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

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.