and forth on this as i read, but nabisco won out in the end

the biggest and most important difference is that america provides jobs for its immigrants, europe doesn't to the same extent. having a job is vital to get integrated into a soceiety instead of living in suburbs where you have no contact with mainstream society.

I fear more and more every day that we're going to see a large-scale war with the "Islamic world." They overreact to a newspaper, westerners overreact to the overreaction, clarity and sanity gets lost. We have no sense of exactly how many people in the muslim world are reacting this way, because all we get are the most sensational photos. This serves to justify and confirm people's suspicions about Islam. Meanwhile radical Islam grows more and more emboldened. I'm not sure how the situation can be defused.

right, but -- back to the point again -- it's only restraint or good judgment if it's done for reasons of sensitivity, awareness, a general sense that people in a pluralistic society should show each other respect, etc. if the restraint is imposed because of fear -- of death threats, of bodily harm -- then that IS self-censorship. and that's what the newspaper was reacting to, however hamhandedly. i think too many people are discounting the climate that's been created by racial tensions, cultural tensions and the rise of islamic fundamentalism in europe -- and that rise has been facilitated by the racial and economic conditions, sure, but it's not ONLY because of them, any more than the rise of american christian fundamentalism is only because of economics (see all the giant suburban megachurches). and if you think rising fundamentalism needs to be confronted, which i do, then i don't think the newspaper's actions are so easily written off.

and, i'll also say again, i'd really like to read a translation of the essay that accompanied the cartoons, because i think that's an important piece of context.

i just think that if the message that comes out of this is, 'oh, better not offend muslims,' that's not going to be a good thing.

1. What exactly are the emotions of the Muslims protesting in the street, other than mass hysteria: are they HURT because their beloved one has been made fun of - in which case the hurt could simply be avoided by not looking at newspapers in the first place ? are they ANGRY because it seems like insulting Mohammed is insulting every one of them ? or are they just DOING THEIR DUTY because the Quran says that noone on the face of this planet is to make fun of Mohammed and they got to enforce this law ? The third opportunity is by far the scariest...

2. What do you think would the response of the Muslims on the street be to the following deal: European countries will make laws forbidding to make fun of Mohammed in public, and in exchange Muslim countries will grant equality to their Muslim, Christian, Atheist, Jewish citizens before the law, OR in exchange Muslim countries will make laws against hate speech like the one frequently seen in the last days. Would anyone accept ? If not, wouldn't it at least make a great argument which would lead some Muslims towards greater understanding of the European position ?

http://www.kurier.at/mmedia/03.02.2006/1138990274_3.jpg

http://retecool.com/comments.php?id=13539_0_1_0_C

Here's another American website making complete fun of Christians:

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/

(Notice, no one is threatening hostage taking over this one.)

:)

http://news.yahoo.com/photo/060203/ids_photos_wl/r1363645636.jpg/print;_ylt=AvXKaty1K2wxPQynbAEj_MuaK8MA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3bXNtMmJ2BHNlYwNzc3M-

"Several of the original Danish cartoons are minted in the same style, beyond lampoon or caricature and well into the realm of pure defamation. Muhammad is seen with a huge knife and a wild thicket of a beard, flanked by two women entirely veiled but for their eyes; worse, and by far the most inflammatory, is one in which his turban holds a ticking bomb."

Is it 'defamation' to portray a murderer as a murderer? The Washington Post journalist is seemingly oblivious to the fact that Mohammed was indeed a vicious murderer. I think this one fact - which is simply beyond dispute - goes to the heart of the whole issue. To criticise extremist jihadist Islam is to criticise the justification they give for their extremism, which unfortunately turns out to be an undistorted reading the Koran and the hadith, the model example of the prophet's own conduct. So the doctrine of muslim fanatics cannot be analysed and condemned or ridiculed without offending muslims who are moderate, because moderate muslims are moderate soley by virtue of ommission; they revere their tradition in the form of the Koran and the prophet's life, but, being basically decent people, omit of necessity from that reverence the actual prescriptions of the Koran regarding infidels and the actual murderous conduct of the founder of their religion. Therefore, there simply isn't a way in which one can ridicule muslim supremacists without offending muslims in general.

For what it's worth, were I a newspaper editor, I don't think I would have taken the route taken by Jyllands-Posten. I agree that their motives look suspicious (at the very least), and I admit I don't know much about the Danish political context. The fact that one of the cartoonist involved covertly criticized Jyllands-Posten lends weight to the accusations that their motives were less than noble. At the same time, regardless of what the newspaper editors' motives were, it's not a case of the paper simply publishing offensive cartoons out of the blue in order to piss certain people off: the cartoons were framed as a response to legitimate issues of freedom of speech and resistance to intimidation.

I don't even particularly like satirical caricatures and political cartoons, since they generally don't illuminate anything, but they are still a form of speech. It's precisely because Muhammad is such an important figure, kind of like a public figure, but a deceased one, looming very large in the realm of ideas and beliefs, that it is crucial that he not be exempted from ridicule and mockery in a free society. (If it were really a matter of mocking someone's family, making fun of someone's Uncle Joe, then wouldn't there be a legal problem with that, assuming Uncle Joe wasn't a public figure?) Mostly stupid satirical cartoons aren't remotely as valuable as, say, historical studies of Muhammad's life or of the Qur'an, but I don't think they should be ruled out.

