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

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).