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

Gypsy, am I with you or against you? Have you realized yet that by siding with the Free Speech or Genocide crowd you're just as much of a sucker as you've accused the multi-culti "no offensive cartoons!" crowd?

i'm just disheartened by how quick people have been to gloss over the free speech/free press part of the issue and act like the danish paper did something unforgivable. i had one guy the other day tell me that publishing the cartoons was as stupid as invading iraq. i hate that one of the major emerging themes from this, implicit and in some cases explicit, is that even a free press needs to watch what they say about people's religions. to which my knee-jerk first amendment response is, 'i got yer religion right here, buddy.' everybody loves freedom of expression until they get offended -- but defending the absolute right to offensive speech is part of the deal. i know, nobody here is saying people shouldn't have the right to be offensive. but they ARE saying people shouldn't BE offensive, for this reason or that reason, and that's uncomfortably close to the same thing -- especially when you have even ostensible voices of reason like kofi annan making throat-clearing noises about the need to respect religion.

and also, like i keep saying, i think both the context of the publication of these cartoons and the actual level of offensiveness of the content have been grossly distorted. muhammad with a bomb in his turban might not be an image i personally would publish, but given the events of the last several years i don't see how it falls outside the bounds of reasonable political satire.

I see two people "glossing over the free press part of the issue" on this thread and about seven thousand people glossing over the "let's sink to their level and call it enlightened civilization" part of this issue

OH FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, YES THAT IS THE POINT, WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT "HALTING MUSLIM IMMIGRATION" THEY ARE NOT SPEAKING ABOUT, SAY, NATION OF ISLAM AMERICAN BLACKS. I mean did I not say this clearly enough?

but hey if you prefer "bigot" to racist to just encompass that technically the word "Muslim" does not/should not connotate "Arabic," be my guest! Some of you random people are bigots not racists, excuse me, I have a cat to dress up in a military uniform.

oh that is DARLING! pics plz!

Were there even protests this size in these countries prior to the Iraq occupation?

I think that's the point gypsy is making repeatedly and I'm agreeing with is that the cartoons, while satirical, are not an incitement to violence any more than say, a Snoop Dogg record or A Clockwork Orange.

People find them offensive. Lunatics will use them as a justification for violence they do. But I don't think the intention behind the cartoons was to incite violence (and if it was then they failed, due to the muted initial reaction as previously noted many times on this thread).

Compare and contrast to the sermons of Abu Hamza.

and i'm sorry, i don't see the 'bigotry' in those cartoons, unless it's bigotry to satirize the relgious views of zealots. they are CLEARLY commentary on a particular strain of violent fundamentalist islam, and were a direct reaction to people feeling scared for their lives if they ran afoul of it. you have to really take them out of context -- and also ignore the majority of the actual cartoons printed -- to take them as some sweeping indictment of islam. and if fundamentalist islam is somehow off the table as a target of satire, then why shouldn't we grant fundamentalist christianity the same "respect"?

They're jerks and we have Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Press so Jyllands Posten is RIGHT ON. Even if it was mindblowingly stupid and petty and if they go the fuck out of business for causing so much trouble and if it were anybody but the fucking Mohammedans nobody would've tolerated this shit for a minute.

xpost: the republication thing is complicated. i think some papers obviously used it to advance their own anti-immigrant agendas. otoh, i think reprinting some of them in the context of covering the controversy is legitimate and even necessary journalism. i think a lot of american papers and tv networks have fallen down on that, because i think it's hard to get a handle on this without seeing the actual cartoons. (especially because i think that some of the descriptions make them sound worse than they are.)

fuck it, why bother? i guess we can all just print martha stewart recipes and brangelina photos. we'd make more money doing that shit anyway.

how is this clear? by suggesting Muhammad=terrorist, doesn't the cartoon become commentary on Islam full stop? and on the ? of racism, I do think any visual representation of Arabness (turban, beard) along with the suggestion of terrorism is available to be read as bigotry. the image of Muhammad is an everymanArab image that's quite common in the West, right?

mandatory disclaimer: I AM NOT EXCUSING THE REACTION TO THE CARTOON IN THE MUSLIM WORLD, WHICH IS TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY DEPRESSING, AND I KNOW THIS PROBABLY PUTS ME IN LEAGUE WITH SCARY NEOCONS, BUT I CAN'T SAY I'D HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THE CIA TAKING AHMEDINEJAD, IN PARTICULAR, OUT.