*

I think Islam is different in significant ways, which may make for irresolvable conflicts

This is getting into speculation, but one reason it may be so difficult to break the connection between religion and state in Islam is that the religion's founder created so many precedents as an actual political leader. While it does not stop rabid right-wing Christians from trying to take over the U.S., Jesus did not present a blueprint for a Christian state, nor did he leave instructions for his followers to sees power on that level. I think this matters, because there is always the potential for an impulse to go back to what the founder of a religion did (or back to what the key holy book says), and frankly I think when that happens in Islam the results are inevitably more explosive than they are in the case of Christianity.

(I am no apologist for Christianity, I remind everyone.)

*

But I'm not only concerned with Islam. I'm certainly more immediately concerned with the Christian Right in my country. Like gypsy, if I read him correctly, I'm also concerned that we could lose some of our freedom to freely express irreverence toward religion. If anything, I think public discourse in the U.S. handles religion with excessive reverence. I find it discouraging that not respecting someone else's beliefs can leave one open to accusations of bigotry. I don't think any one of us is required to respect beliefs we consider unfounded, irrational, etc. On a personal level, I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to taunt people for their beliefs. There has to be a public sphere where people can get under each other's skins. (Again, I don't think the best way to criticize a religion is by lampooning it. I think of the "satirical" article I once read in a Christian magazine, possibly Guideposts, in which Zen Buddhism was represented by a figure named "Ben Zuda." Brilliant stuff.)

*

I love the responses (to online articles about the Muhammad cartoons) I've seen from Muslims saying, "We honor all the prophets," as if everyone who matters gives a damn about "the prophets"; as if evangelical (and maybe any any type of reasonably orthodox) Christians can accept Jesus as just another prophet; as if Islam accepts self-declared prophets (surrounded by a community of convicted believers) who have come since Muhammad. How much do Muslims honor Bahaullah?

*

(Incidentally, since gypsy mentioned his newspaper man angle, I wonder if some of this is coming from my librarian side, since librarians are forever fighting for to protect their ability to make offensive materials of various sorts available, as a matter of principle.)

I have to say that the decision by other European papers to print the cartoons "to demonstrate their support for free speech" seems pretty weak. If I were a Nazi I'd be sending cartoons and opinion pieces to newspapers around Europe this week.

How is this pseudo-tolerance? That sounds like tolerance to me. Tolerance doesn't require encouragement or participation or even an attempt at understanding.

On the other hand, I think there's a real sense in which there can't be a pluralistic society. Other religions will be tolerated so long as they do not make absolutistic claims on the way society is to be organized. I recommend the short (but idea-packed) book, Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11, which seems to me very relevant to this discussion.

Among demonstrations yesterday, 500 protesters gathered outside the Danish Embassy in West London after a two-hour march. Amid chants of “Denmark go to hell” and “Bomb, bomb Denmark”, protesters called for a jihad, or holy war.

Abu Ibrahwm, 26, of Luton, said: “The only solution is for those responsible to be killed. In Islam, the one who insults the messenger should be killed."

Protesters yelled: “Denmark watch your back” and “You’ll pay with your blood”. Banners read: “Europe you will pay, your 9/11 is on its way”.

In Pakistan a Danish flag was burned at a demonstration in Lahore and there were other rallies in Islamabad and Karachi President Gen Pervez Musharraf said: “I have been hurt, grieved and I am angry."

In Jakarta, Indonesia, more than 150 Muslims stormed a building housing the Danish Embassy and tore down and burned the country’s white and red flag.

About 500 Bangladeshis protested in their capital Dhaka after prayers, chanting: “Apologise to Muslims!"

In Gaza, Palestine, militants threw a pipe bomb at a French cultural centre and shot at the building.

Thousands of Palestinian refugees marched through the streets of their camps in Lebanon, burning flags and urging Osama bin Laden to avenge Mohammad.

In the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarm, more than 10,000 Palestinians burned Danish cheese.

Not to go back into this, but Rockist, there's some language in your post that sends me right back to typing ARGH a lot and not understanding the way people think. I won't go point by point, but I want to focus on your use of the word "exempted." I don't think anyone is asking that Mohammed be "exempted" from ridicule or mockery. You later say: "On a personal level, I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to taunt people for their beliefs." That's what's being encouraged here. That's not an "exemption" -- that's a basic level of judiciousness and peaceful spirit that some of us are accusing the newspaper of lacking.

One interesting thing that's occurred to me here is how many people have disapproved of the images of, say, Pakistanis burning Danish flags. I count myself among that group; it's stupid, and I don't agree with them. But it's occurring to me now that the flag-burning is exactly equivalent, in terms of speech, to the original cartoons. A few Danes decided to address Muslim extremism by attacking a symbol held dear by all Muslims. And now a whole lot of Muslims have decided to address that Danish extremism by attacking a symbol presumably held dear by all Danes. And in that latter instance, I think most of us would have an easier time separating the right to speech from the quality of it -- it's a valid act of speech, alright, but that doesn't make it not-stupid, not-unhelpful, not-shitty.

