The new Nazies
posted by Mackety at 11:43 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Monday, February 13, 2006
We were brought up to hate - and we do
Criticism and questioning were forbidden. When I did either of these, I was told: "Muslims cannot love the enemies of God, and those who do will get no mercy in hell." As a young woman, I visited a Christian friend in Cairo during Friday prayers, and we both heard the verbal attacks on Christians and Jews from the loudspeakers outside the mosque. They said: "May God destroy the infidels and the Jews, the enemies of God. We are not to befriend them or make treaties with them." We heard worshippers respond "Amen".
My friend looked scared; I was ashamed. That was when I first realised that something was very wrong in the way my religion was taught and practised. Sadly, the way I was raised was not unique. Hundreds of millions of other Muslims also have been raised with the same hatred of the West and Israel as a way to distract from the failings of their leaders. Things have not changed since I was a little girl in the 1950s.
Palestinian television extols terrorists, and textbooks still deny the existence of Israel. More than 300 Palestinians schools are named after shaheeds, including my father. Roads in both Egypt and Gaza still bear his name - as they do of other "martyrs". What sort of message does that send about the role of terrorists? That they are heroes. Leaders who signed peace treaties, such as President Anwar Sadat, have been assassinated. Today, the Islamo-fascist president of Iran uses nuclear dreams, Holocaust denials and threats to "wipe Israel off the map" as a way to maintain control of his divided country.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/02/12/do1205.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/02/12/ixop.html
My friend looked scared; I was ashamed. That was when I first realised that something was very wrong in the way my religion was taught and practised. Sadly, the way I was raised was not unique. Hundreds of millions of other Muslims also have been raised with the same hatred of the West and Israel as a way to distract from the failings of their leaders. Things have not changed since I was a little girl in the 1950s.
Palestinian television extols terrorists, and textbooks still deny the existence of Israel. More than 300 Palestinians schools are named after shaheeds, including my father. Roads in both Egypt and Gaza still bear his name - as they do of other "martyrs". What sort of message does that send about the role of terrorists? That they are heroes. Leaders who signed peace treaties, such as President Anwar Sadat, have been assassinated. Today, the Islamo-fascist president of Iran uses nuclear dreams, Holocaust denials and threats to "wipe Israel off the map" as a way to maintain control of his divided country.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/02/12/do1205.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/02/12/ixop.html
posted by Mackety at 11:42 PM
0 comments
Hijacking rational discussion (by Robert Spencer)
Amir Taheri, as I have noted before, often does magnificent, invaluable work. Then he turns around and comes out with something absolutely breathtaking in its wrongheadedness and inaccuracy. A couple of years ago he did with an article, still widely reproduced, claiming that the headscarf was a modern Iranian invention not sanctioned by Islam -- as if Muslim women had all gone about with their heads gloriously uncovered until the advent of the Ayatollah Khomeini (an assertion that blithely ignores the evidence from the Qur'an -- 24:31 -- and Hadith -- Abu Dawud book 32, no. 4092 -- that the headcovering is firmly rooted in Islamic teaching).
Now he does the same sort of thing in "Hijacking Islam" in the New York Post. Here he is purveying the comforting but inaccurate notion that jihad theorists are dishonest, semi-literate idiots, the blind leading the blind, fabricating material from the Qur'an and attracting only semi-literates like themselves to their cause.
Would that it were so. Unfortunately, however, it isn't true -- and it does us no good to ignore or deny the truth. In fact, study after study has shown that jihadists today tend to be better educated than other Muslims. Nor is that all that is inaccurate and misleading here:
Here we have a religion without a theology, a secular wolf disguised as a religious lamb.
How did this neo-Islam — a political movement masquerading as religion — come into being, and how can those who know little about Islam distinguish it from the mainstream of the faith?
USING Islam as a vehicle for political ambitions is not new. The Umayyads used it after the Prophet's death to set up a dynastic rule. Three of the four caliphs who succeeded Muhammad were assassinated in the context of political power games presented as religious disputes.
Fast forward to the 19th century, and the Persian adventurer Jamaleddin Assadabadi, who disguised himself as an Afghan to hide his Shiite origin and set out to build a career in the mostly Sunni land of Egypt. Although a Freemason, Jamal (who dubbed himself Sayyed Gamal) concluded that the only way to win power among Muslims was by appealing to their religious sentiments. So he transformed himself into an Islamic scholar, grew an impressive beard and donned a huge black turban to underline his claim of being a descendant of the Prophet.
His partner was Mirza Malkam Khan, an Armenian who claimed to have converted to Islam. Together, they launched the idea of an "Islamic Renaissance" (An-Nahda) and promoted the concept of a "perfect Islamic government" under an "enlightened despot."
Malkam had a slogan of unrivaled cynicism: "Tell the Muslims something is in the Koran, and they will die for you."
This is a very powerful and evocative anecdote, but it loses all its force when one realizes that Taheri has not supplied, and cannot supply, a single instance of jihadists today actually telling their people that something is in the Qur'an when it is not. Osama, Zarqawi, Zawahiri and the rest -- including even the likes of Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza -- cite the Qur'an frequently. Their citations are readily located in the actual text. While Taheri is correct that in the days of Malkam as now, "the overwhelming majority of Muslims didn't know Arabic, and those who did had as much difficulty reading the Koran as an English speaker has with Chaucer," translations abound in all languages. Even though these do not have canonical status alongside the Arabic text, a Muslim leader in any Islamic land would have to be a fool to try to pass off something as in the Qur'an that isn't there.
LATER in the century, the campaigns of Sayyed Gamal and Mirza Malkam produce the Salafi movement. The term comes from the phrase aslaf al-salehin ("the worthy ancestors") and evokes the hope of reviving "the pure Islam of the early days under Muhammad."
Interesting that he makes no mention of the Wahhabis, the more common bogeymen accused of turning peaceful Islam violent, and who arose many decades before Sayyed Gamal.
The Salafi movement gave birth to the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Moslemeen) led by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt (1928), and to an Iranian Shiite version, the Fedayeen of Islam, led by Muhammad Navab-Safavi (1941).
In the '40s the movement produced two other children. The first was a hybrid of Marxism and Islam concocted by a Pakistani journalist Abul-Ala al-Maudoodi, who saw himself as "the Lenin of Islam." The other was a hybrid of Nazism and Islam promoted by the Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Hussaini and Rashid Ali al- Gilani, an Iraqi firebrand of Iranian origin....
In 1979, it won power in Iran under a semi-literate mullah named Ruhallah Khomeini.
This semi-literate was a well-respected religious teacher, an authority on Islamic theology and law, in the Shi'ite holy city of Qom. He won enough renown as an Islamic scholar to earn the title of Ayatollah. He wrote many books and treatises. Taheri, as his biographer, is well aware of all this.
In the 1980s, it dominated Pakistan through a group of army officers known as "the Koran Generals." In 1992 it came close to seizing power in Algeria through the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS). In 1995, it seized power in Kabul under the banner of the Taliban. Most recently, it won the election in the West Bank and Gaza under the label of Hamas.
SALAFISM'S biggest successes, how ever, have come in the West — where the emergence of large communities of Muslims has created a space in which neo-Islam can thrive....
Once visual apartheid is achieved, the neo-Islamist moves to Phase Two: making his followers brain-dead. This is done by persuading them that there is a unique Islamic answer to all questions ever asked or ever to be asked.
And where does the answer come from? From "fatwa factories" set up by (often semi-literate) sheiks in some Muslim countries. The most complex issues of life, from banks charging interest to euthanasia, are often answered with a simple "yes" or "no."
Here again, it would be nice if this were true, but it is not. There may be some fatwa factories that resemble Taheri's description, but much more often Salafis, Wahhabis and others of the same ilk deal in quite carefully reasoned arguments, far beyond a simple "yes" or "no." Consider this extended examination from Ask-Imam.com of the question of whether a Muslim may nowadays own a slave girl for sex purposes -- as is sanctioned by the Qur'an (4:3, etc.).
For a Salafi/Wahhabi argument for violent jihad, carefully argued from the Qur'an, from a Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia, see here.
Taheri continues:
The idea is that, as Maudoodi (the "Lenin of Islam") believed, Islam was sent by God to turn men into robots obeying divine rules as spelled out by the sheiks....
To call Maududi the Lenin of Islam twice in a short piece obscures the fact that he was an indefatigable Islamic scholar himself. It is true that he appropriated the language of Marxism, and cleverly framed his Islamic appeal in that language, as I show in Onward Muslim Soldiers. He also wrote a multi-volume (the edition here in my office is seven volumes) commentary on the Qur'an that owes nothing to Lenin -- and in it, he argued from the Qur'an his central point that governments that do not implement Sharia have no legitimacy and must be fought by Muslims.
Are robots expected to have the patience and intellectual curiosity that is required to plow through a multi-volume tafsir? I am not saying that all who followed Maududi's ideas read and studied his books, but I am saying that this vision of programmed half-wits led by three-quarter wits simply doesn't tally with the facts.
NEO-ISLAM pursues its culture of apartheid by dividing the world into "Islam" and "un-Islam."
Wherever Muslims are a majority is designated as Dar al-Islam (House of Peace); the rest of the world is Dar al-Harb (House of War) or, at best, Dar al-Da'awah (House of Propagation). The claim is that it is enough to be a Muslim to be always right against non-Muslims.
Neo-Islam does this, eh? That's funny; a few years ago I was on Michael Coren's TV show in Toronto with Anis Shorrosh, author of Islam Revealed, and a couple of Muslim scholars. When Shorrosh brought up the dar al-Islam/dar al-Harb distinction, one of them looked aggrieved and said, "That is a concept from Medieval times" -- as if no Muslims today believed in such a division. And now Taheri tells us its not Medieval, it's modern.
In fact, of course, it's both. The huge, chasmic distinction between believers and unbelievers ("the vilest of creatures" according to Qur'an 98:6) runs through the Qur'an. Dar al-Islam/dar al-Harb is a very ancient formulation, and one dear to the heart of jihadists today. Taheri's implication that it is something new obscures its traditional roots, and reassures Western non-Muslims -- but on false pretenses.
This is not how Muhammad taught Islam. His biography is full of instances where he ruled against a Muslim in a dispute with a non-Muslim. For him, the world was divided between "right" and "wrong," and "good" and "evil," not Islam and non-Islam. It is possible to be a Muslim and do evil things, while a non-Muslim could also be an agent of good.
Sure, but this is beside the point. Ultimately Muhammad taught that Muslims should behave this way toward non-Muslims -- even good ones:
Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them….If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya [the tax on non-Muslims specified in Qur’an 9:29]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim 4294)
Taheri says later: "Neo-Islam has as much right to operate in the political field as any other party in a democracy. But it does not have the right to pretend to be a religion — it is not."
Great. But with all this denial and obfuscation, I wonder if Taheri any longer has the right to pretend to be a trustworthy analyst. I still have great respect for his work -- most of the time. But articles like this one just peddle false reassurance, and are misleading. At best.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/
Now he does the same sort of thing in "Hijacking Islam" in the New York Post. Here he is purveying the comforting but inaccurate notion that jihad theorists are dishonest, semi-literate idiots, the blind leading the blind, fabricating material from the Qur'an and attracting only semi-literates like themselves to their cause.
Would that it were so. Unfortunately, however, it isn't true -- and it does us no good to ignore or deny the truth. In fact, study after study has shown that jihadists today tend to be better educated than other Muslims. Nor is that all that is inaccurate and misleading here:
Here we have a religion without a theology, a secular wolf disguised as a religious lamb.
How did this neo-Islam — a political movement masquerading as religion — come into being, and how can those who know little about Islam distinguish it from the mainstream of the faith?
USING Islam as a vehicle for political ambitions is not new. The Umayyads used it after the Prophet's death to set up a dynastic rule. Three of the four caliphs who succeeded Muhammad were assassinated in the context of political power games presented as religious disputes.
Fast forward to the 19th century, and the Persian adventurer Jamaleddin Assadabadi, who disguised himself as an Afghan to hide his Shiite origin and set out to build a career in the mostly Sunni land of Egypt. Although a Freemason, Jamal (who dubbed himself Sayyed Gamal) concluded that the only way to win power among Muslims was by appealing to their religious sentiments. So he transformed himself into an Islamic scholar, grew an impressive beard and donned a huge black turban to underline his claim of being a descendant of the Prophet.
His partner was Mirza Malkam Khan, an Armenian who claimed to have converted to Islam. Together, they launched the idea of an "Islamic Renaissance" (An-Nahda) and promoted the concept of a "perfect Islamic government" under an "enlightened despot."
Malkam had a slogan of unrivaled cynicism: "Tell the Muslims something is in the Koran, and they will die for you."
This is a very powerful and evocative anecdote, but it loses all its force when one realizes that Taheri has not supplied, and cannot supply, a single instance of jihadists today actually telling their people that something is in the Qur'an when it is not. Osama, Zarqawi, Zawahiri and the rest -- including even the likes of Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza -- cite the Qur'an frequently. Their citations are readily located in the actual text. While Taheri is correct that in the days of Malkam as now, "the overwhelming majority of Muslims didn't know Arabic, and those who did had as much difficulty reading the Koran as an English speaker has with Chaucer," translations abound in all languages. Even though these do not have canonical status alongside the Arabic text, a Muslim leader in any Islamic land would have to be a fool to try to pass off something as in the Qur'an that isn't there.
LATER in the century, the campaigns of Sayyed Gamal and Mirza Malkam produce the Salafi movement. The term comes from the phrase aslaf al-salehin ("the worthy ancestors") and evokes the hope of reviving "the pure Islam of the early days under Muhammad."
Interesting that he makes no mention of the Wahhabis, the more common bogeymen accused of turning peaceful Islam violent, and who arose many decades before Sayyed Gamal.
The Salafi movement gave birth to the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Moslemeen) led by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt (1928), and to an Iranian Shiite version, the Fedayeen of Islam, led by Muhammad Navab-Safavi (1941).
In the '40s the movement produced two other children. The first was a hybrid of Marxism and Islam concocted by a Pakistani journalist Abul-Ala al-Maudoodi, who saw himself as "the Lenin of Islam." The other was a hybrid of Nazism and Islam promoted by the Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Hussaini and Rashid Ali al- Gilani, an Iraqi firebrand of Iranian origin....
In 1979, it won power in Iran under a semi-literate mullah named Ruhallah Khomeini.
This semi-literate was a well-respected religious teacher, an authority on Islamic theology and law, in the Shi'ite holy city of Qom. He won enough renown as an Islamic scholar to earn the title of Ayatollah. He wrote many books and treatises. Taheri, as his biographer, is well aware of all this.
In the 1980s, it dominated Pakistan through a group of army officers known as "the Koran Generals." In 1992 it came close to seizing power in Algeria through the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS). In 1995, it seized power in Kabul under the banner of the Taliban. Most recently, it won the election in the West Bank and Gaza under the label of Hamas.
SALAFISM'S biggest successes, how ever, have come in the West — where the emergence of large communities of Muslims has created a space in which neo-Islam can thrive....
Once visual apartheid is achieved, the neo-Islamist moves to Phase Two: making his followers brain-dead. This is done by persuading them that there is a unique Islamic answer to all questions ever asked or ever to be asked.
And where does the answer come from? From "fatwa factories" set up by (often semi-literate) sheiks in some Muslim countries. The most complex issues of life, from banks charging interest to euthanasia, are often answered with a simple "yes" or "no."
Here again, it would be nice if this were true, but it is not. There may be some fatwa factories that resemble Taheri's description, but much more often Salafis, Wahhabis and others of the same ilk deal in quite carefully reasoned arguments, far beyond a simple "yes" or "no." Consider this extended examination from Ask-Imam.com of the question of whether a Muslim may nowadays own a slave girl for sex purposes -- as is sanctioned by the Qur'an (4:3, etc.).
For a Salafi/Wahhabi argument for violent jihad, carefully argued from the Qur'an, from a Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia, see here.
Taheri continues:
The idea is that, as Maudoodi (the "Lenin of Islam") believed, Islam was sent by God to turn men into robots obeying divine rules as spelled out by the sheiks....
To call Maududi the Lenin of Islam twice in a short piece obscures the fact that he was an indefatigable Islamic scholar himself. It is true that he appropriated the language of Marxism, and cleverly framed his Islamic appeal in that language, as I show in Onward Muslim Soldiers. He also wrote a multi-volume (the edition here in my office is seven volumes) commentary on the Qur'an that owes nothing to Lenin -- and in it, he argued from the Qur'an his central point that governments that do not implement Sharia have no legitimacy and must be fought by Muslims.
Are robots expected to have the patience and intellectual curiosity that is required to plow through a multi-volume tafsir? I am not saying that all who followed Maududi's ideas read and studied his books, but I am saying that this vision of programmed half-wits led by three-quarter wits simply doesn't tally with the facts.
NEO-ISLAM pursues its culture of apartheid by dividing the world into "Islam" and "un-Islam."
Wherever Muslims are a majority is designated as Dar al-Islam (House of Peace); the rest of the world is Dar al-Harb (House of War) or, at best, Dar al-Da'awah (House of Propagation). The claim is that it is enough to be a Muslim to be always right against non-Muslims.
Neo-Islam does this, eh? That's funny; a few years ago I was on Michael Coren's TV show in Toronto with Anis Shorrosh, author of Islam Revealed, and a couple of Muslim scholars. When Shorrosh brought up the dar al-Islam/dar al-Harb distinction, one of them looked aggrieved and said, "That is a concept from Medieval times" -- as if no Muslims today believed in such a division. And now Taheri tells us its not Medieval, it's modern.
In fact, of course, it's both. The huge, chasmic distinction between believers and unbelievers ("the vilest of creatures" according to Qur'an 98:6) runs through the Qur'an. Dar al-Islam/dar al-Harb is a very ancient formulation, and one dear to the heart of jihadists today. Taheri's implication that it is something new obscures its traditional roots, and reassures Western non-Muslims -- but on false pretenses.
This is not how Muhammad taught Islam. His biography is full of instances where he ruled against a Muslim in a dispute with a non-Muslim. For him, the world was divided between "right" and "wrong," and "good" and "evil," not Islam and non-Islam. It is possible to be a Muslim and do evil things, while a non-Muslim could also be an agent of good.
Sure, but this is beside the point. Ultimately Muhammad taught that Muslims should behave this way toward non-Muslims -- even good ones:
Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them….If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya [the tax on non-Muslims specified in Qur’an 9:29]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim 4294)
Taheri says later: "Neo-Islam has as much right to operate in the political field as any other party in a democracy. But it does not have the right to pretend to be a religion — it is not."
Great. But with all this denial and obfuscation, I wonder if Taheri any longer has the right to pretend to be a trustworthy analyst. I still have great respect for his work -- most of the time. But articles like this one just peddle false reassurance, and are misleading. At best.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/
posted by Mackety at 11:47 AM
0 comments
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Amir Taheri on political islam
'GOD? What about him?" the sheik asked with a frown.
We were in a London mosque, discussing the ser mons the sheik delivers at Friday congregations. I had asked why God almost never featured in (or, at best, got a cameo role) in sermons that focused almost exclusively on political issues.
For the sheik, what mattered was "the sufferings of our brethren under occupation." In other words: In our Islam, we don't do God — we do Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq!
Here we have a religion without a theology, a secular wolf disguised as a religious lamb.
In many Muslim countries, neo-Islam has been exposed as a political movement and can no longer deceive the masses. In the West, however, it is has managed to dupe parts of the media, government and academia into treating it not as the political movement it is, but as the expression of Islam as a religion.
It is time to end that deception and recognize neo-Islam in its many manifestations as a political phenomenon.
Read the rest at: http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19322
We were in a London mosque, discussing the ser mons the sheik delivers at Friday congregations. I had asked why God almost never featured in (or, at best, got a cameo role) in sermons that focused almost exclusively on political issues.
For the sheik, what mattered was "the sufferings of our brethren under occupation." In other words: In our Islam, we don't do God — we do Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq!
Here we have a religion without a theology, a secular wolf disguised as a religious lamb.
In many Muslim countries, neo-Islam has been exposed as a political movement and can no longer deceive the masses. In the West, however, it is has managed to dupe parts of the media, government and academia into treating it not as the political movement it is, but as the expression of Islam as a religion.
It is time to end that deception and recognize neo-Islam in its many manifestations as a political phenomenon.
Read the rest at: http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19322
posted by Mackety at 10:22 PM
0 comments
Violent Islam
But the pity of the turban-bomb prophet cartoon lies in the very lack of distortion needed to make its all-too-valid point: Islam has been hijacked. Many of its professed spiritual leaders and their adherents invoke Allah in declaring their lust to kill their fellow humans and themselves, and many of those who insist that this is a terrible perversion of a gentle, humane religion have, nevertheless, been cowed into reticence, even silence, by the extremists.
That the dominant response to publication of these cartoons has been incandescent anger, the burning of flags, the torching of embassies and legations, deaths and injuries in clashes with security forces and dire threats of murderous revenge only underlines the original illustrated barb. Leveling accusations of insensitivity and bias and blasphemy, responding with violence and vowing more, the would-be defenders vindicate the very critique they claim is so outrageous. It would be ironic were it not tragic.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395379729&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
That the dominant response to publication of these cartoons has been incandescent anger, the burning of flags, the torching of embassies and legations, deaths and injuries in clashes with security forces and dire threats of murderous revenge only underlines the original illustrated barb. Leveling accusations of insensitivity and bias and blasphemy, responding with violence and vowing more, the would-be defenders vindicate the very critique they claim is so outrageous. It would be ironic were it not tragic.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395379729&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
posted by Mackety at 12:45 PM
0 comments
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Victor Davis Hanson on the dangers of self-censorship
The latest Islamic outrage over the Danish cartoons represents an erosion in the very notion of Western tolerance. Years ago, the death sentence handed down to Salman Rushdie was the dead canary in the mine. It should have warned us that the Western idea of free and unbridled expression, so difficultly won, can be so easily lost.
While listening to the obfuscations of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw about the Danish cartoons, I thought that next he was going to call for a bowdlerization of Dante's Inferno, where Dante and Virgil in the eighth rung of Hell gaze on the mutilated specters of Mahomet and his son Ali, along with the other Sowers of Discord. I grew up reading the text with the gruesome illustrations of Gustave Doré. Can Straw now damn that artist's judgment as well, when the next imam threatens global jihad, more terrorism, an oil cut-off, or to make things worse for Anglo-American troops who are trying to bring democracy to Iraq?
Surely he can apologize that the cross of the Union Jack offends British Muslims? Or perhaps the memory of what Lord Kitchener did in 1898 to the tomb of the Great Mahdi needs contemporary atonement — once one starts down the road of self-censorship, there is never an end to it.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19317
While listening to the obfuscations of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw about the Danish cartoons, I thought that next he was going to call for a bowdlerization of Dante's Inferno, where Dante and Virgil in the eighth rung of Hell gaze on the mutilated specters of Mahomet and his son Ali, along with the other Sowers of Discord. I grew up reading the text with the gruesome illustrations of Gustave Doré. Can Straw now damn that artist's judgment as well, when the next imam threatens global jihad, more terrorism, an oil cut-off, or to make things worse for Anglo-American troops who are trying to bring democracy to Iraq?
Surely he can apologize that the cross of the Union Jack offends British Muslims? Or perhaps the memory of what Lord Kitchener did in 1898 to the tomb of the Great Mahdi needs contemporary atonement — once one starts down the road of self-censorship, there is never an end to it.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19317
posted by Mackety at 11:18 AM
0 comments
John O'Sullivan on Cartoon War
The secondary argument that we must all censor ourselves to avoid offending others in a multicultural society is a highly ironic commentary on the liberals' promise that multiculturalism meant a more lively, colorful, and argumentative society. We are now told that it means holding our tongues on sensitive issues and telling young women not to dress in ways that might provoke a pious Muslim to rape them.
If multiculturalism is incompatible with a free and lively society, as some implicitly now concede, then the sensible response is not to gradually chip away at Western freedom but to ensure that immigration from non-Western cultures proceeds at a rate that is assimilable culturally as well as economically. In other words Muslims coming to Europe or America would automatically adjust to the freedoms of a free society because they would lack the numbers to insist on everyone else changing to suit them—which is currently the Islamist demand.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19318
If multiculturalism is incompatible with a free and lively society, as some implicitly now concede, then the sensible response is not to gradually chip away at Western freedom but to ensure that immigration from non-Western cultures proceeds at a rate that is assimilable culturally as well as economically. In other words Muslims coming to Europe or America would automatically adjust to the freedoms of a free society because they would lack the numbers to insist on everyone else changing to suit them—which is currently the Islamist demand.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19318
posted by Mackety at 11:13 AM
0 comments
Amir Taheri on Cartoon War
February 9, 2006 -- 'A BLESSING from God": So have Iran's leaders, starting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, described the controversy over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed.
A closer look at the row, however, shows that the whole rigmarole was launched by Sunni-Salafi groups in Europe and Asia, with Ahmadinejad and his Syrian vassal, President Bashar al-Assad, belatedly playing catch-up. God had nothing to do with it.
In Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood told the Danish group that this was not the time to kick a fuss over the cartoons. The brotherhood was busy plotting its election strategy and pretending to be a "moderate" political party. The last thing it wanted was to be branded as a rabid anti-West force. The brotherhood leaders suggested that the matter be put on ice until January.
The Danish militants also received a negative reply from Hamas, the Palestinian radical movement. Hamas was busy trying to win a general election and needed to reassure at least part of the Palestinian middle classes. The Hamas advice was: Wait until after we have won.
The emissaries found a more sympathetic audience in Qatar — where the satellite-TV channel Al Jazeera (owned by the emir) specializes in inciting Muslims against the West and democracy in general. The channel's chief Islamist televangelist, Yussuf al-Qaradawi (an Egyptian preacher who is also a friend of Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London), was all too keen to issue a "fatwa" to light the fuse. He then mobilized his network of Muslim Brotherhood militants in Europe to attack the cartoons and claim, falsely, that images were not allowed in Islam and that the Danish paper had violated "an absolute principle of The Only True Faith."
Thus the call for Jihad received its supposed "theological" green light. (Ironically, the section of the brotherhood headed by al-Qaradawi is financed by the European Union as a non-governmental organization.)
As the first rent-a-mob crowds appeared on global TV screens, Ahmadinejad realized that here was a cow worth milking.
For Denmark is set to assume the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council — at the very time that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is expected to refer Iran to the Security Council and demand sanctions. What better, for Tehran's purposes, than to portray Denmark as "an enemy of Islam" and mobilize Muslim sympathy against the Security Council?
To regain the initiative from the Sunni-Salafi groups, Ahmadinejad quickly ordered a severing of commercial ties with Denmark, thus portraying the Islamic Republic as the Muslim world's leader in the anti-Danish campaign.
Syria was next to jump on the bandwagon, again for mercenary reasons. The United Nations wants Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and five of his relatives and aides, including his younger brother, for questioning in the murder of Lebanon's former premier, Rafiq al-Hariri. (Assad has tried to negotiate immunity for himself and his brother in exchange for handing over the others — but the U.N. wouldn't play.) As with Iran's nuclear program, the Syrian dossier will reach the Security Council under Danish presidency. To portray Denmark as "an enemy of the Prophet" would not be such a bad thing when the council, as expected, points the finger at Assad and his regime as responsible for a series of political murders, including that of Hariri.
The Danish Muslim gang who lied by adding cartoons that had never been published has done more damage to the Prophet and to Islam than the 12 controversial cartoonists of Jyllands-Posten.
The fight between Denmark and its detractors is not between the West and Islam. It is between democracy and a global fascist movement masquerading as religion.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19313
A closer look at the row, however, shows that the whole rigmarole was launched by Sunni-Salafi groups in Europe and Asia, with Ahmadinejad and his Syrian vassal, President Bashar al-Assad, belatedly playing catch-up. God had nothing to do with it.
In Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood told the Danish group that this was not the time to kick a fuss over the cartoons. The brotherhood was busy plotting its election strategy and pretending to be a "moderate" political party. The last thing it wanted was to be branded as a rabid anti-West force. The brotherhood leaders suggested that the matter be put on ice until January.
The Danish militants also received a negative reply from Hamas, the Palestinian radical movement. Hamas was busy trying to win a general election and needed to reassure at least part of the Palestinian middle classes. The Hamas advice was: Wait until after we have won.
The emissaries found a more sympathetic audience in Qatar — where the satellite-TV channel Al Jazeera (owned by the emir) specializes in inciting Muslims against the West and democracy in general. The channel's chief Islamist televangelist, Yussuf al-Qaradawi (an Egyptian preacher who is also a friend of Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London), was all too keen to issue a "fatwa" to light the fuse. He then mobilized his network of Muslim Brotherhood militants in Europe to attack the cartoons and claim, falsely, that images were not allowed in Islam and that the Danish paper had violated "an absolute principle of The Only True Faith."
Thus the call for Jihad received its supposed "theological" green light. (Ironically, the section of the brotherhood headed by al-Qaradawi is financed by the European Union as a non-governmental organization.)
As the first rent-a-mob crowds appeared on global TV screens, Ahmadinejad realized that here was a cow worth milking.
For Denmark is set to assume the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council — at the very time that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is expected to refer Iran to the Security Council and demand sanctions. What better, for Tehran's purposes, than to portray Denmark as "an enemy of Islam" and mobilize Muslim sympathy against the Security Council?
To regain the initiative from the Sunni-Salafi groups, Ahmadinejad quickly ordered a severing of commercial ties with Denmark, thus portraying the Islamic Republic as the Muslim world's leader in the anti-Danish campaign.
Syria was next to jump on the bandwagon, again for mercenary reasons. The United Nations wants Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and five of his relatives and aides, including his younger brother, for questioning in the murder of Lebanon's former premier, Rafiq al-Hariri. (Assad has tried to negotiate immunity for himself and his brother in exchange for handing over the others — but the U.N. wouldn't play.) As with Iran's nuclear program, the Syrian dossier will reach the Security Council under Danish presidency. To portray Denmark as "an enemy of the Prophet" would not be such a bad thing when the council, as expected, points the finger at Assad and his regime as responsible for a series of political murders, including that of Hariri.
The Danish Muslim gang who lied by adding cartoons that had never been published has done more damage to the Prophet and to Islam than the 12 controversial cartoonists of Jyllands-Posten.
The fight between Denmark and its detractors is not between the West and Islam. It is between democracy and a global fascist movement masquerading as religion.
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19313
posted by Mackety at 10:59 AM
0 comments
Irshad manji on Cartoon War
Knock, knock. Who’ll dare?
Irshad ManjiFebruary 10, 2006
At the World Economic Forum in January, I observed something revealing. In a session about the US religious right, a cartoonist satirised one of America’s most influential Christian ministers, Pat Robertson. In the audience, chuckling with the rest of us, was a prominent British Muslim. But his smile disappeared the moment we were shown a cartoon that made fun of Muslim clerics.
Since then, a fierce fight has erupted between the European Union and the Muslim world over caricatures of Prophet Muhammad. Months ago, the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published cartoons that showed Islam’s messenger wearing, among other things, a turban-turned-time bomb. Although the paper has apologised, the controversy has metastasised. A Norwegian magazine and French paper recently reprinted the drawings, as have other broadcasters and publications while covering this story.
In response, Muslim rioters torched Scandinavian missions in Syria, Lebanon and Iran. Bomb threats have hit the offices of more than one European newspaper. Various Arab countries have recalled their ambassadors from Copenhagen. Boycotts of Danish products are sweeping across supermarkets in the Arab world, and Muslims as far away as India and Indonesia are pouring into the streets to burn Danish flags — which feature the cross, among the holiest of Christian symbols.
Last week, thousands of Palestinians shouted ‘Death to Denmark!’ Copenhagen has evacuated Danish citizens from the Gaza Strip and has sternly warned nationals in the West Bank to get out as well. Muslims themselves are getting pummelled in the riots: four died in Afghanistan on Monday alone.
To judge the root problem here, let us first determine how the cartoons became an international incident. Last September, these comics ran beside a story about the hurdles encountered by a Danish author in finding someone — anyone — to illustrate her children’s book about the Prophet. Every artist she approached declined the job out of fear of having to contend with Islamist extremists.
As if on cue, two of the people who produced these cartoons received death threats in October 2005. We Muslims love to lecture about the need to assess touchy matters — such as offensive Quranic verses — ‘in context’. The context in which the Muhammad cartoons first appeared suggests that frustration, not malice, was the motive.
Regardless, the cartoons met with howls of protest from Danish Muslims. Ten ambassadors of Muslim countries issued a letter demanding that Denmark’s prime minister punish Jyllands-Posten. Apparently, it didn’t occur to them that in a free society, media are generally independent of government. The paper continued to operate. Thus, the controversy continued to simmer.
Then a group of Danish imams took the cartoons to West Asia. Complaining of press bias, they distributed the drawings — and, some say, fabricated a few of their own to ensure that unrest would be sown. One of the extra sketches, for example, portrays the Prophet with a pig’s snout.
All hell soon broke loose. From missionary manipulation, the imams achieved in the Arab world what they couldn’t accomplish from exercising their democratic freedoms in Denmark.
But it’s not just the Danish imams who choreographed this passion play. Arab elites also got in on the game. Why wouldn’t they? Such controversies provide convenient opportunities to channel anger away from daily crimes. No wonder President Lahoud of Lebanon insisted that his country “cannot accept any insult to any religion”. That’s rich. Since the late Seventies, the Lebanese government has licensed Hezbollah-run satellite television station al-Manar, among the most viciously anti-Semitic broadcasters on earth.
Similarly, the justice minister of the United Arab Emirates has said that the Danish cartoons represent “cultural terrorism, not freedom of expression”. This from a country that promotes its capital as the ‘Las Vegas of the Gulf’, yet blocks my website — muslim-refusenik.com — for being “inconsistent with the moral values” of the UAE. Presumably, my site should be an online casino.
Muslims have little integrity demanding respect for our faith if we don’t show it for others. When have we demonstrated against Saudi Arabia’s policy to prevent Christians and Jews from stepping on the soil of Mecca? They may come for rare business trips, but nothing more. As long as Rome welcomes non-Christians and Jerusalem embraces non-Jews, we Muslims have more to protest than cartoons.
None of this is to dismiss the need to take my religion seriously. Hell, Muslims even take seriously the need to be serious: Islam has a teaching against ‘excessive laughter’. I’m not joking. But does this mean that we should cry ‘blasphemy’ over less-than-flattering depictions of Prophet Muhammad? God no.
For one thing, the Quran itself points out that there will always be non-believers, and that it’s for Allah, not Muslims, to deal with them. More than that, the Quran says there is “no compulsion in religion”. This suggests that nobody should be forced to treat Islamic norms as sacred.
Fine, many Muslims will retort, but we’re talking about Prophet Muhammad — Allah’s final and, therefore, perfect messenger. However, Islamic tradition holds that the Prophet was a human being who made mistakes. It’s precisely because he wasn’t perfect that we know about the so-called ‘Satanic Verses’: a collection of passages that the Prophet reportedly included in the Quran. Only later did he realise that those verses glorified heathen idols rather than God. According to Islamic legend, he retracted the idolatrous passages, blaming them on a trick played by Satan.
When Muslims put the Prophet on a pedestal, we’re engaging in idolatry of our own. The point of monotheism is to worship one God, not one of God’s emissaries. Which is why humility requires people of faith to mock themselves — and each other — every once in a while.
Here’s my attempt: a priest, a rabbi and a mullah meet at a conference about religion, and afterwards are sitting around discussing their different faiths. The conversation turns to the topic of taboos.
The priest says to the rabbi and the mullah, “You guys can’t tell me that you’ve never eaten pork.”
“Never!” intones the rabbi.
“Absolutely not!” insists the mullah.
But the priest is sceptical. “Come on, not even once? Maybe in a fit of rebellion when you were younger?”
“Okay,” confesses the rabbi. “When I was young, I once nibbled on bacon.”
“I admit it,” the mullah laughs (not excessively). “In a fit of youthful arrogance, I sampled a pork chop.”
Then the conversation turns to the priest’s religious observances. “You can’t tell me you’ve never had sex,” says the mullah.
“Of course not!” The priest protests. “I took a vow of chastity.”
The mullah and the rabbi roll their eyes. “Maybe after a few drinks?” the rabbi teases.
“Perhaps, in a moment of temptation, your faith waned?” the mullah wonders.
“Okay,” the priest confesses. “Once, when I was drunk in seminary school, I had sexual relations with a woman.”
“Beats pork, huh?” say the rabbi and the mullah.
Clearly, I’m as impure a feminist as I am a Muslim. The difference is, offended feminists won’t threaten to kill me. The same can’t be said for many of my fellow Muslims.
What part of ‘no compulsion’ don’t they understand?
The writer is a Visiting Fellow at Yale University and author of The Trouble with Islam Today. This article is an expanded version of the article printed in The Wall Street Journal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1622601,00120001.htm
Irshad ManjiFebruary 10, 2006
At the World Economic Forum in January, I observed something revealing. In a session about the US religious right, a cartoonist satirised one of America’s most influential Christian ministers, Pat Robertson. In the audience, chuckling with the rest of us, was a prominent British Muslim. But his smile disappeared the moment we were shown a cartoon that made fun of Muslim clerics.
Since then, a fierce fight has erupted between the European Union and the Muslim world over caricatures of Prophet Muhammad. Months ago, the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published cartoons that showed Islam’s messenger wearing, among other things, a turban-turned-time bomb. Although the paper has apologised, the controversy has metastasised. A Norwegian magazine and French paper recently reprinted the drawings, as have other broadcasters and publications while covering this story.
In response, Muslim rioters torched Scandinavian missions in Syria, Lebanon and Iran. Bomb threats have hit the offices of more than one European newspaper. Various Arab countries have recalled their ambassadors from Copenhagen. Boycotts of Danish products are sweeping across supermarkets in the Arab world, and Muslims as far away as India and Indonesia are pouring into the streets to burn Danish flags — which feature the cross, among the holiest of Christian symbols.
Last week, thousands of Palestinians shouted ‘Death to Denmark!’ Copenhagen has evacuated Danish citizens from the Gaza Strip and has sternly warned nationals in the West Bank to get out as well. Muslims themselves are getting pummelled in the riots: four died in Afghanistan on Monday alone.
To judge the root problem here, let us first determine how the cartoons became an international incident. Last September, these comics ran beside a story about the hurdles encountered by a Danish author in finding someone — anyone — to illustrate her children’s book about the Prophet. Every artist she approached declined the job out of fear of having to contend with Islamist extremists.
As if on cue, two of the people who produced these cartoons received death threats in October 2005. We Muslims love to lecture about the need to assess touchy matters — such as offensive Quranic verses — ‘in context’. The context in which the Muhammad cartoons first appeared suggests that frustration, not malice, was the motive.
Regardless, the cartoons met with howls of protest from Danish Muslims. Ten ambassadors of Muslim countries issued a letter demanding that Denmark’s prime minister punish Jyllands-Posten. Apparently, it didn’t occur to them that in a free society, media are generally independent of government. The paper continued to operate. Thus, the controversy continued to simmer.
Then a group of Danish imams took the cartoons to West Asia. Complaining of press bias, they distributed the drawings — and, some say, fabricated a few of their own to ensure that unrest would be sown. One of the extra sketches, for example, portrays the Prophet with a pig’s snout.
All hell soon broke loose. From missionary manipulation, the imams achieved in the Arab world what they couldn’t accomplish from exercising their democratic freedoms in Denmark.
But it’s not just the Danish imams who choreographed this passion play. Arab elites also got in on the game. Why wouldn’t they? Such controversies provide convenient opportunities to channel anger away from daily crimes. No wonder President Lahoud of Lebanon insisted that his country “cannot accept any insult to any religion”. That’s rich. Since the late Seventies, the Lebanese government has licensed Hezbollah-run satellite television station al-Manar, among the most viciously anti-Semitic broadcasters on earth.
Similarly, the justice minister of the United Arab Emirates has said that the Danish cartoons represent “cultural terrorism, not freedom of expression”. This from a country that promotes its capital as the ‘Las Vegas of the Gulf’, yet blocks my website — muslim-refusenik.com — for being “inconsistent with the moral values” of the UAE. Presumably, my site should be an online casino.
Muslims have little integrity demanding respect for our faith if we don’t show it for others. When have we demonstrated against Saudi Arabia’s policy to prevent Christians and Jews from stepping on the soil of Mecca? They may come for rare business trips, but nothing more. As long as Rome welcomes non-Christians and Jerusalem embraces non-Jews, we Muslims have more to protest than cartoons.
None of this is to dismiss the need to take my religion seriously. Hell, Muslims even take seriously the need to be serious: Islam has a teaching against ‘excessive laughter’. I’m not joking. But does this mean that we should cry ‘blasphemy’ over less-than-flattering depictions of Prophet Muhammad? God no.
For one thing, the Quran itself points out that there will always be non-believers, and that it’s for Allah, not Muslims, to deal with them. More than that, the Quran says there is “no compulsion in religion”. This suggests that nobody should be forced to treat Islamic norms as sacred.
Fine, many Muslims will retort, but we’re talking about Prophet Muhammad — Allah’s final and, therefore, perfect messenger. However, Islamic tradition holds that the Prophet was a human being who made mistakes. It’s precisely because he wasn’t perfect that we know about the so-called ‘Satanic Verses’: a collection of passages that the Prophet reportedly included in the Quran. Only later did he realise that those verses glorified heathen idols rather than God. According to Islamic legend, he retracted the idolatrous passages, blaming them on a trick played by Satan.
When Muslims put the Prophet on a pedestal, we’re engaging in idolatry of our own. The point of monotheism is to worship one God, not one of God’s emissaries. Which is why humility requires people of faith to mock themselves — and each other — every once in a while.
Here’s my attempt: a priest, a rabbi and a mullah meet at a conference about religion, and afterwards are sitting around discussing their different faiths. The conversation turns to the topic of taboos.
The priest says to the rabbi and the mullah, “You guys can’t tell me that you’ve never eaten pork.”
“Never!” intones the rabbi.
“Absolutely not!” insists the mullah.
But the priest is sceptical. “Come on, not even once? Maybe in a fit of rebellion when you were younger?”
“Okay,” confesses the rabbi. “When I was young, I once nibbled on bacon.”
“I admit it,” the mullah laughs (not excessively). “In a fit of youthful arrogance, I sampled a pork chop.”
Then the conversation turns to the priest’s religious observances. “You can’t tell me you’ve never had sex,” says the mullah.
“Of course not!” The priest protests. “I took a vow of chastity.”
The mullah and the rabbi roll their eyes. “Maybe after a few drinks?” the rabbi teases.
“Perhaps, in a moment of temptation, your faith waned?” the mullah wonders.
“Okay,” the priest confesses. “Once, when I was drunk in seminary school, I had sexual relations with a woman.”
“Beats pork, huh?” say the rabbi and the mullah.
Clearly, I’m as impure a feminist as I am a Muslim. The difference is, offended feminists won’t threaten to kill me. The same can’t be said for many of my fellow Muslims.
What part of ‘no compulsion’ don’t they understand?
The writer is a Visiting Fellow at Yale University and author of The Trouble with Islam Today. This article is an expanded version of the article printed in The Wall Street Journal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1622601,00120001.htm
posted by Mackety at 10:45 AM
0 comments
Friday, February 10, 2006
Bloggers: an army of irregulars
First, here are a few examples of how the bloggers have, for me, become a useful source.
Only this week, they tracked down the origin of a fake cartoon which has been fuelling the furore over the characterisation of Muhammad in a Danish paper.
One of the pictures being circulated, a very fuzzy, grey photocopy, apparently showed the prophet Muhammad with the face of a pig.
It was quickly pointed out, by bloggers and others, that this was not one of the 12 Danish cartoons.
Nobody however knew the origin of this portrayal.
Then I received an e-mail from a reader passing on a link to a blog called neandernews.
And there it was.
The picture had nothing to do with the prophet. It was a photo of the winner of a "pig-squealing" competition held last summer in the French Pyrenees. It had first been published on the MSNBC website in August.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/4696668.stm
Only this week, they tracked down the origin of a fake cartoon which has been fuelling the furore over the characterisation of Muhammad in a Danish paper.
One of the pictures being circulated, a very fuzzy, grey photocopy, apparently showed the prophet Muhammad with the face of a pig.
It was quickly pointed out, by bloggers and others, that this was not one of the 12 Danish cartoons.
Nobody however knew the origin of this portrayal.
Then I received an e-mail from a reader passing on a link to a blog called neandernews.
And there it was.
The picture had nothing to do with the prophet. It was a photo of the winner of a "pig-squealing" competition held last summer in the French Pyrenees. It had first been published on the MSNBC website in August.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/4696668.stm
posted by Mackety at 11:14 AM
0 comments
Europe is asleep
Bawer is an American who moved to Europe in 1998 in search of a more cultured, tolerant society. Yet his latest book harshly denounces the failure to integrate Muslims in countries across Europe.
European governments subscribe to the ``worst kind of political correctness,'' Bawer writes. From Norway to Italy, governments shower immigrants with benefits, yet corral them into ghettos, prevent them from becoming real citizens and turn a blind eye to Muslim attacks on women, Jews and gays, he says.
Bawer hints at a coming cataclysm. ``Immigrants to Europe bring with them many tribal customs that are flagrantly inconsistent with a Western understanding of human rights,'' he writes. ``These customs represent flashpoints of latent or potential conflict between the Muslim immigrant communities and their host societies.''
Read more at: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000088&sid=aFsWAcpr7NgY&refer=culture
posted by Mackety at 11:09 AM
0 comments
Western values make the world better
Quote from Victor Davis Hanson's newest article:
To be sure, some people use that freedom and prosperity to live merely for appetite and pleasure, and no one can argue that the jihadist indictment of our widespread cultural vulgarity and spiritual debasement is not based on reality. But giving people freedom does not guarantee that they will use that freedom wisely or well. It just means that they are responsible for their choices. After all, we are all free to be as spiritual as we wish, and to reject the vulgarity and hedonism so widespread in Western culture — if thy television offend thee, pluck it out of thy house. Any alternative to leaving it up to individuals to choose how to use their freedom ultimately leads to control by some elite, and history shows us that this is a recipe for tyranny and oppression, whether that elite comprises the Communist Party or Islamist mullahs. For as the Roman poet Juvenal put it, “Who will guard the guardians?”
Whatever the basis of their obsessive criticism, then, Occidentalists — whether Western or Islamist — cannot attribute it to the facts. An honest appraisal of human existence in times past and outside the West today shows that the more Western the world becomes, the better off the average human being will be.
http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton021006.html
To be sure, some people use that freedom and prosperity to live merely for appetite and pleasure, and no one can argue that the jihadist indictment of our widespread cultural vulgarity and spiritual debasement is not based on reality. But giving people freedom does not guarantee that they will use that freedom wisely or well. It just means that they are responsible for their choices. After all, we are all free to be as spiritual as we wish, and to reject the vulgarity and hedonism so widespread in Western culture — if thy television offend thee, pluck it out of thy house. Any alternative to leaving it up to individuals to choose how to use their freedom ultimately leads to control by some elite, and history shows us that this is a recipe for tyranny and oppression, whether that elite comprises the Communist Party or Islamist mullahs. For as the Roman poet Juvenal put it, “Who will guard the guardians?”
Whatever the basis of their obsessive criticism, then, Occidentalists — whether Western or Islamist — cannot attribute it to the facts. An honest appraisal of human existence in times past and outside the West today shows that the more Western the world becomes, the better off the average human being will be.
http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton021006.html
posted by Mackety at 10:48 AM
0 comments
The Clash to End All Clashes?
It certainly feels like a clash of civilizations. But it is not.
By way of demonstration, allow me to recall the similar Muslim-Western confrontation that took place in 1989 over the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses and the resulting death edict from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. It first appeared, as now, that the West aligned solidly against the edict and the Muslim world stood equally with it. As the dust settled, however, a far more nuanced situation became apparent.
Significant voices in the West expressed sympathy for Khomeini. Former president Jimmy Carter responded with a call for Americans to be "sensitive to the concern and anger" of Muslims. The director of the Near East Studies Center at UCLA, Georges Sabbagh, declared Khomeini "completely within his rights" to sentence Rushdie to death. Immanuel Jakobovits, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, wrote that "the book should not have been published" and called for legislation to proscribe such "excesses in the freedom of expression."
In contrast, important Muslims opposed the edict. Erdal Inönü, leader of Turkey's opposition Social Democratic party, announced that "killing somebody for what he has written is simply murder." Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature, called Khomeini a "terrorist." A Palestinian journalist in Israel, Abdullatif Younis, dubbed The Satanic Verses "a great service."
This same division already exists in the current crisis. Middle East-studies professors are denouncing the cartoons even as two Jordanian editors went to jail for reprinting them.
It is a tragic mistake to lump all Muslims with the forces of darkness. Moderate, enlightened, free-thinking Muslims do exist. Hounded in their own circles, they look to the West for succor and support. And, however weak they may presently be, they eventually will have a crucial role in modernizing the Muslim world.
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3361
By way of demonstration, allow me to recall the similar Muslim-Western confrontation that took place in 1989 over the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses and the resulting death edict from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. It first appeared, as now, that the West aligned solidly against the edict and the Muslim world stood equally with it. As the dust settled, however, a far more nuanced situation became apparent.
Significant voices in the West expressed sympathy for Khomeini. Former president Jimmy Carter responded with a call for Americans to be "sensitive to the concern and anger" of Muslims. The director of the Near East Studies Center at UCLA, Georges Sabbagh, declared Khomeini "completely within his rights" to sentence Rushdie to death. Immanuel Jakobovits, chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, wrote that "the book should not have been published" and called for legislation to proscribe such "excesses in the freedom of expression."
In contrast, important Muslims opposed the edict. Erdal Inönü, leader of Turkey's opposition Social Democratic party, announced that "killing somebody for what he has written is simply murder." Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature, called Khomeini a "terrorist." A Palestinian journalist in Israel, Abdullatif Younis, dubbed The Satanic Verses "a great service."
This same division already exists in the current crisis. Middle East-studies professors are denouncing the cartoons even as two Jordanian editors went to jail for reprinting them.
It is a tragic mistake to lump all Muslims with the forces of darkness. Moderate, enlightened, free-thinking Muslims do exist. Hounded in their own circles, they look to the West for succor and support. And, however weak they may presently be, they eventually will have a crucial role in modernizing the Muslim world.
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3361
posted by Mackety at 10:44 AM
0 comments
More heroism from the great Ayaan Hirsi Ali
BERLIN (Reuters) - A Dutch politician and self-styled Muslim dissident urged Europeans to stand firm on Thursday in an international crisis over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, saying it was "necessary and urgent" to criticise Islam.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali praised newspapers in many countries which have printed the cartoons, considered blasphemous by many Muslims, but said others had held back for fear of criticising what she called "intolerant aspects of Islam".
"Today I am here to defend the right to offend within the bounds of the law," she told a news conference organised by her publisher during a visit to Berlin.
"It's necessary and it's urgent to criticise Islam. It is urgent to criticise the teachings of Mohammad."...
"Liberty does not come cheap. A few million euros is worth paying for the defence of free speech."...
Hirsi Ali said critical reactions in Europe had highlighted the presence of "a considerable minority...who do not understand or will not accept the workings of liberal democracy." Some Muslims had a tendency to "play the victim" and complain, without justification, that their religion was under attack.
She listed among her criticisms of Mohammad his teachings on gays, apostates, the subordination of women, the flogging and stoning of adulterers and the cutting-off of thieves' hands.
Hirsi Ali said she intended to press ahead with a sequel to "Submission" which should appear at the end of this year.
Asked about the threats to her life, she said: "I have a reasonable fear, yes, I have protection. But I also will not allow myself to be put in a state of fear that will lead me to panic or to silence."
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/
posted by Mackety at 10:40 AM
0 comments
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Outstanding analysis by american blogger Granddaddy Long Legs
And yes that really IS the name of the blog!
Here comes a small part of his analysis. Read the rest at: http://granddaddylonglegs.blogspot.com/2006/02/gathering-islamic-storm.html
"The cartoons of Mohammed aren't really the problem. Sacrilege isn't really the problem. Of course, there are some who are truly offended by the pictures. But on average, the litanies of religious offenses are raised as a way to legitimize rioting. The underlying theme of this raucousness is disdain for the West and the desire to prove the superiority of Muslims (as a cultural identity more than just a religion) through violent acts.
Western soul searching and apologizing will not assuage the hate and anger of the Arabs. They were not angered and driven to riot because the pictures are sacrilegious; they went looking for something, anything, to call sacrilegious so that they could riot and rail against the West. Anyone who doesn't realize by now that this outrage is manufactured is blind, and anyone who thinks that the organizers are seeking an apology are simply naive. They seek capitulation by the West to whatever they should ask of it. They seek this capitulation by spreading fear of death by Muslim hands, and they are growing ever eager to prove their seriousness.
Of course, not every Muslim is a terrorist. But the fact remains that most terrorists are Muslims. Most of the recent major armed conflicts in the world have involved Muslims. Moreover, the nonviolent Muslims are doing nothing bold to calm the unrest within their communities. They are paralyzed with fear, and have allowed their communities, religion and culture to be hijacked by extremists. So there should be no more pretending that they are peaceful people, despite the killing that takes place unchallenged all around them.
If the self-described peace loving Muslims are traveling down the river in a boat with a war party, and they have no plans to steer toward shore, then they are not completely blameless. They abet with their silence and their inaction, and to Western outsiders they blend in with the mob.
This issue of the Mohammed cartoons and how to deal with the ensuing Middle Eastern unrest cuts to the heart of the disconnect between people who support military action in Iraq and people who don't.
American and European liberals still just don't get it. Many never will. They are as clueless and insulated as the liberal semi-politicos, academic intellectuals, and other keepers of anti-American chic that in the 70's and 80's hailed the Soviet system as economically and socially superior to its collapsing, apathetic Western counterpart."
Here comes a small part of his analysis. Read the rest at: http://granddaddylonglegs.blogspot.com/2006/02/gathering-islamic-storm.html
"The cartoons of Mohammed aren't really the problem. Sacrilege isn't really the problem. Of course, there are some who are truly offended by the pictures. But on average, the litanies of religious offenses are raised as a way to legitimize rioting. The underlying theme of this raucousness is disdain for the West and the desire to prove the superiority of Muslims (as a cultural identity more than just a religion) through violent acts.
Western soul searching and apologizing will not assuage the hate and anger of the Arabs. They were not angered and driven to riot because the pictures are sacrilegious; they went looking for something, anything, to call sacrilegious so that they could riot and rail against the West. Anyone who doesn't realize by now that this outrage is manufactured is blind, and anyone who thinks that the organizers are seeking an apology are simply naive. They seek capitulation by the West to whatever they should ask of it. They seek this capitulation by spreading fear of death by Muslim hands, and they are growing ever eager to prove their seriousness.
Of course, not every Muslim is a terrorist. But the fact remains that most terrorists are Muslims. Most of the recent major armed conflicts in the world have involved Muslims. Moreover, the nonviolent Muslims are doing nothing bold to calm the unrest within their communities. They are paralyzed with fear, and have allowed their communities, religion and culture to be hijacked by extremists. So there should be no more pretending that they are peaceful people, despite the killing that takes place unchallenged all around them.
If the self-described peace loving Muslims are traveling down the river in a boat with a war party, and they have no plans to steer toward shore, then they are not completely blameless. They abet with their silence and their inaction, and to Western outsiders they blend in with the mob.
This issue of the Mohammed cartoons and how to deal with the ensuing Middle Eastern unrest cuts to the heart of the disconnect between people who support military action in Iraq and people who don't.
American and European liberals still just don't get it. Many never will. They are as clueless and insulated as the liberal semi-politicos, academic intellectuals, and other keepers of anti-American chic that in the 70's and 80's hailed the Soviet system as economically and socially superior to its collapsing, apathetic Western counterpart."
posted by Mackety at 4:39 PM
0 comments
Debate forum discusses cartoon story
Here is one arab womans view on the latest developments:
(her identity cannot be verified)
"I regret to say that I was among the people to whom the delegation from Islamisk trossamfund in Denmark showed this picture. Not as it is in the picture printed here, but in a black & white rather unclear picture. And I, like all the others around me, believed this was in fact one of the cartoons published, just like our Danish brothers informed us. I didn't question it at all but was shocked and appalled they would show our great prophet as a man with a pig's ears and nose.After seeing the various broadcasts I now understand that this delegation of people who referred to themselves as true representatives of Danish Muslims wre in fact presenting us with a piece of fraud. I assume with the only intention to start an uprising and fight the Danish paper JylandsPosten and Denmark in general.Now, when I have seen proof this picture has nothing to do with this matter, I know we have been fools. But you do not question the people you trust. In this case however the picture was indeed from a festival in France last summer. With no connection to Islam or Denmark or JylandsPosten.My heart is bleeding. I don't know how to make up for this again. I think it is too late. I can only appeal to everyone who reads this that you check and double check your sources of information. And that you spread the word and help clear up the misinformation about this particular picture.
This is the man who misled us all: Ahmad Akkari from Islamisk trossamfund in Denmark. He calls himself a Muslim, but in my opinion he has done enormous damage to Islam."
http://www.perspectives.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=84427&forum_id=39
You can follow the online debate on the link above. In the same forum, there are many other boards and a huge number of threads. The cartoon story has been discussed a lot!
(her identity cannot be verified)
"I regret to say that I was among the people to whom the delegation from Islamisk trossamfund in Denmark showed this picture. Not as it is in the picture printed here, but in a black & white rather unclear picture. And I, like all the others around me, believed this was in fact one of the cartoons published, just like our Danish brothers informed us. I didn't question it at all but was shocked and appalled they would show our great prophet as a man with a pig's ears and nose.After seeing the various broadcasts I now understand that this delegation of people who referred to themselves as true representatives of Danish Muslims wre in fact presenting us with a piece of fraud. I assume with the only intention to start an uprising and fight the Danish paper JylandsPosten and Denmark in general.Now, when I have seen proof this picture has nothing to do with this matter, I know we have been fools. But you do not question the people you trust. In this case however the picture was indeed from a festival in France last summer. With no connection to Islam or Denmark or JylandsPosten.My heart is bleeding. I don't know how to make up for this again. I think it is too late. I can only appeal to everyone who reads this that you check and double check your sources of information. And that you spread the word and help clear up the misinformation about this particular picture.
This is the man who misled us all: Ahmad Akkari from Islamisk trossamfund in Denmark. He calls himself a Muslim, but in my opinion he has done enormous damage to Islam."
http://www.perspectives.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=84427&forum_id=39
You can follow the online debate on the link above. In the same forum, there are many other boards and a huge number of threads. The cartoon story has been discussed a lot!
posted by Mackety at 12:20 PM
0 comments
A reminder
This is a reminder to all those who thinks we should bow to Islam and let Islam determine what we can and cannot do:
In 1945, the anti-Nazi German pastor Martin Niemoller wrote the following:
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."
Step up for Denmark now or you will be next!
In 1945, the anti-Nazi German pastor Martin Niemoller wrote the following:
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."
Step up for Denmark now or you will be next!
posted by Mackety at 12:04 PM
0 comments
Rage Against the Western Machine
We’re at war. But only one side seems to get that.
"Rage over cartoons” has been the gist of many a headline over the past week describing the violence with which masked gunmen and arsonist mobs in the Islamic world have been protesting the publication in Denmark five months ago of political cartoons caricaturing Mohammed.
Rage, yes. But let’s please get over the idea that this latest violence has anything much to do with the cartoons.
"Rage over cartoons” has been the gist of many a headline over the past week describing the violence with which masked gunmen and arsonist mobs in the Islamic world have been protesting the publication in Denmark five months ago of political cartoons caricaturing Mohammed.
Rage, yes. But let’s please get over the idea that this latest violence has anything much to do with the cartoons.
posted by Mackety at 11:53 AM
0 comments
Human rights lawyer calls on media to print Muhammad cartoons
One of Canada's leading human rights advocates says Canadian newspapers should publish the controversial Danish cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
Montreal lawyer Julius Grey spoke to a classroom packed with 60 law students at the University of Ottawa Tuesday afternoon.
INDEPTH: Muhammad cartoons: a timeline
Grey argued that by not printing the cartoons, the media jeopardizes Canada's culture of freedom of expression and fails to properly inform its citizens about what has become a global issue.
"Once these caricatures had become an object of international attention, then it was the duty of our newspapers in Canada to inform the Canadian public and they should have printed it," said Grey.
The cartoons have provoked the anger of Muslims across the Islamic world, with violent riots turning deadly in several countries.
Only a few newspapers in Canada have decided to print the cartoons, including Montreal's French-language newspaper Le Devoir.
A student newspaper at the University of Prince Edward Island, The Cadre, published a number of the cartoons. But soon after several thousand issues hit the stands on Wednesday, the university administration began removing them.
Ottawa Mosque Imam Gamal Solaiman says the cartoons are provocative and unnecessary.
"People should realize there's a difference between freedom of speech, and insulting and inviting hate," said Solaiman.
"There is no absolute meaning of freedom of expression. Your freedom ends where my rights start."
But Grey argues that the words do not injure people and that "in the absence of real perceptible, preventable harm, every type of expression should be permitted."
Members of the local Muslim community have arranged to meet with the Danish ambassador to Canada on Friday afternoon.
http://www.cbc.ca/montreal/story/qc-greycartoons-060208.html
Montreal lawyer Julius Grey spoke to a classroom packed with 60 law students at the University of Ottawa Tuesday afternoon.
INDEPTH: Muhammad cartoons: a timeline
Grey argued that by not printing the cartoons, the media jeopardizes Canada's culture of freedom of expression and fails to properly inform its citizens about what has become a global issue.
"Once these caricatures had become an object of international attention, then it was the duty of our newspapers in Canada to inform the Canadian public and they should have printed it," said Grey.
The cartoons have provoked the anger of Muslims across the Islamic world, with violent riots turning deadly in several countries.
Only a few newspapers in Canada have decided to print the cartoons, including Montreal's French-language newspaper Le Devoir.
A student newspaper at the University of Prince Edward Island, The Cadre, published a number of the cartoons. But soon after several thousand issues hit the stands on Wednesday, the university administration began removing them.
Ottawa Mosque Imam Gamal Solaiman says the cartoons are provocative and unnecessary.
"People should realize there's a difference between freedom of speech, and insulting and inviting hate," said Solaiman.
"There is no absolute meaning of freedom of expression. Your freedom ends where my rights start."
But Grey argues that the words do not injure people and that "in the absence of real perceptible, preventable harm, every type of expression should be permitted."
Members of the local Muslim community have arranged to meet with the Danish ambassador to Canada on Friday afternoon.
http://www.cbc.ca/montreal/story/qc-greycartoons-060208.html
posted by Mackety at 11:39 AM
0 comments
No apologies
The Daily star in Lebanon made an interview with editor from Jyllandsposten. Here is the last part of the interview:
But you tried to influence what happens in Saudi Arabia via the messages in the cartoons.
No, I'm not doing that. This story was about what was going on in Denmark and Northern Europe.
So where do you draw the line between censorship and freedom of speech?
My newspaper has its limits. In a pluralistic society where you do have freedom of speech, my limits should not be the limits of others. We do have laws against racism and blasphemy.
Didn't your newspaper commit blasphemy by depicting Muhammad?
Danish prosecutors determined around a month ago that the cartoons were not blasphemous.
Will Jyllands-Posten apologize?
For what?
http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/02/09/d602091502108.htm
Yes, what for?
The muslim world owes an apology to Denmark and to Jyllandsposten, not the other way around!
But you tried to influence what happens in Saudi Arabia via the messages in the cartoons.
No, I'm not doing that. This story was about what was going on in Denmark and Northern Europe.
So where do you draw the line between censorship and freedom of speech?
My newspaper has its limits. In a pluralistic society where you do have freedom of speech, my limits should not be the limits of others. We do have laws against racism and blasphemy.
Didn't your newspaper commit blasphemy by depicting Muhammad?
Danish prosecutors determined around a month ago that the cartoons were not blasphemous.
Will Jyllands-Posten apologize?
For what?
http://www.thedailystar.net/2006/02/09/d602091502108.htm
Yes, what for?
The muslim world owes an apology to Denmark and to Jyllandsposten, not the other way around!
posted by Mackety at 11:36 AM
0 comments
Iranian journalist Amir Taheri on Cartoon war
"The Muslim Fury," one newspaper headline screamed. "The rage of Islam sweeps Europe," said another. "The clash of civilizations is coming," warned one commentator. All this refers to the row provoked by the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper four months ago. Since then a number of demonstrations have been held, mostly -- though not exclusively -- in the West, and Scandinavian embassies and consulates have been besieged.
But how representative of Islam are all those demonstrators? The "rage machine" was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood -- a political, not a religious, organization -- called on sympathizers in the Middle East and Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera. Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood's rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders abandoned their party's 60-year-old secular pretensions and organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.
The Muslim Brotherhood's position, put by one of its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan -- who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British home secretary -- can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false.
There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments -- which include a ban on depicting God -- as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.
Now to the second claim, that the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. That is true if we restrict the Muslim world to the Brotherhood and its siblings in the Salafist movement, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. But these are all political organizations masquerading as religious ones. They are not the sole representatives of Islam just as the Nazi party was not the sole representative of German culture. Their attempt at portraying Islam as a sullen culture that lacks a sense of humor is part of the same discourse that claims "suicide-martyrdom" as the highest goal for all true believers.
For more information: http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19311
But how representative of Islam are all those demonstrators? The "rage machine" was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood -- a political, not a religious, organization -- called on sympathizers in the Middle East and Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera. Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood's rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders abandoned their party's 60-year-old secular pretensions and organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.
The Muslim Brotherhood's position, put by one of its younger militants, Tariq Ramadan -- who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British home secretary -- can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false.
There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments -- which include a ban on depicting God -- as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.
Now to the second claim, that the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. That is true if we restrict the Muslim world to the Brotherhood and its siblings in the Salafist movement, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. But these are all political organizations masquerading as religious ones. They are not the sole representatives of Islam just as the Nazi party was not the sole representative of German culture. Their attempt at portraying Islam as a sullen culture that lacks a sense of humor is part of the same discourse that claims "suicide-martyrdom" as the highest goal for all true believers.
For more information: http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/19311
posted by Mackety at 11:12 AM
0 comments
BBC misinformed
Collateral Damage
From the Brussels Journal:
Tonight the BBC admitted that it has misinformed the international community by telling the world that one of the Danish Muhammad cartoons was a depiction of a pigsnouted Muhammad. The BBC website says:
Twelve cartoons were originally published by Jyllands-Posten. None showed the Prophet with the face of a pig. Yet such a portrayal has circulated in the Middle East (The BBC was caught out and for a time showed film of this in Gaza without realizing it was not one of the 12).
This picture, a fuzzy grey photocopy, can now be traced back (suspicion having been confirmed by an admission) to a delegation of Danish Muslim leaders who went to the Middle East in November to publicise the cartoons. The visit was organised by Abu Laban, a leading Muslim figure in Denmark.
From the Brussels Journal:
Tonight the BBC admitted that it has misinformed the international community by telling the world that one of the Danish Muhammad cartoons was a depiction of a pigsnouted Muhammad. The BBC website says:
Twelve cartoons were originally published by Jyllands-Posten. None showed the Prophet with the face of a pig. Yet such a portrayal has circulated in the Middle East (The BBC was caught out and for a time showed film of this in Gaza without realizing it was not one of the 12).
This picture, a fuzzy grey photocopy, can now be traced back (suspicion having been confirmed by an admission) to a delegation of Danish Muslim leaders who went to the Middle East in November to publicise the cartoons. The visit was organised by Abu Laban, a leading Muslim figure in Denmark.
posted by Mackety at 10:59 AM
0 comments
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Boycott Egypt
http://egyptiansandmonkey.blogspot.com/2006/02/boycott-egypt.html
Turns out a big Egyptian Newspaper published the muhammad cartoons back in october during the holy month of Ramadan.
Maybe the islamic world should boycott Egypt too. I mean hey, Denmark may not have adhered to Sharia, but why SHOULD Denmark do that?
Denmark is not a muslim country and has no wish to become one. Sharia has no value whatever in Denmark.
Egypt on the other hand IS a muslim country, so if the islamists mean business, they should be boycotting Egypt.
But who are we trying to kid? This is not about cartoons! This is about the fascism ruling the arab world, in both its governments offices, and certainly also in some of its mosques.
Hypocricy seems to be a way of life for political Islam and its representatives, the islamists.
Ahmadinejad in particular are mastering the filthy art of lies, hypocricy and stupidity these days!
Now come on all you faithfull islamists. BOYCOTT EGYPT
posted by Mackety at 11:17 PM
0 comments
Cox and Forkum reveal the content of meetings at CNN, the Boston Globe, the New York Press, etc.Dhimmitude and anti-dhimmitude in Gotham. From the New York Observer Politiker, with thanks to Tombeth:
The editorial staff of the alternative weekly New York Press walked out today, en masse, after the paper's publishers backed down from printing the Danish cartoons that have become the center of a global free-speech fight.
Editor-in-Chief Harry Siegel emails, on behalf of the editorial staff:
New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editor Jonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/
Bravo.
posted by Mackety at 11:13 PM
0 comments
Islamists Fan the Flames, but other muslims want them to shut up!
No doubt the furor was inflamed by the spreading of three false and ridiculously over-the-top cartoons via a report handed out by a group of Danish imams touring the Muslim world and meeting with political, religious and media figures. Spokesman Akhmad Akkari actually admitted that the drawings had been added, but claimed the cartoons had been sent to them anonymously. It seems that the original cartoons were not sufficiently offensive to whip the Muslim masses into a frenzy.
Whether the protesters constitute large portions of the Muslim population or simply a radical fringe is still questionable. It certainly is odd that the cartoons came out in September and are only now causing such an uproar. How all those Danish flags suddenly appeared across the Muslim world is another curiosity. Could it be that this "movement" was in fact orchestrated? The finger has been pointed at Syria and Iran as possible contenders.
But some Muslims have chosen not to follow the script. Emboldened by the fortitude of their countrymen, Danish Muslims in the city of Arhus have begun to speak out against the radical imams who purport to represent them. "There is a large group of Muslims in this city who want to live in a secular society and adhere to the principle that religion is an issue between them and God and not something that should involve society," said city official and organizer Bünyamin Simsek.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2006/02/08/cstillwell.DTL
Whether the protesters constitute large portions of the Muslim population or simply a radical fringe is still questionable. It certainly is odd that the cartoons came out in September and are only now causing such an uproar. How all those Danish flags suddenly appeared across the Muslim world is another curiosity. Could it be that this "movement" was in fact orchestrated? The finger has been pointed at Syria and Iran as possible contenders.
But some Muslims have chosen not to follow the script. Emboldened by the fortitude of their countrymen, Danish Muslims in the city of Arhus have begun to speak out against the radical imams who purport to represent them. "There is a large group of Muslims in this city who want to live in a secular society and adhere to the principle that religion is an issue between them and God and not something that should involve society," said city official and organizer Bünyamin Simsek.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2006/02/08/cstillwell.DTL
posted by Mackety at 4:54 PM
0 comments
Imams barred from integration plans
By The Copenhagen Post
Imams' critical statements about Denmark in Muslim media have angered the minister of integration affairs Political criticism of local imams in recent days has led the integration minister to exclude the muslim clerics from discussions of the integration of Muslims into Danish society.
Some imams have reportedly offered statements to media in Muslim countries that harmed Danish interests in the on-going row over the Mohammed cartoons, the integration minister, Rikke Hvilshøj, said on Monday.
'I think we have a clear picture today that imams are not the ones we should look to if we want integration in Denmark to work,' Hvilshøj told daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende. 'I've become aware that there are other groups we should draw upon.'
One incident involved imam Abu Laban telling television station al-Jazeera that he was happy about the Muslim boycott. Later the same day, he said to Danish television station TV2 that he would urge Muslims to stop the boycott immediately.
Hvilshøj had otherwise made efforts to draw upon imams' significant influence in local Muslim communities. During a conference held with seven local imams last April, she called upon them to encourage young Muslims to complete an education.
PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen had also invited a group of imams for an anti-terror conference at his Marienborg residence in September. The conference sought to find ways of preventing Islam from being used in the name of terror attacks.
Such efforts to involve the Muslim clerics were now a thing of the past, said Hvilshøj.
'The imams have revealed that they aren't the ones who benefit integration in Denmark,' she said. 'Some of the quotes we have seen show that they aren't interested in integeration.'
Imams' critical statements about Denmark in Muslim media have angered the minister of integration affairs Political criticism of local imams in recent days has led the integration minister to exclude the muslim clerics from discussions of the integration of Muslims into Danish society.
Some imams have reportedly offered statements to media in Muslim countries that harmed Danish interests in the on-going row over the Mohammed cartoons, the integration minister, Rikke Hvilshøj, said on Monday.
'I think we have a clear picture today that imams are not the ones we should look to if we want integration in Denmark to work,' Hvilshøj told daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende. 'I've become aware that there are other groups we should draw upon.'
One incident involved imam Abu Laban telling television station al-Jazeera that he was happy about the Muslim boycott. Later the same day, he said to Danish television station TV2 that he would urge Muslims to stop the boycott immediately.
Hvilshøj had otherwise made efforts to draw upon imams' significant influence in local Muslim communities. During a conference held with seven local imams last April, she called upon them to encourage young Muslims to complete an education.
PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen had also invited a group of imams for an anti-terror conference at his Marienborg residence in September. The conference sought to find ways of preventing Islam from being used in the name of terror attacks.
Such efforts to involve the Muslim clerics were now a thing of the past, said Hvilshøj.
'The imams have revealed that they aren't the ones who benefit integration in Denmark,' she said. 'Some of the quotes we have seen show that they aren't interested in integeration.'
posted by Mackety at 4:53 PM
0 comments
Moscow museum to exhibit Mohammed cartoons
A Moscow museum has announced it will exhibit the entire series of cartoons of Mohammed that have caused riots throughout the Islamic world.Yury Samodurov, director of the Sakharov Museum and Public Center, said on Russian television that the center was ready to organize a public exhibition of the cartoons satirizing the founder of Islam that originally were published in a Danish newspaper, Pravda.ru reported Monday."We must show the whole world that Russia goes along with Europe, that the freedom of expression is much more important for us than the dogmas of religious fanatics," Samodurov said.
http://upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060207-072431-9805r
http://upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060207-072431-9805r
posted by Mackety at 4:05 PM
0 comments
Imams Exposed
by Paul Belien, The Brussels JournalTuesday, February 7, 2006
Radical Danish imams have deliberately incited hatred against Denmark, the country that had hospitably welcomed them in. To this end, while on a visit to Arab countries last month, they added three false, extremely offensive Muhammad “cartoons” to the twelve relatively mild ones published by Jyllands-Posten last September [see the latter here, halfway down the page].
One of the three additional cartoons [we linked to them in this article], which the imams distributed on a faxed image of appalling quality, was said to be a depiction of Muhammad with a pigsnout. When the Danish press discovered the three false so-called Danish cartoons, the imams refused to say where they had got them. They claimed, however, that the false cartoons were genuinely Danish and had been added to “give an insight in how hateful the atmosphere in Denmark is towards Muslims.”
The Brussels Journal has always doubted whether the cartoons added by the imams were genuine. Whenever we mentioned them we explicitly wondered whether they were not “of the imam’s own making.” Certain Western mainstream media, however, such as the Australian network SBS (and even, we have been told, the BBC) authoritatively declared that the pigsnout was one of Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons. Yesterday an American blogger discovered where the “pigsnout Muhammad” comes from. It has no relation to Muhammad whatsoever, it is not even a cartoon, but a fax image of a photo of a French clown performing at a pig festival.
"Muhammad" according to the imams Denmark is being punished at the instigation of radical imams because twelve cartoonists have depicted Muhammad. However, these imams created their own three Muhammad images. They have even presented a French clown as being Muhammad. Because the twelve JP cartoonists are not Muslims, the Muslim blasphemy laws do not apply to them. But these laws do apply to the imams. Consequently, these imams deserve death. They – and no-one else – depicted the prophet as a pig – the highest imaginable insult in Islam.
Read more at: http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/brussels020706a.htm
posted by Mackety at 4:01 PM
0 comments
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Cartoon Debate
The case for mocking religion.By Christopher HitchensPosted Saturday, Feb. 4, 2006, at 4:31 PM ET
As well as being a small masterpiece of inarticulacy and self-abnegation, the statement from the State Department about this week's international Muslim pogrom against the free press was also accidentally accurate.
"Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief."
Thus the hapless Sean McCormack, reading painfully slowly from what was reported as a prepared government statement. How appalling for the country of the First Amendment to be represented by such an administration. What does he mean "unacceptable"? That it should be forbidden? And how abysmal that a "spokesman" cannot distinguish between criticism of a belief system and slander against a people. However, the illiterate McCormack is right in unintentionally comparing racist libels to religious faith. Many people have pointed out that the Arab and Muslim press is replete with anti-Jewish caricature, often of the most lurid and hateful kind. In one way the comparison is hopelessly inexact. These foul items mostly appear in countries where the state decides what is published or broadcast. However, when Muslims republish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or perpetuate the story of Jewish blood-sacrifice at Passover, they are recycling the fantasies of the Russian Orthodox Christian secret police (in the first instance) and of centuries of Roman Catholic and Lutheran propaganda (in the second). And, when an Israeli politician refers to Palestinians as snakes or pigs or monkeys, it is near to a certainty that he will be a rabbi (most usually Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the disgraceful Shas party) and will cite Talmudic authority for his racism. For most of human history, religion and bigotry have been two sides of the same coin, and it still shows.
Read the rest at: http://www.slate.com/id/2135499/
As well as being a small masterpiece of inarticulacy and self-abnegation, the statement from the State Department about this week's international Muslim pogrom against the free press was also accidentally accurate.
"Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief."
Thus the hapless Sean McCormack, reading painfully slowly from what was reported as a prepared government statement. How appalling for the country of the First Amendment to be represented by such an administration. What does he mean "unacceptable"? That it should be forbidden? And how abysmal that a "spokesman" cannot distinguish between criticism of a belief system and slander against a people. However, the illiterate McCormack is right in unintentionally comparing racist libels to religious faith. Many people have pointed out that the Arab and Muslim press is replete with anti-Jewish caricature, often of the most lurid and hateful kind. In one way the comparison is hopelessly inexact. These foul items mostly appear in countries where the state decides what is published or broadcast. However, when Muslims republish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or perpetuate the story of Jewish blood-sacrifice at Passover, they are recycling the fantasies of the Russian Orthodox Christian secret police (in the first instance) and of centuries of Roman Catholic and Lutheran propaganda (in the second). And, when an Israeli politician refers to Palestinians as snakes or pigs or monkeys, it is near to a certainty that he will be a rabbi (most usually Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of the disgraceful Shas party) and will cite Talmudic authority for his racism. For most of human history, religion and bigotry have been two sides of the same coin, and it still shows.
Read the rest at: http://www.slate.com/id/2135499/
posted by Mackety at 10:41 PM
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Liberal muslim speaks out against cartoon violence
In this extremist enabling-environment we should not ignore the lonely but hopeful voices of the more assimilated European Muslims who are quick to say that the spiraling violent street protests do not speak for them. One prominent example is the Palestinian-born Danish Member of Parliament Naser Khader, who said to the offending Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, "To be a practicing Muslim is not the same as being an extremist. I'll fight the people who think they can tell me and others how to be a good Muslim. That is a matter between Allah and individual Muslims." Such voices of moderation need to be given more attention, for it is from them that we might find a way to redeem the promise of peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic society.
Tolerance is a two-way street: it implies not only mutual respect but a live and let live attitude that is absent from Muslims' reaction to these cartoons. The violent protestors that have taken to the streets around the world are providing evidence of mass psychosis rather than being witnesses to one of the world's great faiths.
At protests in London, cameras caught sight of two signs that cut to the heart of why this is a time for choosing. One sign said "Freedom Go to Hell" while another read "Learn from 9/11". By standing up to this controversy in the spirit of civility, in defense of a universal rather than culturally determined right to freedom of speech, we are showing that we have learned the lessons of 9/11. We will not be intimidated by threats of violence. Instead, we will stand up and defend the multicultural civil society.
http://www.nysun.com/article/27170?page_no=2
Tolerance is a two-way street: it implies not only mutual respect but a live and let live attitude that is absent from Muslims' reaction to these cartoons. The violent protestors that have taken to the streets around the world are providing evidence of mass psychosis rather than being witnesses to one of the world's great faiths.
At protests in London, cameras caught sight of two signs that cut to the heart of why this is a time for choosing. One sign said "Freedom Go to Hell" while another read "Learn from 9/11". By standing up to this controversy in the spirit of civility, in defense of a universal rather than culturally determined right to freedom of speech, we are showing that we have learned the lessons of 9/11. We will not be intimidated by threats of violence. Instead, we will stand up and defend the multicultural civil society.
http://www.nysun.com/article/27170?page_no=2
posted by Mackety at 8:04 PM
0 comments
Cartoons and Islamic Imperialism
By Daniel PipesFrontPageMagazine.com February 7, 2006
The key issue at stake in the battle over the twelve Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad is this: will the West stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech, or will Muslims impose their way of life on the West? Ultimately, there is no compromise; Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.
More specifically, will Westerners accede to a double standard by which Muslims are free to insult Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, while Muhammad, Islam, and Muslims enjoy an immunity from insults? Muslims routinely publish cartoons far more offensive than the Danish ones; are they entitled to dish it out while being insulated from similar indignities?
Germany’s Die Welt newspaper hinted at this issue in an editorial: “The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical. When Syrian television showed drama documentaries in prime time depicting rabbis as cannibals, the imams were quiet.” Nor, by the way, have imams protested the stomping on the Christian cross embedded in the Danish flag.
The deeper issue here, however, is not Muslim hypocrisy but Islamic supremacism. Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who published the cartoons, explains that if Muslims insist “that I, as a non-Muslim, should submit to their taboos, … they're asking for my submission.”
Precisely. Robert Spencer rightly calls on the free world to stand “resolutely with Denmark.” The informative Brussels Journal asserts, “We are all Danes now.”
Some governments get it:
· Norway: “we will not apologize because in a country like Norway, which guarantees freedom of expression, we cannot apologize for what the newspapers print,” commented Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.
· Germany: “Why should the German government apologize [for German papers publishing the cartoons]? This is an expression of press freedom,” said Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble.
· France: “Political cartoons are by nature excessive. And I prefer an excess of caricature to an excess of censorship,” commented Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
Other governments wrongly apologized:
· Poland: “the bounds of properly conceived freedom of expression have been overstepped,” stated Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz.
· United Kingdom: “the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong,” said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
· New Zealand: “gratuitously offensive,” Trade Negotiations Minister Jim Sutton called the cartoons.
· United States: “"Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable,” said State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus.
Strangely, as “Old Europe” finds its backbone, the Anglosphere quivers. So awful was the U.S. government reaction, it actually won the endorsement of the country’s leading Islamist organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. This should come as no great surprise, however, for Washington has a history of treating Islam preferentially; and on two earlier occasions it also faltered in cases of insults concerning Muhammad.
In 1989, Salman Rushdie came under a death edict from Ayatollah Khomeini for satirizing Muhammad in his magical-realism novel, The Satanic Verses. Rather than stand up for the novelist’s life, President George H.W. Bush equated The Satanic Verses and the death edict, calling both “offensive.” Secretary of State James A. Baker III termed the edict merely “regrettable.”
Even worse, in 1997 when an Israeli woman distributed a poster of Muhammad as a pig, the U.S. government shamefully abandoned its protection of free speech. On behalf of President Bill Clinton, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns called the woman in question “either sick or … evil” and stated that “She deserves to be put on trial for these outrageous attacks on Islam.” The State Department endorses a criminal trial for protected speech? Stranger yet was the context of this outburst; as I noted at the time, having combed through weeks of State Department briefings, I “found nothing approaching this vituperative language in reference to the horrors that took place in Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands lost their lives. To the contrary, Mr. Burns was throughout cautious and diplomatic.”
Western governments should take a crash course on Islamic law and the historically-abiding Muslim imperative to subjugate non-Muslim peoples. They might start by reading the forthcoming book by Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale).
Peoples who would stay free must stand unreservedly with Denmark.
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21192
The key issue at stake in the battle over the twelve Danish cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad is this: will the West stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech, or will Muslims impose their way of life on the West? Ultimately, there is no compromise; Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.
More specifically, will Westerners accede to a double standard by which Muslims are free to insult Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, while Muhammad, Islam, and Muslims enjoy an immunity from insults? Muslims routinely publish cartoons far more offensive than the Danish ones; are they entitled to dish it out while being insulated from similar indignities?
Germany’s Die Welt newspaper hinted at this issue in an editorial: “The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical. When Syrian television showed drama documentaries in prime time depicting rabbis as cannibals, the imams were quiet.” Nor, by the way, have imams protested the stomping on the Christian cross embedded in the Danish flag.
The deeper issue here, however, is not Muslim hypocrisy but Islamic supremacism. Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who published the cartoons, explains that if Muslims insist “that I, as a non-Muslim, should submit to their taboos, … they're asking for my submission.”
Precisely. Robert Spencer rightly calls on the free world to stand “resolutely with Denmark.” The informative Brussels Journal asserts, “We are all Danes now.”
Some governments get it:
· Norway: “we will not apologize because in a country like Norway, which guarantees freedom of expression, we cannot apologize for what the newspapers print,” commented Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.
· Germany: “Why should the German government apologize [for German papers publishing the cartoons]? This is an expression of press freedom,” said Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble.
· France: “Political cartoons are by nature excessive. And I prefer an excess of caricature to an excess of censorship,” commented Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
Other governments wrongly apologized:
· Poland: “the bounds of properly conceived freedom of expression have been overstepped,” stated Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz.
· United Kingdom: “the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong,” said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
· New Zealand: “gratuitously offensive,” Trade Negotiations Minister Jim Sutton called the cartoons.
· United States: “"Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable,” said State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus.
Strangely, as “Old Europe” finds its backbone, the Anglosphere quivers. So awful was the U.S. government reaction, it actually won the endorsement of the country’s leading Islamist organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. This should come as no great surprise, however, for Washington has a history of treating Islam preferentially; and on two earlier occasions it also faltered in cases of insults concerning Muhammad.
In 1989, Salman Rushdie came under a death edict from Ayatollah Khomeini for satirizing Muhammad in his magical-realism novel, The Satanic Verses. Rather than stand up for the novelist’s life, President George H.W. Bush equated The Satanic Verses and the death edict, calling both “offensive.” Secretary of State James A. Baker III termed the edict merely “regrettable.”
Even worse, in 1997 when an Israeli woman distributed a poster of Muhammad as a pig, the U.S. government shamefully abandoned its protection of free speech. On behalf of President Bill Clinton, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns called the woman in question “either sick or … evil” and stated that “She deserves to be put on trial for these outrageous attacks on Islam.” The State Department endorses a criminal trial for protected speech? Stranger yet was the context of this outburst; as I noted at the time, having combed through weeks of State Department briefings, I “found nothing approaching this vituperative language in reference to the horrors that took place in Rwanda, where hundreds of thousands lost their lives. To the contrary, Mr. Burns was throughout cautious and diplomatic.”
Western governments should take a crash course on Islamic law and the historically-abiding Muslim imperative to subjugate non-Muslim peoples. They might start by reading the forthcoming book by Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (Yale).
Peoples who would stay free must stand unreservedly with Denmark.
http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21192
posted by Mackety at 10:28 AM
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Pyromania and cartoons
One of the participants in the hatemonger imam "tour of hate" Ahmed Akkari yesterday on Danish tv-channel DR1 offered the editor of Jyllands-Posten that they should make a common statement on arab television and later today Akkari also wanted to make a common pressconference with Danish primeminister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.On one side we need the hatemonger imams to take their lies back, on the other hand we dont want to give them any kind of victory as they absolutely dont deserve one.Akkaris suggestion reminds me a bit of the stories you sometimes hear about firefighters who become pyromaniacs because they want to be celebrated for how good firefighters they are.Akkari and his friends start a fire and afterwards they want to be celebrated as the ones who put it out again.
http://zurueckgeschossen.blogspot.com/2006/02/pyromania-and-cartoons.html
http://zurueckgeschossen.blogspot.com/2006/02/pyromania-and-cartoons.html
posted by Mackety at 10:27 AM
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Danish cartoons: Muslims in their own Dark Age
By Irfan Yusuf:
Had someone unaware of the cartoons viewed the response, they might think Denmark has invaded Bosnia or Iran and was unjustly occupying its territory. They might think Danish settlements replaced Israeli ones popping up in various places across the West Bank. Or perhaps the Danish Government had passed laws banning girls from wearing headscarves in schools.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Instead, an obscure privately-owned newspaper in Denmark published cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. One cartoon apparently showed the Prophet standing at the pearly gates of heaven in much the same way as St Peter in the Catholic tradition. Another portrayed the Prophet’s turban as a bomb.
The cartoons were first published in the Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten. Most people living in Muslim countries would probably be unable to pronounce the paper’s name, let alone having heard of it.
And so today, I and many other Muslims feel compelled to stand up and be counted. To defend the honour of a man I grew up to regard as a Prophet.
No, not from a dozen cartoons published by a neo-Conservative Danish newspaper. Nor from their reproduction in newspapers across Europe and even New Zealand.
We feel compelled to defend the honour of the Prophet of Islam from the shameful actions of some people claiming to be his followers.
No, we are not ashamed of Islam. We are not ashamed of the Prophet Mohammed. We are not ashamed of the values with which many of us grew up, values that are so similar to those of my Anglican school or my many Jewish colleagues and friends.
What upsets and shames us is the depths to which some Muslims have sunk.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4133
Had someone unaware of the cartoons viewed the response, they might think Denmark has invaded Bosnia or Iran and was unjustly occupying its territory. They might think Danish settlements replaced Israeli ones popping up in various places across the West Bank. Or perhaps the Danish Government had passed laws banning girls from wearing headscarves in schools.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Instead, an obscure privately-owned newspaper in Denmark published cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. One cartoon apparently showed the Prophet standing at the pearly gates of heaven in much the same way as St Peter in the Catholic tradition. Another portrayed the Prophet’s turban as a bomb.
The cartoons were first published in the Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten. Most people living in Muslim countries would probably be unable to pronounce the paper’s name, let alone having heard of it.
And so today, I and many other Muslims feel compelled to stand up and be counted. To defend the honour of a man I grew up to regard as a Prophet.
No, not from a dozen cartoons published by a neo-Conservative Danish newspaper. Nor from their reproduction in newspapers across Europe and even New Zealand.
We feel compelled to defend the honour of the Prophet of Islam from the shameful actions of some people claiming to be his followers.
No, we are not ashamed of Islam. We are not ashamed of the Prophet Mohammed. We are not ashamed of the values with which many of us grew up, values that are so similar to those of my Anglican school or my many Jewish colleagues and friends.
What upsets and shames us is the depths to which some Muslims have sunk.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4133
posted by Mackety at 10:17 AM
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Swedish Hypocrisy!
Instead of supporting freedom of speech in Denmark, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter accused it´s Danish colleagues several times for having published caricatures of the prophet Muhammed that the newspaper pretends to be not only insulting but rasist.
On sunday 06-02-06, however, Dagens Nyheter published a caricature of it´s own in connection with the escalation of the conflict. Compared withJyllands-Postens caricatures this one is really nasty and humiliating.Look at the picture of a pig standing behind the door of a mosque with his trousers drawn down waiting for anal intercourse. With whom we may ask? By those who are praying in the mosque, of course, who else?It might also perhaps be interpreted as a paraphrase of the malicious portrait of the Prophet Muhammed that the Danish imams brought to the Middle East in order to set Muslims against the Danes?But there is no portrait of the Prophet in Dagens Nyheters picture, his presence is only implicit.Congratulations! At least Dagens Nyheter can not be accused for having published a malicious portrait of the Prophet. So the violent iconclasts in the Muslim world can take a deep breath and continue to hunt Danes.Yet another victory for the Swedish hypocrisy ?
Read more about this issue on http://dansk-svensk.blogspot.com/
posted by Mackety at 10:01 AM
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Monday, February 06, 2006
SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH AYAAN HIRSI ALI
'Everyone Is Afraid to Criticize Islam'
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch politician forced to go into hiding after the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, responds to the Danish cartoon scandal, arguing that if Europe doesn't stand up to extremists, a culture of self-censorship of criticism of Islam that pervades in Holland will spread in Europe. Auf Wiedersehen, free speech.
SPIEGEL: Hirsi Ali, you have called the Prophet Muhammad a tyrant and a pervert. Theo van Gogh, the director of your film "Submission," which is critical of Islam, was murdered by Islamists. You yourself are under police protection. Can you understand how the Danish cartoonists feel at this point?
Hirsi Ali: "The cartoons should be displayed everywhere."Hirsi Ali: They probably feel numb. On the one hand, a voice in their heads is encouraging them not to sell out their freedom of speech. At the same time, they're experiencing the shocking sensation of what it's like to lose your own personal freedom. One mustn't forget that they're part of the postwar generation, and that all they've experienced is peace and prosperity. And now they suddenly have to fight for their own human rights once again.
SPIEGEL: Why have the protests escalated to such an extent?
Hirsi Ali: There is no freedom of speech in those Arab countries where the demonstrations and public outrage are being staged. The reason many people flee to Europe from these places is precisely because they have criticized religion, the political establishment and society. Totalitarian Islamic regimes are in a deep crisis. Globalization means that they're exposed to considerable change, and they also fear the reformist forces developing among émigrés in the West. They'll use threatening gestures against the West, and the success they achieve with their threats, to intimidate these people.
SPIEGEL: Was apologizing for the cartoons the wrong thing to do?
Hirsi Ali: Once again, the West pursued the principle of turning first one cheek, then the other. In fact, it's already a tradition. In 1980, privately owned British broadcaster ITV aired a documentary about the stoning of a Saudi Arabian princess who had allegedly committed adultery. The government in Riyadh intervened and the British government issued an apology. We saw the same kowtowing response in 1987 when (Dutch comedian) Rudi Carrell derided (Iranian revolutionary leader) Ayatollah Khomeini in a comedy skit (that was aired on German television). In 2000, a play about the youngest wife of the Prophet Mohammed, titled "Aisha," was cancelled before it ever opened in Rotterdam. Then there was the van Gogh murder and now the cartoons. We are constantly apologizing, and we don't notice how much abuse we're taking. Meanwhile, the other side doesn't give an inch.
SPIEGEL: What should the appropriate European response look like?
Hirsi Ali: There should be solidarity. The cartoons should be displayed everywhere. After all, the Arabs can't boycott goods from every country. They're far too dependent on imports. And Scandinavian companies should be compensated for their losses. Freedom of speech should at least be worth that much to us.
SPIEGEL: But Muslims, like any religious community, should also be able to protect themselves against slander and insult.
Hirsi Ali: That's exactly the reflex I was just talking about: offering the other cheek. Not a day passes, in Europe and elsewhere, when radical imams aren't preaching hatred in their mosques. They call Jews and Christians inferior, and we say they're just exercising their freedom of speech. When will the Europeans realize that the Islamists don't allow their critics the same right? After the West prostrates itself, they'll be more than happy to say that Allah has made the infidels spineless.
SPIEGEL: What will be the upshot of the storm of protests against the cartoons?
Hirsi Ali: We could see the same thing happening that has happened in the Netherlands, where writers, journalists and artists have felt intimidated ever since the van Gogh murder. Everyone is afraid to criticize Islam. Significantly, "Submission" still isn't being shown in theaters.
SPIEGEL: Many have criticized the film as being too radical and too offensive.
Hirsi Ali: The criticism of van Gogh was legitimate. But when someone has to die for his world view, what he may have done wrong is no longer the issue. That's when we have to stand up for our basic rights. Otherwise we are just reinforcing the killer and conceding that there was a good reason to kill this person.
SPIEGEL: You too have been accused for your dogged criticism of Islam.
Hirsi Ali: Oddly enough, my critics never specify how far I can go. How can you address problems if you're not even allowed to clearly define them? Like the fact that Muslim women at home are kept locked up, are raped and are married off against their will -- and that in a country in which our far too passive intellectuals are so proud of their freedom!
SPIEGEL: The debate over speaking Dutch on the streets and the integration programs for potentially violent Moroccan youth -- do these things also represent the fruits of your provocations?
Hirsi Ali: The sharp criticism has finally triggered an open debate over our relationship with Muslim immigrants. We have become more conscious of things. For example, we are now classifying honor killings by the victims' countries of origin. And we're finally turning our attention to young girls who are sent against their wills from Morocco to Holland as brides, and adopting legislation to make this practice more difficult.
SPIEGEL: You're working on a sequel to "Submission." Will you stick to your uncompromising approach?
Hirsi Ali: Yes, of course. We want to continue the debate over the Koran's claim to absoluteness, the infallibility of the Prophet and sexual morality. In the first part, we portrayed a woman who speaks to her god, complaining that despite the fact that she has abided by his rules and subjugated herself, she is still being abused by her uncle. The second part deals with the dilemma into which the Muslim faith plunges four different men. One hates Jews, the second one is gay, the third is a bon vivant who wants to be a good Muslim but repeatedly succumbs to life's temptations, and the fourth is a martyr. They all feel abandoned by their god and decide to stop worshipping him.
SPIEGEL: Will recent events make it more difficult to screen the film?
Hirsi Ali: The conditions couldn't be more difficult. We're forced to produce the film under complete anonymity. Everyone involved in the film, from actors to technicians, will be unrecognizable. But we are determined to complete the project. The director didn't really like van Gogh, but he believes that, for the sake of free speech, shooting the sequel is critical. I'm optimistic that we'll be able to premier the film this year.
SPIEGEL: Is the Koran's claim to absoluteness, which you criticize in "Submission," the central obstacle to reforming Islam?
Hirsi Ali: The doctrine stating that the faith is inalterable because the Koran was dictated by God must be replaced. Muslims must realize that it was human beings who wrote the holy scriptures. After all, most Christians don't believe in hell, in the angels or in the earth having been created in six days. They now see these things as symbolic stories, but they still remain true to their faith.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,399263,00.html
posted by Mackety at 9:57 PM
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The drawings that started The Cartoon War
All twelve cartoons in English translation:Jyllands Posten Cartoons English editionDrawings from Kaare Bluitgens book which started it all:Mohammed Drawings from Kaare Bluitgens book
posted by Mackety at 6:18 PM
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The arab media doesnt mind racist cartoons at all......when jews are the target!
Dont you just love the arab sense of decency. Bring a picture of Sharon eating arab children in a major arab newspaper and no one takes offence, but if a european newspaper suggests arab violence by publishing a picture of Mohammad with a bomb in his turban, you will have millions of arabs screaming "kill the infidels".Pretty soon, they will be screaming kill the jews, because in the minds of most arabs, nothing bad can happen to them without it being done by jews.
posted by Mackety at 4:41 PM
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Muslims in Belgium uses cartoon controversy to slander jews
Non-Jews slander non-Jewish prophets and then come to hang the Jews, one could say of the latest, ugly twist in the Danish cartoon controversy, paraphrasing one of Menachem Begin's most famous lines.
A Belgian-Dutch Islamic political organization, the Arab European League, posted anti-Jewish cartoons on its Web site on Saturday in response to the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that appeared in Danish papers last year and offended many Muslims, unleashing violent demonstrations around the Islamic world.
One of the AEL cartoons reportedly displayed an image of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler, and another questioned whether the Holocaust actually occurred.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1138622554514&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Paul Belien from the brusselsjournal writes about it in http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/brussels020606.htm
a quote from the article:
The three AEL cartoons posted so far have been very instructive in that they have all mocked the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust, as if Mr Jahjah wants to emphasize that “islamofascism” is indeed the ideology he adheres to.
The first cartoon, posted on Friday evening, shows Anne Frank in bed with a naked Adolf Hitler. “Write this one in your diary Anne!” Hitler says. The cartoon of the Führer and the little girl in his bed is eerily reminiscent of a story I once heard about a certain leader who took himself a child wife, but I have forgotten who it was. The second cartoon, posted yesterday, shows Jews amidst Auschwitz corpses. “We have to get to the 6,000,000 somehow!” one Jew tells another. “I don’t think they are Jews,” the other one replies. The third cartoon, posted today, shows Steven Spielberg ringing Peter Jackson to ask for his assistance with a Holocaust movie. “I don’t think I have that much imagination Steven, sorry,” Jackson replies.
A Belgian-Dutch Islamic political organization, the Arab European League, posted anti-Jewish cartoons on its Web site on Saturday in response to the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that appeared in Danish papers last year and offended many Muslims, unleashing violent demonstrations around the Islamic world.
One of the AEL cartoons reportedly displayed an image of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler, and another questioned whether the Holocaust actually occurred.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1138622554514&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Paul Belien from the brusselsjournal writes about it in http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/brussels020606.htm
a quote from the article:
The three AEL cartoons posted so far have been very instructive in that they have all mocked the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust, as if Mr Jahjah wants to emphasize that “islamofascism” is indeed the ideology he adheres to.
The first cartoon, posted on Friday evening, shows Anne Frank in bed with a naked Adolf Hitler. “Write this one in your diary Anne!” Hitler says. The cartoon of the Führer and the little girl in his bed is eerily reminiscent of a story I once heard about a certain leader who took himself a child wife, but I have forgotten who it was. The second cartoon, posted yesterday, shows Jews amidst Auschwitz corpses. “We have to get to the 6,000,000 somehow!” one Jew tells another. “I don’t think they are Jews,” the other one replies. The third cartoon, posted today, shows Steven Spielberg ringing Peter Jackson to ask for his assistance with a Holocaust movie. “I don’t think I have that much imagination Steven, sorry,” Jackson replies.
posted by Mackety at 4:04 PM
0 comments
Saudi Arabian Blogger speaks out on Cartoon issue!
It's all about us. Me, me, me! We are insulted. Why? Because we choose to be, it's our right. The cartoonists are mocking the present-day distortions of true Islam by the bigots and zealots and terrorists, and the bigots and zealots and terrorists don't like it. And they are telling the rest of the 1.3 billion that they feel insulted as well, even if they don't.So what do they want to happen? This is where the toys and rattles and dummies go flying.We demand a formal apology, said Hlayhel....The Saudi government recalled its ambassador for consultations in light of the Danish government's lack of attention....Saudi Arabia's top cleric has called on Denmark to punish a newspaper that ran cartoons portraying Prophet Mohammad....The two publications should apologize to Muslims around the world....WAMY also sought an unconditional apology from the governments of Denmark and Norway .... and punish the culprits who deliberately provoke over one billion Muslims as part of their hostile propaganda against Islam.Wow! You get the picture. We expect punishments and apologies, in whatever order. And we ourselves are great believers in apologies, of course. Look how we apologized for all our citizens who flew into the World Trade Centre. And the great expression of regret to the "so-called "Booze Bombers" for their false imprisonment, torture, and extracted "confessions". Not to mention the apologies to the families of fifteen Makkah schoolgirls, killed in a fire by the actions of the Muttawa. And soon there'll be an apology to the families killed in.....Sorry. I forgot. We're not supposed to talk about the Makkah stampede.
http://muttawa.blogspot.com/2006/01/prams-toys-rattles-and-dummies.html
http://muttawa.blogspot.com/2006/01/prams-toys-rattles-and-dummies.html
posted by Mackety at 3:34 PM
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Creating Outrage: Meet the imam behind the cartoon overreaction.
Learn more about the background for the cartoon war at NationalReview:
Confused by the wave of protests, threats, boycotts, and attacks against diplomatic facilities that have shaken their idyllic tranquility after the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed on Jyllands-Posten, the Danes are asking themselves questions. They wonder if an attack will take place in their country, as threatened by various jihadi groups, and if freedom of speech is in jeopardy. But a more immediate question is puzzling some: Why has the outrage of the Muslim world exploded only now, in February, when the cartoons were published last September? At the time of the initial publication, international media had reported news of the blasphemous caricatures, not only in Danish, but also in English. Yet nothing happened, aside from timid protests from the Muslim community of the tiny Scandinavian kingdom. So what is different about the situation now? More than the question, it is the answer that is keeping a good chunk of Denmark's political and cultural elite awake at night. The recent anti-Danish emotional wave coming from the Muslim world, in fact, is far from a spontaneous reaction, but it has been cunningly orchestrated by a knowledgeable insider, a real snake in the grass who has been creeping in Denmark for the last 15 years.
Confused by the wave of protests, threats, boycotts, and attacks against diplomatic facilities that have shaken their idyllic tranquility after the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed on Jyllands-Posten, the Danes are asking themselves questions. They wonder if an attack will take place in their country, as threatened by various jihadi groups, and if freedom of speech is in jeopardy. But a more immediate question is puzzling some: Why has the outrage of the Muslim world exploded only now, in February, when the cartoons were published last September? At the time of the initial publication, international media had reported news of the blasphemous caricatures, not only in Danish, but also in English. Yet nothing happened, aside from timid protests from the Muslim community of the tiny Scandinavian kingdom. So what is different about the situation now? More than the question, it is the answer that is keeping a good chunk of Denmark's political and cultural elite awake at night. The recent anti-Danish emotional wave coming from the Muslim world, in fact, is far from a spontaneous reaction, but it has been cunningly orchestrated by a knowledgeable insider, a real snake in the grass who has been creeping in Denmark for the last 15 years.
posted by Mackety at 2:22 PM
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Protesters Threw Stones and Fire Bombs at Austrian Embassy in Tehran
Tehran. Protesters, angry with the publishing of cartoons of the prophet Mohammad in western newspapers, threw rocks and homemade bombs at the building of the Austrian embassy in Tehran, Reuters reported. A Reuters photographer at the scene said the protesters had smashed all the diplomatic mission's windows with stones and had thrown several petrol bombs at the building.The building did not catch fire and dozens of riot police surrounded it and were preventing the protesters from storming inside.The embassy was attacked over the cartoons and also for the European Union's stance over Iran's nuclear programme, since Vienna currently holds the presidency of the EU.
http://www.focus-fen.net/index.php?catid=138&newsid=82132&ch=0
http://www.focus-fen.net/index.php?catid=138&newsid=82132&ch=0
posted by Mackety at 2:08 PM
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Someone who gets it
Jerusalem Post about the cartoon war:
The Prophet's honor
The cartoon was disgracefully insensitive. It depicted a barbed wire Star of David in which innocent Palestinian men, women and children were trapped. By the time it appeared in the Seattle Times in July 2003, hundreds of Israeli civilians had been mercilessly slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists in what they call the "second intifada." But compared to what is typically found in the Arab press, cartoonist Tony Auth's effrontery was fairly bland.
Arab political "humor" knows no bounds. A cartoon in Qatar's Al-Watan depicted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon drinking from a goblet of Palestinian children's blood. Another, in the Egyptian Al-Ahram al-Arabi showed him jackbooted, bloody-handed and crushing peace.
Arab cartoonists routinely demonize Jews as global conspirators, corrupters of society and blood-suckers. Just this Saturday, Britain's Muslim Weekly published a caricature of a hooked-nose Jew - Ehud Olmert.
And it's not just cartoons. During Ramadan 2002, an Egyptian satellite television channel broadcasted the multi-episode Horseman Without a Horse series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion canard.
How did Israel and world Jewry respond? The Israeli embassy in Cairo filed a protest. A US student group held an orderly demonstration outside an Egyptian consulate, and Jewish leaders sent a strongly-worded letter to the Mubarak government.
Contrast this with the frenzied Muslim reaction to 12 cartoons, including one depicting the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban which appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten five months ago and was recently widely disseminated. It was intended, paradoxically, to satirize Muslim intolerance.
The cartoon "blasphemy" has generated bomb threats, armed takeovers and widespread desecration of the Danish flag. A Western cultural center was vandalized; Catholic aid workers were threatened. European observers at the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Sinai wisely stayed away from their posts.
Several Muslim states have recalled their ambassadors. There is talk of a Muslim trade boycott of Danish (and European) products. Mass protests are being held throughout the world. In London, marchers carried placards reading: "Massacre those who insult Islam" and "Freedom go to hell." Protesters denounced the BBC for airing the cartoons during news broadcasts.
Things continue to deteriorate. In Damascus on Saturday rioters set fire to the building that houses the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish embassies. In Beirut yesterday the Danish embassy was set ablaze.
Official Western reaction has generally been to meet intolerance with remarkable sensitivity and understanding. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, while apologizing for the offense caused, sought to explain that his government doesn't actually control what newspapers publish.
The Vatican condemned the cartoons as offensive; so did the US State Department (though the White House denounced subsequent anti-Western violence as "outrageous").
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw counseled self-censorship: "There is freedom of speech... but... not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory."
There are those who would argue that the controversy does not reflect a clash of civilizations. Yet it is precisely this persistent refusal to acknowledge the obvious that weakens the cause of tolerance and liberty. Must "understanding" invariably result in the abdication of Western values?
If anyone wants to appreciate why the West views with such suspicion the weapons programs of Muslim states such as Iran, they need look no further than the intolerance Muslim regimes exhibit to these cartoons, and what this portends.
No one wants to add fuel to the fire. Mobs are more easily placated than reasoned with. But once this controversy passes it will be valuable to determine just who exploited the flap to foment anti-Western outrage, and to inquire what "moderate" Muslim voices said.
One such voice, Jihad al-Momani, editor-in-chief of the Jordanian weekly Shihan, was arrested for republishing the cartoons (to show Arabs what they were protesting). In an accompanying editorial - which his staff subsequently repudiated - Momani wrote: "Who offends Islam more? A foreigner who draws the prophet... or a Muslim with an explosive belt who commits suicide in Amman or anywhere else?"
Globalism demands that points of contact between Islam and the West be multi-cultural havens, not flashpoints. For that to happen, tolerance must be a two-way street.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1138622555872&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
The Prophet's honor
The cartoon was disgracefully insensitive. It depicted a barbed wire Star of David in which innocent Palestinian men, women and children were trapped. By the time it appeared in the Seattle Times in July 2003, hundreds of Israeli civilians had been mercilessly slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists in what they call the "second intifada." But compared to what is typically found in the Arab press, cartoonist Tony Auth's effrontery was fairly bland.
Arab political "humor" knows no bounds. A cartoon in Qatar's Al-Watan depicted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon drinking from a goblet of Palestinian children's blood. Another, in the Egyptian Al-Ahram al-Arabi showed him jackbooted, bloody-handed and crushing peace.
Arab cartoonists routinely demonize Jews as global conspirators, corrupters of society and blood-suckers. Just this Saturday, Britain's Muslim Weekly published a caricature of a hooked-nose Jew - Ehud Olmert.
And it's not just cartoons. During Ramadan 2002, an Egyptian satellite television channel broadcasted the multi-episode Horseman Without a Horse series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion canard.
How did Israel and world Jewry respond? The Israeli embassy in Cairo filed a protest. A US student group held an orderly demonstration outside an Egyptian consulate, and Jewish leaders sent a strongly-worded letter to the Mubarak government.
Contrast this with the frenzied Muslim reaction to 12 cartoons, including one depicting the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban which appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten five months ago and was recently widely disseminated. It was intended, paradoxically, to satirize Muslim intolerance.
The cartoon "blasphemy" has generated bomb threats, armed takeovers and widespread desecration of the Danish flag. A Western cultural center was vandalized; Catholic aid workers were threatened. European observers at the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Sinai wisely stayed away from their posts.
Several Muslim states have recalled their ambassadors. There is talk of a Muslim trade boycott of Danish (and European) products. Mass protests are being held throughout the world. In London, marchers carried placards reading: "Massacre those who insult Islam" and "Freedom go to hell." Protesters denounced the BBC for airing the cartoons during news broadcasts.
Things continue to deteriorate. In Damascus on Saturday rioters set fire to the building that houses the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish embassies. In Beirut yesterday the Danish embassy was set ablaze.
Official Western reaction has generally been to meet intolerance with remarkable sensitivity and understanding. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, while apologizing for the offense caused, sought to explain that his government doesn't actually control what newspapers publish.
The Vatican condemned the cartoons as offensive; so did the US State Department (though the White House denounced subsequent anti-Western violence as "outrageous").
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw counseled self-censorship: "There is freedom of speech... but... not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory."
There are those who would argue that the controversy does not reflect a clash of civilizations. Yet it is precisely this persistent refusal to acknowledge the obvious that weakens the cause of tolerance and liberty. Must "understanding" invariably result in the abdication of Western values?
If anyone wants to appreciate why the West views with such suspicion the weapons programs of Muslim states such as Iran, they need look no further than the intolerance Muslim regimes exhibit to these cartoons, and what this portends.
No one wants to add fuel to the fire. Mobs are more easily placated than reasoned with. But once this controversy passes it will be valuable to determine just who exploited the flap to foment anti-Western outrage, and to inquire what "moderate" Muslim voices said.
One such voice, Jihad al-Momani, editor-in-chief of the Jordanian weekly Shihan, was arrested for republishing the cartoons (to show Arabs what they were protesting). In an accompanying editorial - which his staff subsequently repudiated - Momani wrote: "Who offends Islam more? A foreigner who draws the prophet... or a Muslim with an explosive belt who commits suicide in Amman or anywhere else?"
Globalism demands that points of contact between Islam and the West be multi-cultural havens, not flashpoints. For that to happen, tolerance must be a two-way street.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1138622555872&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
posted by Mackety at 1:44 PM
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