Yeah that's what I'm saying. I mean it's a true fact and plainly obvious that there is a thin and nearly invisible line between "not starting stupid fights" and "never doing anything worthwhile."

because at this point the cartoons in one danish newspaper are just standing in for a lot of things. that should be obvious.

all these "starting fights" and "throwing gasoline on fires" arguments presuppose that the newspaper could have in any way anticipated the events of the last few months, and i think that's ridiculous. especially because the events of the last few months have been largely the product of determined efforts by various groups of people to stoke outrage, for their own religious/political purposes, which i am largely unsympathetic to.

like i said, my concern is that the message that comes out of this is, don't talk shit about people's religions. (because, you know, you might "start a stupid fight.") when i see no particular compunction on the part of assorted religious authorities -- christian and muslim -- in talking shit about everybody else. talking shit about people's religions is a pretty goddamn important thing to be able to do.

i don't see in terms of intention how this is different from the newspaper's action. in terms of size and effect, sure it's much different, but even if the cartoons weren't intended to "stoke outrage" in muslims (as if intentions really count), weren't they intended to "stoke outrage" (of a different sort) in westerners?

but i got no problem saying that one cartoon or even, if you like, the whole page of them wasn't "intelligent and useful." fine, that's an opinion, we can all argue about what constitutes intelligent and useful speech. not that any of us always live up to those standards, but they're fine standards to aspire to. but i do have a problem "blaming" the cartoons for what happened afterward. i think that's a dangerous road to go down.

xpost: re: stoking outrage -- well, but to what end? i think the newspaper was trying to raise an alarm about artists being intimidated by religious zealots. which, when it comes down to it, is actually something i find kind of alarming. i don't think the point was, "throw these brown savages out on their turbans," although i guess if you ignore the majority of the cartoons and the actual context of their publication and squint hard enough you can kind of see it like that.

i dunno. i don't think that it could be said that the way this has gone has been exactly the intentions of the initial objectors (ie. i doubt they wanted to see other muslims die in rioting), but i have no idea.

I realize a lot of the racist stuff is probably not the intention of the cartoon, but I do think it's available to be read into it. (there's a whole complicated post to be written about the nonidentity but weird intertwining of racism and anti-Muslim sentiment, but I'm not calm enough to do it right now. maybe nabisco will show up again.) I should say I keep imagining how people I know would react to the cartoon (like, say, my mom, who's not about to burn anything down), and I can't imagine them being anything but offended, and sort of perceiving the cartoon as willfully mean. They may not be right, but it's an understandable reaction.

that said, I'm not even sure what I'm arguing anymore. gypsy, you're making a lot of sense, and I do think the history of the past, say thirty years in the Muslim world has involved a lot of people getting played. Juan Cole's comments on the whole thing are good to keep in mind, I think.

yeah, we're talking mostly a matter of degrees here, since as m.white said a long time ago a lot of the people on this thread agree on the basics. (i'm not including the send-em-back-to-the-desert brigade.) and like i said a while ago, i think criticizing the cartoons is fine just like criticizing ted rall is fine, but i'm only comfortable with it in a context where their RIGHT to say the things they say is taken as a given. and in the broader debate around this thing (broader meaning "outside ilx"), i don't think that's being taken as a given -- even by a lot of ostensible liberals -- and that kind of alarms me.

and by "right," i don't just mean the literal legal right (although that's fundamental) but also the social and cultural right, the understanding and acceptance that in a free society these things are part of the dialogue. because as soon as people start buying the idea that there are things you shouldn't even though you theoretically can, then you're taking a step toward not actually being allowed to say them. which, not coincidentally, was what prompted the actual publication of the cartoons.

xpost: this is also repeating something said earlier (although at this point what isn't?), but there's a big difference between self-censorship out of mutual respect and self-censorship out of fear.

Yes, it becomes commentary on the fact that Islam was founded by a murderous barbarian who urged his followers to emulate his example, hence the problems we're facing now.

But that doesn't mean it's a commentary on *muslims* full stop. It's pointing out the religious source of the extremists' violence, not saying that muslims are necessarily violent.

If you were saying that understanding the motivation of violent jihadists isn't worth alienating the 'moderates' that would be bad enough, but you're world-view won't even allow you to countenance the fact that Mohammed & the doctrines based on his words and deeds *is* the source of all muslim violence!

that's because I don't believe that they are. I don't understand the first part of the sentence that came from, so I can't comment on it.

In any case, I'd prefer that this thread didn't wind up making me racist toward white people, so I'm trying to keep uninvested in it.

It's also easy to tell the difference between (a) people who are offering valid critiques of Islamic theology in practice and how it can breed extremism, and (b) people who are tying extremism to basic Islamic theology for the sole purpose of allowing them to assault the religion and not just the extremism. (You can tell this in part because the people of the second group totally forget that just about every major world religion has its start in a context of violence, and most of them have at some point expanded from there to do political violence on the surrounding world.)

I think this mostly stems from a frustration at being criticized by people who won't criticize themselves first. I mean, Americans could talk about how guns, loosened environmental laws and lax enforcement, and obesity or whatnot will kill X number of us per year or we could obssess about diabolical foreigners, which is sadly, sexier to most people. Muslims can go on about how a Danish newspaper in a non-Muslim country has offended them (I think their rage is really about their impotence to do much about it) or they could look at their own, often vile press. They could compare the free press of Denmark with their own censored press and worry about their own house before casting stones. And if there's a frightening example of group thinking, it's one that will impose a boycott/call for apologies from an entire country for the actions of one newspaper. It shows an ignorance of the West that equally matches our ignorance of Islam.

Having said that, many religions do justify barabarous acts in the fundamental texts. We can elide that so as not to offend, but the Koran and the Old Testament do have some rather firece things to say at times.