Between those two equal acts of speech, I understand the desire to side with the one whose subtextual value is freedom, and not the one whose subtextual value is repression. But they're both shitty acts of speech, and their subtextual values aren't the only options. And I won't jump entirely behind someone who shares one of my values -- freedom -- if they seem to be enemies of some of the other things I value, including a whole bunch of cheesy stuff like truth, judiciousness, egalitarianism, generosity, and openness of spirit.

i mean, im not necessarily arguing that the european approach is even wrong, im just interested in the way it appears to differ to the american approach. ive read that some mosques in america fly the american flag (is this true?), the equivalent happening in britain is unthinkable (though of course our attitude towards our flag is a whole other can of worms)

thats interesting about african-americans. in england most muslims have traditionally been pakistani, and, perhaps similarly, familiar and 'unthreatening', perhaps it is rose tinted to suggest that integration was successful, but it appeared to be. over the last, maybe 15 years, this seems to have changed, perhaps because the british approach has changed. i think earlier immigrants were perhaps encouraged to view themselves as british (and, of course, came from british empire states), i think the british approach has abandoned this now. perhaps there isnt an approach anymore. but i think it has led to more recent communities seeming alien and unknown to the british public , very much 'the other', and, of course, vice versa

(theres also an argument that radicalization of british muslim youth (as opposed to recent immigrants) is a reaction to what might be seen as excessive accomodation and cowtowing by their parents)

how does all this play out in america though?

"All hell will break loose, if those extremists burn the Qur’an," Raed Halil, the head of the European Committee for Defending Prophet Muhammad, told IslamOnline.net over the phone from the Danish capital Copenhagen."

To clarify, I mean on a person-to-person level. But I think there has to be room for mocking belief in the public sphere. (I don't know if a newspaper is the place for it.) I don't know, I might conceivably end a discussion about religion by saying something like "I think it's all a lot of shit," or at least say something like that on an internet board. But maybe if I were being serious, I wouldn't see much point in making a comment like that. But I'd still like to reserve the "right", if only to blow off steam, because I can't manage to be as cool-headed and as deeply rhetorical as you.

If the pope issued a fatwa encyclical on not portraying Jesus in a mocking manner, I'm not sure it would be out of line for newspaper cartoonists to respond with cartoons that included such mockery.

i see that american newspapers have decided against it, but america doesnt have the equivalents of the euro tabloids?

the question is...will fox news show the cartoon?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2024306,00.html

an illustrator was not able to be found to depict mohammed for a childrens book, with people turning down the job, citing the gogh murder in holland. the artists turning down the job, is where the self-censorship angles comes in, and then newspapers decision to print the cartoon

ok, its still inflamatory, its still baiting, its still prophecy fulfilment, but its not random either, and does have some context. im not sure how edifying any of this really is, and the point could have been made with less inflamatory depictions. of course its also arguable that this was a minor minor story, and the paper seized on a scrap to create a monster.

seems a lot better than the bomb in the turban!

well, no one on this thread is. but that's exactly what all those protesters are demanding, which is part of why i can't get all the way to what i take to be your view on this. if the paper's intent in doing this had been to just say, "we hate muslims," then maybe i'd be more in the "they should have shown more judiciousness" camp. but their intent was different than that. and once more, i'd really like to read the essay that went along with the cartoons -- i don't know that it would change how i feel about any of it, but i think it's an important part of the equation that has just been left out.

Ditto.

Good summary of the background to this from the Guardian.

It isnt a matter of feeling freedoms are being railroaded, it should simply be one of mutual respect.

I guess whats at hand here is extremists full stop, and the more the loonies get airtime, the more other loonies (rightwingers, neonazis, hatemongering christian fundies, racists, whatever) will feel vindicated and secure in a growing crowd.

Freedom of speech is a dangerous tool. Hell, we dont even HAVE it constitutionally in AU as far as I know.

but i do respect people's right to hold whatever views they want, even if the views are ones i don't agree with. at least, as long as they are likewise willing to live more or less peaceably in a world where not everyone thinks like they do. but what if part of their belief system mandates that, in fact, peaceable coexistence is off the table? what do you do then? at what point do you say, no, tolerance of diversity and pluralism is non-negotiable?

And I'm heartened to see that more and more people are daring to say what previously seemed unthinkable (though not on ILX of course) - that the only possible solution to the quandry we've unwittingly found ourselves in is the outright proscription of Islam in the West.

gypsy mothra and nabisco, I think you guys are officially too good for this thread.

