timeimmortal

Remind me, again, why we sent our soldiers to die to liberate the French? Apparently, this sort of crass exhibitionism has become rather commonplace at the massive memorial site commemorating the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers in capturing Vimy Ridge, one of those instances where the Canucks came in to do the job that nobody else could get done.

That’s right: Canadian sacrifice is now the backdrop for erotica and smut.

Perhaps I’m thinking about this the wrong way, though? I am reliably informed by P. Z. Myers that nothing should be held sacred, so perhaps I should applaud these Frenchies for their restraint; they could, after all, have chosen to use the memorial as a latrine instead.

Bollocks to that. This is patent ingratitude. It almost makes one wish there was another war brewing, one in which France could be left to fend for herself.

Kevin Myers crime? Well, as a man who spent some years living in Africa, he had the temerity to speak what he knew to be true about the problems on that troubled continent, and he did so in print:

When I went to Ethiopia* just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported — such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect).

I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children — not cold, unpopular and even “racist” accusations about African male culpability.

This follows from an earlier article that he penned, in which he noted still more problems:

The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

There is, no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system; but I do not know what it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this.

…

Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.

They are now — one way or another — virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

…

How much Morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.

For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

And for saying as much, all of it good common sense, Mr. Myers could potentially be jailed…without benefit of trial. In Ireland, which is supposedly a free and democratic nation.

On the one hand, I expected some uproar in Ireland over my piece about Ethiopia on July 10. But there really wasn’t any. On the other, I didn’t expect an attempt to jail me by a state-sponsored body. Yet Denise Charlton, of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, has urged An Garda Siochana to investigate me under a special law, by which I could be tried and imprisoned for two years without even the benefit of a jury.

Oh, Denise, Denise, you silly, silly little girl: have you nothing better to do with your time and talents than to try to get someone jailed for saying something you dislike? So there we are. The apparatchiks of the equality industry merely have to contemplate the sector of their psyche wherein their self-righteous emotions reside: and if these are sufficiently overwrought, they decide that a hate-crime has been committed.

…

So, “a lot of Africans” are “all very offended”, are they? All of them? The poor dears. Well, if the countries on whose behalf they get so easily offended are so bloody marvellous — Sudan? Rwanda? Zimbabwe? Sierre Leone? Congo? Somalia? Eritrea? Etcetera? — why aren’t they enjoying themselves back home?

Just so.

The above are not easy words to read; I personally doubt that Mr. Myers intended for them to be easy to read. The reality of Africa — and even of the outcomes of the various aid monies that flow in to that troubled continent — is not an easy truth to hear, and I doubt there is any way to put it to paper in a palatable manner, save to gloss over the really nasty bits in favour of heart-wrenching stories about babies with bloated bellies.

And make no mistake: starvation, especially of infants, is a damnable tragedy. But nothing is really being done about this by simply pouring more money into the various countries that make up Africa — in the end, what is achieved is that governments are propped up which have no business being in power in the first place. The cycle of injustice is thus free to continue.

Positive developments do occasionally occur in Africa, admittedly, but one notes that many of these are intrinsically linked with foreign missions that see Westerners come in to Africa (once more) to take an active role in e.g. the construction of bridges and water systems.

But now, apparently, a man stands to be jailed in Ireland for saying as much.

* a quick note, for those who will attempt to lay blame for all this at the feet of the colonial escapades of e.g. Britain and France: Ethiopia was never a colony.

Employees at a Catholic clinic in France removed a crucifix from the wall after a parent threw a fit at its presence.

Predictably, said parent was Muslim. He actually went to the length of demanding the removal of the crucifix before he would allow his daughter to be treated. Because clearly, the little girl’s health was the less concerning issue.

Employees removed a crucifix in a room at the Catholic clinic Saint-Vincent de Paul in Bourgoin-Jallieu after the Muslim father of a patient demanded they do so before treating his daughter.

Marie-Therese Besson, manager of the clinic, says that people who choose to be treated at the clinic know that they are a Catholic establishment. It says so clearly at the entrance and the nurses wear a Catholic habit. She adds that there is a small crucifix in every room. In this incident the nurse did what was necessary to calm down the situation.

The Saint Vincent de Paul Bourgoin-Jallieu clinic is part of l’Alliance des maternités catholiques. Sister Marie-Mathieu, head of the board of directors for l’Alliance des maternités catholiques, says the issue will be brought up in the next meeting of the ethics committee. She say that they occasionally face such situations in their institutions, the last time being several months ago when a father broke a crucifix in a clinic in Aix-en-Provence and threw it in the trash. That incident was not tolerated.

The administration says that they regularly treat Muslim women and respect their wish to be veiled. Sister Marie-Mathieu says that such incidents go against the basic tenant of mutual respect.

Perhaps the question has to be raised as to whether Muslims in France are interested in sharing the “basic tenant” of mutual respect.

The latest “good guy” in the freespeecher struggle? An engineering prof at Michgan State University:

The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman.

Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student’s Association. The e-mail was in response to the students’ protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were ‘hate speech.’ Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following:

Dear Muslim Association,

As a professor of Mechanical engineeringhere at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called ‘whores’ in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris, France. This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Muslims to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile ‘protests.’ If you do not like the values of the West — see the 1st Amendment — you are free to leave. I hope for God’s sake that most of you choose that option Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.

Cordially,
I. S. Wichman
Professor of Mechanical Engineering

The best part? The university is not getting involved — what the professor said in the context of a private email is his business, and not theirs.

Brigitte Bardot? Well…yes, it seems.

Aside from [Muslim] sheep-slaughtering, Mlle Bardot is also opposed to Canadian seal-culling. But when she denounces seal-clubbing, nobody prosecutes her for Racism. Islam is everything but a race. It’s a Religion, an ideology, a politico-legal system, a set of cultural practices — and there’s something disquieting about the zeal with which the French state is pursuing her under the catch-all of “racism”. In the last decade, she’s been convicted and fined on four occasions for “inciting racial hatred”. The first was for some remarks about the number of mosques in France, and the most recent was for some observations about “the Islamization of France”. She is not a lady of moderate disposition, but it would hardly seem to be in the public interest to give the impression that these subjects are now beyond discussion.

Mlle. Bardot’s specific “crime” in this regard was her opposition, as an animal rights activist, to the practice of slaughtering sheep according to the Islamic “halal” requirements, which she deemed as cruel. Apparently, it is “racist” to say that now.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

So says Canadian Olympic Committee president Michael Chambers, responding to various local and international pressures for Canada (among other Western nations) to boycott the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

Evidently, the fact that China has a piss-poor human rights record doesn’t matter to Michael Chambers. Perhaps, then, it should be the athletes themselves who stand up and say “we will not go.”

Protests against the Summer Olympics have been large and numerous. In Britain, attempts were made to douse the Olympic Torch as it was paraded through the streets. In France, the Torch was successfully doused. And in Tibet, Chinese authorities have already killed and arrested hundreds of people in an effort to secure the path that the Torch will be taken along as it is paraded toward Beijing.

Michael Chambers thinks this will all just go away in a few weeks, it seems. Personally, I don’t think this will be the only torch-dousing we’ll see. And I think the clamour for boycotts will grow.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

An important trial in France revealed the Pallywood fauxtography machine and its media pipeline. Last week, expert testimony supported media critic Philippe Karsenty’s claim that France 2 reporter Charles Enderlin’s coverage of the Mohammad al-Dura affair was doctored and staged.

Karsenty appealed a verdict that he libeled Enderlin when he questioned the claim that Israel killed the boy who was crouching behind his father during a gunfight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian shooters. 

Al-Dura’s iconic image sped around the world and sold stamps, T shirts and the Second Intifada. It inspired violence, riots, terrorism and became a 21st century blood libel. On March 3, Israel’s Haaretz reported the stunning news that if the boy and his father were actually shot at all, the bullets could not have come from Israel’s position, only the Palestinians’.

Not that there should ever have been a reason to trust footage emerging from Palestine, but it’s nice to know that when an independent researcher finally gets a chance to look at the situation, the falsehood of the Palestinian claims is easily demonstrated. Mohammad al-Dura’s “murder” was what launched a wave of terror attacks against Jews and Israel…and it was all a lie.

Update: Welcome, Steynians! Welcome, WebElf readers!

The French police carried out a series of high-profile raids in poor suburbs close to the capital Monday, arresting dozens of people suspected of shooting at police officers and setting fires during three days of unrest in November.

The raids were supported by 1,100 police officers who surrounded buildings, forced open doors and searched homes in towns including Villiers-le-Bel and Sarcelles.

The sweep came less than a month before municipal elections that could deal a further blow to the standing of President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose approval ratings have plunged since his election last year.

Sarkozy vowed to reform France and improve law and order in the restive suburbs during his election campaign.

…

The police took 35 people into custody and were seeking several more on suspicion of arson and attempted murder of police officers during three nights of violence in Villiers-le-Bel in November, a spokesman for the police said.

The November rioting was triggered when two youths on a motorbike died in a collision with a police car. More than 130 police officers were wounded, 75 of them wounded by shotgun fire or pellet guns.

The use of firearms was seen as a dangerous escalation in hard-to-police areas where unemployment is high and many residents, especially those from immigrant backgrounds, live in rundown public housing.

Ultimately, this sort of action is the only one that a country can take against problems of the sort that France is facing. If (predominantly Muslim) immigrants insist on lawlessness, the law of the land must either succumb to their desires or exert itself in ways even stronger than any unrest those immigrants might cause. It’s nice to see that the French are taking a hard stance on this issue (finally).

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: RightGirl)

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

I admit: the photo attached to this article worried me a great deal, because it speaks to the demographic realities that Mark Steyn is, even now, about to be hauled before a human rights commission (HRC) here in Canada for re-iterating.

It’s odd enough, as PWPL blogger Andrea notes, to see a “family medal” (that’s what the caption underneath the image explains, that this is the family that won the “family medal” in Epinal, France) in a post-modern nation like France, where one would think that feminism and the gay rights movements would have advanced their respective causes to the point that any formal recognition of family would be quaint at best, and intolerable more likely. Motherhood has become very passe, so to speak, and it’s interesting that France (of all places) would still bother taking time to acknowledge it as something…commendable.

And there is something commendable about any woman who successfully raises seven children. That is something to be lauded, don’t get me wrong.

But what does it say about the future of France when the women having most of the babies are from Arab or North African (and then predominantly Muslim) countries? And what does it say about the future of France when the women winning its “family medals” are all orthodox Muslims? In three or four generations, will the indigenous people of France still be the majority population segment there? Will French be the majority language?

The above image is, I think, demographic shift…the illustrated version. And it’s worrisome.

Erf writes in with a concern over this article and the way I approached it.

Why do you keep assuming Islam fundies have some sort of monopoly on insanity? If there’s any reason to believe the murder was some kind of honour killing, it’s not in the linked news reports. There are a lot of reasons why people kill other people, even men killing their own daughters. Some of them even have nothing to do with religion.

It seems like you immediately jump to the conclusion that insane Muslims are behind every act of violence that bears even superficial resemblance to the actual insane Muslim violence (of which there is sadly no shortage). This is not reasonable. Not all crazy people are Muslim, dude. In fact, most aren’t.

There are approximately three types of murderous crimes that I gravitate toward for blogging material. One is murders perpetrated by persons of a nihilistic/militantly atheistic bent (which I typically analyze from the perspective of conformity between the act and Darwinistic philosophy), one is murders perpetrated by Christians (which I denounce and criticize harshly, especially if they are attempting to use Christian theology to justify the act), and one is murders perpetrated by Muslims. This latter category is a fairly common theme around here for two reasons.

Firstly, I don’t assume that Islamic fundamentalists have any monopoly on insanity, although to be fair I do think that Islamic fundamentalists perpetrate way more acts of violence and murder than to Christian fundamentalists. About the worst most Christian fundies will do is…you know…demand that we teach young earth creationism or intelligent design in science classes. Or bake cookies. Once in a blue moon, some idiot with a Bible will get it in his head that he should off an abortionist or something, and when that happens I think the only proper response is to denounce the act as being antithetical to the Christian message in the clearest and most distinct terms possible.

On the Islamic side of the equation, it’s harder to take the text of the Koran, or Sharia law (which is basically an exegesis of the Koran), and use those to condemn acts of murder committed by Muslims or in the name of Islam in the same way that one can use the Bible and the Catechism to condemn murders committed by Christians or in the name of Christianity. Depending on how strictly one interprets the Sharia, things like honour killings are easily justified, as is discrimination against — or persecution of — apostates and infidels.

Secondly, while I am sometimes wrong (the recent bombing of a real estate agent in France is a decent example) in “jumping to the conclusion” that some Islamonutter was the perpetrator of a violent act that bears some or all of the usual hallmarks of violent acts that have, in the past and in other places, been attributable to Islamic terrorists and thugs, I find that I’m right more often than not.

Yes, there are indeed any number of different reasons why a person might choose to kill another person, and even why a man might choose to kill his own daughter. And yes, non-Muslims sometimes do that as well. But let’s look at the evidence that we have here, eh?

Firstly, the murder happened in an “immigrant” community within the city of Malmö (the Fosie district, which which has many residents who have self-segregated on the basis of language and culture, and for whom an inability to speak the local language is often a barrier to gainful employment). While none of the sources explicitly mention Islam as a relevant factor in the immigrant community in Sweden, it does serve to note that many of the top nations supplying immigrants to Sweden are predominantly Muslim nations, with the top two being Iraq and Iran. So while its certainly a possibility that neither the murdered girl nor her murderers were Muslim, there is also a reasonable probability that they were.

Secondly, the victim was a teenaged girl, and the arrested perpetrators were her stepfather and brother. That certainly fits the classical model of an honour killing, whereby a younger girl (often a teenager) is murdered by male relatives for having impugned the family honour somehow (perhaps by chatting with a Swedish boy, something a teenager would be wont to do?).

Thirdly, there is an established pattern of these balcony-related murders — seven distinctly identifiable cases. This suggests either the work of a prolific serial killer, or else a common modus operandi among several families within communities that have higher populations of immigrants and which are culturally segregated from the rest of Sweden all around them.

So while it’s technically correct to say that there is nothing in the news reports which has explicitly said “this was an honour killing perpetrated by a Muslim family”, there are also a lot of markers and indicators that one can find upon doing some further digging. Now, admittedly, I only did that digging just now — what I said in my previous article was just off-the-cuff speculation. But based on the above, it doesn’t seem an unreasonable speculation at all.

Which doesn’t surprise, by the way, because this sort of thing has become depressingly commonplace in Europe, and may even have recently taken place in Canada. It’s completely right to note that there is plenty of “hard” Muslim violence to go around (over 10,000 terrorist acts committed by Islamist radicals just since September 11th, 2001, in fact)…but there is also an emerging undercurrent of “soft” violence in the immigrant communities of many Western nations, which follows almost in lockstep behind the rising prevalence of Islam in those communities.

And quite frankly, it has escalated to the point already that when one hears of a teenaged girl being murdered by an older male relation, one can do very little but speculate as to the probable religious creed of the victim and her murderer.

David Warren provides a quick, three-paragraph summation of the challenges that the Western world is facing today. In what can’t really be called a surprise (except perhaps by a progressive mind to crippled by multicultural pieties), Islam takes the lead role:

We (the U.S. and allies) are winning in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and losing everywhere else. The Syrians are now murdering independent Lebanese politicians with impunity. The pressure on Iran has been relieved. Pakistan is teetering towards a civil and military collapse from which only the Islamists can gain. Islamist demands for the imposition of Shariah, and for the legal persecution of religious minorities, have entered the mainstream of political life in countries that were once free of religious zealotry — Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia. Islamist terrorists are winning effective control over the remoter Muslim-settled regions in many countries of Asia and Africa, creating streams of Christian refugees from the southern Philippines, of Buddhist refugees from southern Thailand, of Christians and Animists fleeing south across the breadth of Africa.

Saudi-sponsored Wahabi Islam is consolidating its hold over the mosques of the West, and radicalizing the huge Muslim immigrant communities that have congregated in almost every major European city. Across Europe, and increasingly in North America (and as we’ve seen in Canada in the obscene “human rights” trials of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant), the most radical Muslims are exploiting state multiculturalism, to score victories over free speech and win pathetic apologies from anyone accused of the thought crime of “Islamophobia.”

Islam is a broad and ancient religion — we are not discussing that, today. We are discussing instead the contemporary reality. For internationally, Islam has been morphing into a violent and puritanical cult. Yet this very large and very hard fact is being rendered undiscussable, in historical or any other terms.

And a quick note on the current state of affairs in Egypt, a concept which is broadly applicable to the whole of the Muslim world at present:

In Egypt as elsewhere, to say that “the great majority of Muslims are peaceful, unaggressive people, just trying to get on with their lives” is to utter something deeply fatuous. The great majority of Germans were likewise, in the 1930s.

As Kathy Shaidle is fond of pointing out, Paul Revere was not credited with shouting “Some of the British are coming!” And that is because he did not need to, nor did the Minutemen need to be alerted to the impending onslaught with a wordy explanation that the Redcoats about to descend upon them were not representative of the wider majority of British folk world-wide. Likewise, in World War II, we didn’t go to war against some of the Germans, or some of the Japanese.

The common thread between those two examples, which is unfortunately missing from many peoples’ analysis of the current situation of the West vs. the Islamic world, is the concept of war. Whether a war for independence, or a globe-spanning war against fascism, it’s easier to look at the historical examples above and note that while it may be true that while our forebears weren’t so careful as to classify the enemy beyond using broad cultural categories, that is explicable because of the urgency of the conflict taking place at the time. The extension of such an argument, then, is that we in the West today are not currently embroiled in a war with Islam.

Which is true, in a sense…that is, in the sense that no war has formally been declared by means of the normal diplomatic channels. But in a more important sense — objective reality — the war is already on, and has been for some time. If, under Sharia, the average Muslim (even though s/he might otherwise be a decent sort, and quite personable), regards the world as divided into two realms — that of Islam and that of harb (War) — then whether or not any Islamic nation or group has formally issued a declaration of war is irrelevant. If in fact it is the religious obligation of Muslims everywhere to “fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection,” (Sura 9:29), then whether or not any war has been formally declared is irrelevant. