February 13, 2006
Seattle Spine
A wonderful Seattle Weekly tabloid The Stranger has reprinted some of the cartoons from the Jyllands-Posten that are currentlyAll the RageVisit the Stranger for the rest of this wonderful read. And, let us not forget that the cartoons appeared much earlier in an Egyptian newspaper. Rantings of a Sandmonkey has the goods:
Islamic Fundamentalists Don't Just Have a Problem with Cartoons, They Have a Problem with Freedom
It began last September.
Danish author Kaare Bluitgen couldn’t find an illustrator for his biography of Muhammad. Fundamentalist Muslims frown on depictions of the prophet and—in one of many European cases of self-censorship since the November 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker and Islam critic Theo van Gogh—artists feared a reaction. Europe, you see, isn’t the liberal paradise you think it is, or knew it to be 10 or 20 years ago. At this very moment, European liberalism is caught in a steadily intensifying struggle with fundamentalist Muslim censoriousness—call it creeping Sharia. Concerned about this trend and eager to make a statement about free speech, Denmark’s largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, invited illustrators to submit drawings of Muhammad. On September 30, the paper printed 12 of them.
Most of the cartoons, frankly, were lame and witless. A couple (notably one depicting Muhammad as a terrorist) were provocative in the way editorial cartoons are supposed to be. But compared to the lusty Christian baiting in movies like Life of Brian—or in various artworks by Gilbert and George, among others—they were pretty tame stuff.
When artists bait Christians, the Christians (at most) wave signs and send out press releases. When Danish Muslims saw the Muhammad cartoons, they went ballistic. Thousands protested in Copenhagen. Death threats were issued. On October 12, a group of Muslim ambassadors demanded a meeting with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. He refused. “It is so self-evidently clear what principles Danish society is based upon,” he said later, “that there is nothing to have a meeting about.”
Now, in today’s Europe—where cultural appeasement by political and media elites of the continent’s largely unintegrated and antidemocratic Muslim minority is standard practice—Fogh Rasmussen’s blunt stance was encouraging. Yet Danish Muslim leaders stepped up pressure—claiming that the cartoons had wounded the delicate sensibilities of a billion of their co-religionists around the world—and won allies. In December, Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, promised that “action” on the cartoons would be forthcoming. (Apparently free speech was not on her list of human rights.) The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers condemned the Danish media’s “intolerance.”
Boycott Egypt
Freedom For Egyptians reminded me why the cartoons looked so familiar to me: they were actually printed in the Egyptian Newspaper Al Fagr back in October 2005. I repeat, October 2005, during Ramadan, for all the egyptian muslim population to see, and not a single squeak of outrage was present. Al Fagr isn't a small newspaper either: it has respectable circulation in Egypt, since it's helmed by known Journalist Adel Hamoudah. Looking around in my house I found the copy of the newspaper, so I decided to scan it and present to all of you to see.
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