Anyone care to argue the case, which seems pretty central to me, that Mohammed *wasn't* a cold-blooded killer?

true to a degree, but i think, almost uniformly on the thread, people seem to suggest that the reaction has been predictable, histrionic and depressing. the main topic of the thread is still, the cartoons themselves, which is a more divisive issue.

there are points to made me about the reaction, and yes, incitement, racial hatred etc, what is the correct response. although, interestingly, in a way, we're seeing the flipside of some recent legislation that says its occur to criticise muslims (as not a racial group), but not jews or sikhs. ie, if it ok to attack muslims,...its ok to attack non-muslims (as not a racial group EITHER!)

theres a whole other thread on this, but, again, sometimes stuff like this is a double edge sword, we're here talking about freedom of speech and how we love it so, and things like the muslim protests are a test of that! sometimes i think our tolerance of such things actually adds fuel to the fire

i dont really think anyone is saying the protests arent histrionic and ott, its sort of a given

This issue really bugs me so aplogies for what is a long post.

ideas of proscribing islam from the west are generally untenable and unwanted for many of the reasons already gone into and as a way of thinking it locks the relationship as a problem. some people are cool some are not, till you get to know them you simply can not say. yet this leaves me wondering, what is actually to be done about the demonstrations in europe where you have people both determined to live in the west as well as determined to prophecy its destruction? What can be done?

it doesn't seem that anyone on this board objects to the right to go to regents park and make yourself heard, it's the nature of the slogans that worries people. Promising a repeat of 7/7 is not the way to open up a dialogue, which i assume is why extremists use it because they don't want a dialogue. (If i'm understanding correctly this same accusation is the one that's being made against the danish newspaper.)what the cartoons have provided is an oppurtunity for those that want to say it's 'us' vs. 'them' to further sow dissension, an oppurtunity that all interested parties have seized upon.

the difference is the position from which you do this. casual bigotry is different when you're the majority singing 2 world wars and one world cup to when you're a minority. i could well cop it off either group but at the moment the jihadists are a more pressing concern.

they are a clear minority who want no positive relationship with the country that they're living in. they've gotten to know the ways and have decided that we are definetley not cool. they don't even want a good relationship with other muslims who don't adhere to their beliefs. they will not give up any fundamentals and as such won't relate to the society around them: every relationship demands compromise and they will not. they cannot. they cannot compromise their beliefs to allow them an easy relationship with western culture and stay true to their religion. this is a problem.

so to make a clear distinction between muslims and jihadists, should a society invest any time and money into attempting to soothe jihadists that seem determined to attack it? should they simply ignore their complaints? especially when they will/can not at least lean in a bit to another way of living.

My answer is 'no' because i don't think either is a real possibility. i hope i'm wrong on that because the other alternative seems to me just as tricky: how do you combat the danger that these people pose without persecuting muslims who have found a way to stay true to a culture at times at odds with their religion?

well you could leave it to the powers that be, but most institutions don't seem to be doing a particularly good job at that, be it internationally or nationally or locally. such interventions also come across as attacks from on high even when they're not meant to be. surely it is up to us to open up conversations instead of looking for others to improve relationships for us. had the readership of this danish newspaper been more responsible back in september and written in in protest then none of this would be happening. a relationship spanning millions as the one between the west and islam already does works at points between people as individuals getting along, falling in love/out etc.

so playing catch up as i am where are the prominent islamic voices that aren't jihadists, where are the eloquent muslims? they could never outstrip chantelle and preston in a ratings war but does the responsibility then not fall onto us to ensure that such voices can be heard? and i mean more than on a messageboard.

it's not that i think we have reached a crisis and that throwing up our hands will damn us all, but apart from the bigots a lot of people seem to be arguing for good things. these cartoons could be an oppurtunity.

oh and i'm a first time poster trying not to troll, so if i've offended anyone or spent most of this attacking strawmen then my apologies, but like i said this issue really bugs me...

what i mean is, 'our' tolerance adds fuel to extremists fire, and is not a reason for ending this tolerance

hi optimus!

and that cameraman who filmed the injured iraqi insurgent being executed -- certainly there wz plenty of blog-comment yak in the US abt how they hoped next time out the US army wd frag him "by mistake haha" etc etc -- is this different? again, i don't take blog-comment threats very seriously (beered-up blowhards venting easy frustration) but maybe this is just complacency on my part :(

which is scarier –- more chilling in its effects -- to a professional writer or cartoonist? the open threat of the occasional mob in the street or the daily emailed threat of the anonymous and hidden lone-nut obsessive internet stalker? esp.when there seem to be lots of the internet stalker, and more by the day?

as a quasi-journalist myself, my kneejerk to "it's offensive!!" is certainly "but some people deserve to be offended!!" -- but i also admire nabisco's mournful-hopeful concept of a space for civility wide enough to contain a plurality of the world's foax, who can agree (albeit fairly testily) to differ with one another, and contain and control their respective crazies -- i think these semi-polarised spaces are worth fighting for

this is still a kind of self-censorship, albeit in the other direction -- and maybe it's actually harder for an honest writer to fight against, bcz it's so tied up with the toughness necessary to resist just giving up and going with the flow

They're too busy trying to finish the complete works of shakespeare.

Seriously though, nuff respect to the thread - what everyone else has said about the way in which their mind has changed.

The key absence here (here as in 'the issue', not this thread) is politics, as opposed to political theory. There's too much either / or going on; I expect some lazy hack has said that 'this is a referendum on pluralism and multiculturalism' as if the poles being represented, of free speech, and theocracy, were already settled, and really, we needed to get the gloves off, and get into a right old ding-dong to the death (pace Huntingdon) to see who wins.

That's not the case though. As many have argued, and as this thread shows, positions change. The vital space to be preserved - and this is the true high ground of liberalism, not offending people like a tit - is the space where this debate happens and makes a difference. In that context, the Danish papers have done us a disservice. By being so cack-handed, by being so inflammatory, they have set this debate up in a way to close that space down. I suspect they've done it for the usual reasons these things happen - circulation, a dollop of editorial stupidity (hello every other paper printing them) and a vague right-wing agenda which looks at potential multicultural conflict and says 'bring it on' or at the very least 'we told this would happen if we let them come here'.

To continue Nabsico's line upthread, there is a group of non-muslim's who are seeing this as the start of the culture wars of religion and race, and the rest who aren't enamoured by the paper's actions, but are deeply unenamoured by the response of some in the Muslim community. It's easy to get angry, as I did when I saw the text of some of the banners at the London demo on Friday, but the initial anger has to be replaced by a proper assessment of how to do this politically.

Against that backdrop, the only proper line is to call the paper and its ilk utter idiots and best, provocateurs at worst, matched in both those stakes by the islamic demonstrators talking about more 7/7s and killing apostates. The free, liberal and tolerant society won't get built by caving into theocrats, but nor will it be strengthened if the people we need to believe in it see it as a charter for latent anti-immigrant race-war to be given full vent.

Gary Younge had it right, I thought, in yesterday's Guardian. Just because someone has the right to free speech doesn't mean that their exercising of it is worth defending. They may have been entitled to do what they did, but their broke a bigger rule of liberal democracy, and especially of progressives, which was to be uttrely cackhanded and inflammatory in their politics.

I think that's probably at least partly because we all take it for granted that none of us support such speech. Also most of us (none of us on this thread?) are Muslims, so there's no sense of "look, this is what our group is out there doing," whereas the issue of how, as the western secularists we mostly are, to regulate our speech in regard to Islam is less agreed on.

(Just for the record, I'd like to be clear that I don't agree with those calling for Muslims to be prevented from immigrating to western countries, or for the to be deported! I do think that there is something particularly problematic about Islam, because of the way Islamic societies and western societies have diverged over several hundred years, and also because of Islam's combination of a theocratic model (a la ancient Israel) with a missionary thrust akin to Christianity's. I think it matters that neither Jesus nor Paul call for Christians to go out and take up arms in order to create a Christian theocracy. It's true that there are Christians who espouse some sort of theocratic model, but imo it requires a lot of interpretive gymnastics to get to that point.)

One answer: Tariq Ramadan, the academic the U.S. State Department thinks is too dangerous to be allowed to teach in America:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/05/opinion/edramadan.php

(And I realize full well that his position on this is basically Nabisco's.)

but the thing is, i don't personally see those principles as equivalent. free speech and expression -- especially about religion and politics -- is utterly crucial to me. someone's particular religious restrictions on depiction of their holy men, i'm sorry, i'm not going to go out of my way to offend them, but i fundamentally find those kind of religious restrictions kind of dumb at best, and prone to being used for all kinds of anti-liberal purposes -- as very much seems to be the case with a lot of these protests. there's a lot of muddled talk about respect on this thread, and i wish there was more clarity about what people are really asking to be respected. like i said above, there are a lot of things about fundamentalist islam that i very much do not respect, because i think they are antithetical to liberal pluralism, and i reserve the right to say so, and loudly. maybe not in the manner of these cartoons, but still.

so, ok, the prohibition on idolatry is not itself antithetical to liberal democracy. unless, of course, you try to enforce it outside the bounds of the community of believers.

looking at it from one angle it's a question of conflict of laws, in which case I can't see how in any sense Sharia is to prevail over Danish/European law.

Of course there are moral questions too, but the morals in question should be those of a Western democracy.

i think people are to some degree confusing the details of the case -- would i run this cartoon? would i personally be offended by it? -- with the underlying principles. the principles are what i care about. the details are worth debating, but only in a context where the principles are first accepted. on this thread, i think that's the case -- no one, as far as i can tell, is suggesting that the newspaper should not have been allowed to run the cartoons. but this debate is happening in a much bigger world than this thread, and in the bigger world, the underlying principle of free speech -- including the freedom to mock religious beliefs -- is not taken as a universal given.

so, i can agree with nabisco that among the global minority of people who accept that principle as a given, it is best for all kinds of reasons to exercise that right wisely and with some sensitivity. but this issue is not only being debated among people who accept that as a given. and the people who don't accept it are the ones who worry me -- in the u.s., in the vatican, in damascus, wherever.

(the following links are in Dutch, sorry)

The (Belgian) Arab-European League published antisemitic cartoons on their website, citing their right to free speech (story in Dutch).

The result was an immediate complaint by the Israeli Center for Documentation And Information. (one of the cartoons had a revisionist flavour. That and antisemitism are punishable offences here.)

I have no further opinion on this, I'm just pointing it out.

why should religious groups be protected above other groups?

Right, and it's not encouraging that in many predominantly Muslim countries non-Muslims can't even proselytize and apostasy is a punishable crime (at least on the books, whether or not its actually enforced).

x-post:

rockist - getting away from religion specifically, the british papers don't have any problem with putting pictures/cartoons/articles in their papers which offend certain groups.
why should religious groups be protected above other groups?

I don't think they should simply on the basis of being religious.

See, I think actually that's a frustrating thing about all this. If this were a local newspaper, I would be able to gauge (sp?) how it fit into the overall policy, community standards, etc. In this case I have to trust various descriptions of what this Danish newspaper is like, what newspapers there are like in general, etc.

I notice you don't link to any examples of moderation in the muslim/arab press -- only bullshit to fuel your pro-zionist, one world NWO agenda.

Muslim scholar slams mission attacks, urges boycott
Sun Feb 5, 2006 3:26 PM ET

DUBAI (Reuters) - Prominent Muslim scholar Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi condemned on Sunday the torching of Danish and Norwegian embassies in Arab capitals by Muslims angry over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar, told Arabic television Al Jazeera that Muslims should instead channel their fury by boycotting goods of countries who published the drawings in their newspapers.

"We call on Muslims to show their fury in a logical an controlled manner," Qaradawi said.

"We didn't ask people to burn embassies as some have done in Damascus and Beirut. We asked people to boycott products ... We don't sanction destruction and torching because this is not in line with morality or Muslim behavior," he said, referring to calls to boycott he made during Friday's sermon in Qatar.

Thousands of angry Muslim protesters torched the Danish consulate in Beirut on Sunday a day after Syrians set fire to the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus, damaged the Swedish embassy and tried to storm the French mission.

Qaradawi also called for international action over the cartoons -- one which depicted Prophet Mohammad with a turban shaped like a bomb -- which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and were reprinted in other European countries.

"I call on Arab and Islamic governments to ask the United Nations to issue a law forbidding insults to all religions."

Newspapers have insisted on their right to print the cartoons on the grounds of freedom of speech. Muslims believe depictions of the Prophet Mohammad are blasphemous.

"Freedom comes with responsibilities. Only God has absolute freedom," Qaradawi he said.

He is an outspoken Egyptian Sunni Muslim cleric who frequently appears on a weekly religious programme on Al Jazeera television which has a wide viewership in the Arab world.

You are joking, right? Or did someone scrape you off the bottom of a Lyndon Larouche table at a campus activities fair?

and they are also logical because they would be in reaction not to the printing of the cartoons, but to govt inactivity in banning them. whether anyones agrees with this or not, is kind of irrelevant, sanctions and boycotts are entirely valid responses

I do, but that's another thread, or another bunch of threads, and I don't actually feel like fighting that on this one.

x-post:

I think I've seen these photos on BBC, Reuters, etc. so pretty valid. I can't promise that, since I haven't been keeping track of every page I've checked out, obviously.

i dont believe the danish producers deserve to be hurt either, but, that doesnt change the fact that it is logical

(Apologies for the jingoistic site source.)

i dont agree with this, but i still think its logical!

That, of course, goes for both parties, here.

its still inflammatory, and unhelpful, but...its not quite the same. a different way of making a point?

see, that's the kind of false equivalency i've been afraid of all the way through this thread. when you consider what is being reaped, not just by the newspaper but by denmark as a whole, you would have to argue that what denmark sowed was the right for the newspaper to publish the cartoons. that's certainly the argument being made by the protesters, and it's one that i find alarming.

I was not arguing this upthread!

Muslims must honestly examine why there is such a huge gap between the way we imagine Islam and our prophet, and the way both are seen by others. Our offended sensibilities must not be limited to the Danish newspaper or the cartoonist, but to those like Fadi Abdullatif, whose actions should be regarded as just as offensive to Islam and to our reverence for the prophet. Otherwise, we are all responsible for those Danish cartoons.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-mona_05edi.ART.State.Edition1.3ed14a8.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/international/middleeast/06cartoon.html?hp&ex=1139202000&en=d7fd387b0985d049&ei=5094&partner=homepage

http://retecool.com/comments.php?id=13539_0_1_0_C

Here’s another American website making complete fun of Christians:

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/

(Notice, no one is threatening hostage taking over this one.)

Here's a couple bits of writing from our American founding fathers two hundred years ago- they had more sense:

"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." - Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason, 1794-1795.)

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of... Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."- Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason, 1794-1795.)

Benjamin Franklin

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."--Benjamin Franklin, _Poor_Richard_, 1758

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."--Benjamin Franklin, _Poor_Richard_, 1758

"I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it." -- Benjamin Franklin, _Articles_Of_Belief_and_Acts_of_Religion_, Nov.20, 1728

(Obviously I don't count ideas like Rockist Scientist's as anywhere close to that, given that he seems basically spot-on about the political/theocratic bent of Islam, and that he has more than a shred of a clue about the mutability of religion as lived and in practice.)

but can't we/shouldn't we also acknowledge that an intolerant, violent streak of fundamentalist islam has seized the international stage and has to be confronted one way or another? in the same way that intolerant fundamentalist christianity needs to be confronted? the confusion here is that the newspaper pretty clearly was aiming at the former group, but was perceived and/or portrayed as aiming at the much larger mass of muslims. you can blame the newspaper for its broad brush and rhetorical cluster-bombing, but that doesn't mean its actual target didn't deserve the targeting.

The US, Britain, France and Iran were represented by caricatures of Bush, Blair etc. Israel was represented by a hook-nosed claw-handed shylock-like Jew.

The Board of Deputies has complained, but has yet to march on Regent's Park mosque demanding beheadings.

Oh, and over on Indymedia they've decided that Friday's protest was OBVIOUSLY just organised by neo-cons to discredit Islam and encourage an invasion of Iran.

I have absolutely no time for the first arguement, and very little for the second — had 500 people marched through London to the US embassy demanding an end to the "occupation" it would at least have made some sense, but screaming about death to those who mock Islam and protesting against a government because an independent newspaper printed something you don't like is just absurd, and no different to the BNP marching on a mosque in protest at the 7/7 bombings.

-- Matt DC (runmd...), February 3rd, 2006.

when the new statesman printed an anti-semitic image on the front page, was there a baying mob? the pic of a naked child would be outrageous *because it involved the exploitation of a child*. it's not a free speech issue.

actually, even this isnt true. we're talking about printing images of muhammed being a taboo that european society may or may not do well to gradually adopt. but paedophilia isnt an absolute, and is arguably a taboo introduced by the victorians (or gradually in the hundred or so years before the victorians). its actually not a bad comparison, because this is something that is seen as totally unacceptable in europe today, and not a free speech issue. but in the 1300s the imagery of children was quite different, not the appolonian innocent view of the last few hundred years.

so thats a great example of how free speech incorporates taboos.

A very fair point, and I'll concede I made my sarky edit not realising it was a muslim who'd written that article - I didn't read it properly.

xpost

actually, even this isnt true. we're talking about printing images of muhammed being a taboo that european society may or may not do well to gradually adopt. but paedophilia isnt an absolute, and is arguably a taboo introduced by the victorians (or gradually in the hundred or so years before the victorians). its actually not a bad comparison, because this is something that is seen as totally unacceptable in europe today, and not a free speech issue. but in the 1300s the imagery of children was quite different, not the appolonian innocent view of the last few hundred years.

so thats a great example of how free speech incorporates taboos.

-- terry lennox. (...)

i'm not sure how the fact that the taboo on paedophilia 'not being an absolute' is relevant. as things stand, it *is* a taboo -- and how do you feel about that? as things stand, the law is not subservient to the prohibition under islam against producing images of the prophet -- and how do you feel about *that*?

how do i feel about paedophilia being a taboo? im glad! but i still realise that it is a social construction, and not a particularly old one. but, in relation to muhammed, we're talking about 'only images', and it strikes me that there is some disingeneousness about this, so im just comparing to 'only images' which are also a social taboo, but one accepted by the british people

glad also! i'm not arguing for censorship. saying the paper was inflammatory and stupid for printing them*, and saying they should be banned are two different things

*we're only talking about some of the cartoons here anyway, i think some of them are fine

its only become considered as mistreatment over the last few hundred years. and, who is harmed by the taking of a photograph (if nothing is happening in the photograph but it is presented in a certain way?)

but the 'it's okay to mistreat a child in 1700' and the 'it's okay to publish pictures of same in 1700' things are still different -- the argument for free speech is one thing and the argument about mistreating children another, even if our attitudes to both do change over time.

if mistreatment of children is tolerated, so is the publication of photographs of their mistreatment. but it will never be the case that drawing a cartoon can harm someone; the *only* question there is of freedom to publish it.

xpost

this is turning into an episode of 'south park'

anyway, it shows its not as black and white as it seems!

I am a Muslim. I believe in and recite the Kalima. I am in a rage over the cartoons. I have managed to see them, since there are many sites now where they are available, and my rage is that they are an accurate representation. Political cartoons are wonderful. They are a mirror which cuts away the superficial and shows by exaggeration what the cartoonist sees as the heart of the issue.

There are no physical likenesses of the holy prophet, but there are certainly depictions. His life was meticulously recorded, as all Muslims are supposed to study and follow his example. So if a Danish newspaper commissions cartoonists to find an image of the Prophet Muhammad, where are they going to find the imagery to capture in their cartoons? They are going to see it in the face that the Muslim world presents. And it isn't pretty.

It is the face of the bomb ticking away above the brain, destroying reason. It is the face of the sword guarding repressed, hidden and frightened women. About a vision of paradise as a male voluptuous fantasy inspiring people to kill innocents and themselves. They could have shown other ugly scenes from state executions to anti-semitism and intolerance of other religions and viewpoints. The scariest image I saw was of the placards outside the Regent's Park mosque saying: "To Hell with free speech" and "Behead those who insult the prophet". The Qur'an and the Al-hadith are venerated and recited, but not read, studied and acted upon.
Rafiq Mahmood
Edinburgh

It seems some Muslims have failed to see the irony of the cartoons. They are, in my opinion, an accurate depiction of the view of Islam that the followers of Osama bin Laden have cultivated throughout the world. This view of the prophet as the precursor and instigator of the current actions of terrorists is the falsehood that Muslims should be most affected by.
Zahir Mirza
Gillingham, Kent

"They want to test our feelings," protester Mawli Abdul Qahar Abu Israra told the BBC.

"They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and to their newspapers," he said.

but what's the answer - are they extremists or not???

Monday February 6, 2006

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have caused a storm of protest throughout the Islamic world, refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ, it has emerged today.

The Danish daily turned down the cartoons of Christ three years ago, on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers and were not funny.

In April 2003, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to Jyllands-Posten.

Zieler received an email back from the paper's Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: "I don't think Jyllands-Posten's readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them."

The only legitimate use of boycotts agsinst nations is when their laws and official government policy are noxious. The calls for boycotts amongst Muslims against Denmark are either politically naive or evil, which is to say that they still don't understand that the Danish government doesn't control or have the right to censure a privately owned media outlet or that they think that their feeling of offense is greater than the Danish people's right to have the right to free speech in their own country, in which case they can go fuck their hypocritical selves. A mass protest to call for an apology from the newspaper or the firing of the editorial board or whatnot I can understand but the kind of collective guilt that is being ascribed to the Danes is really scary to me and as ill founded as lumping together moderate and fanatical Muslims.

The comments about revisionism and anti-semitism being illegal in the Netherlands reminds me that I think all limits on free speech are misguided and lazy. Doesn't the very use of illiberal laws to defend a liberal institution undermine it? Also, imho, the real import and utility of free speech is not only that it provides an open market of ideas but that it also requires a society to actively and openly come to terms with its worst elements and tendencies. Outlawing hate speech doesn't make hate go away, it makes it go underground and 'right thinking' people are then tempted to think that they no longer need be vigilant against its venom. I haven't noticed that anti-hate speech laws have lessened European racism or depleted the numbers in nationalistic or neo-Nazi groups. They have merely given extremely illiberal people a sense of martyrdom and a liberal weapon to weild against their enemies.

more interestingly, cole also has a round-up of muslim reactions, showing how they vary from place to place and dissecting the ways the issue has gotten bound up with local/regional politics.

Contrary to what the article wrote it is most likely that the Conservatives, in an alliance with the Center Party, The Liberal Party and Christian Democrats will win the next election. I don't know where the author got that info from. However, the only reason they have a bigger chance of winning is because they moved drasticly to the left and the only party that could be described as socially conservative is the Christian Democrats.

Also, something that rarely is mentioned when immigration to Western Europe is discussed is that a lot of these countries have only had large scale immigration in the last 15-20 years! Geez! Give it some time to work.

"he's not a suicide bomber, he's a very silly boy"

Gives a chilling new meaning to the phrase "noose of light"

Are you worried he might right poetry?

Living in a small country where religion (christianity) has almost vanished during the past hundreds of years up until recently when it's becomimg a bigger issue again due to immigrants (christians, muslims, whatever -they are more religious than the average ethnic swede anyway), I see the publishing of the drawings from a different angle than most people in this thread.

It's ok to be religious but please keep it to yourself and don't let it show in everyday life is more or less what the big majority in Sweden feels. I realise that I live in a small corner of the world but as an example, here it would be impossible for the prime minister to mention God in his speech like George Bush does. If you like me, can't see anything coming from religion that couldn't be replaced ( and in a better way) with humanity, it is important being able to question the religions and their holy gods, prophets, scripts etc. If something is forbidden for a jew, it can't be applied on me. It's their right to live according to their belief as long as it doesn't inflict on the law but it doesn't mean that I, out of respect or whatever, shall do the same.

I don't hold many things holy and I think we have a right to bring subjects in religion up to create a debate, otherwise there's a risk that we leave to priests, imams, rabbies and others to TELL people what's right and wrong instead of thinking for themselves. This is what happened in a lot of countries in the west during hundreds of years when they (priests) were looked upon as halfgods by common people.

I think it's a very good thing when the swedish church or what the bible says is being questioned. I also think it's good when it's done in a way that the church and their followers find offensive. This way of bringing shit in christianity up has helped to throughout the years make the swedish church accept female priests and the right for homosexuals to have their partnership sanctioned in a church. I believe that in the long run changes like this will make christianity less religious. (I hope you understand what I mean, my vocabulary and phrasing in english could be better I suppose). This artwork (http://www.katedral.vaxjo.se/KLASSRUM/re/Ecce.htm) that was shown in alot of places in Sweden some years ago is a good example. It made some christians furious or sad but it also made them discuss homosexuality and the different ways people might look upon Jesus.

Jyllans-Posten published 12 different cartoons with different meanings (as you already know, one of them was very critical to the newspaper itself) and they published them in a context: are muslim taboos something a non-muslim has to follow in fear of bodily harm? Of course they could have just ran a text about it but would there be a debate then? Because beside all the demonstrations, flagburning, embassyburning and all, there is a big debate going on in the world.

Europeans would do well to take a page from the way immigrants are assimilated and incorporated into American culture. This would hardly even be an issue here with American Muslims.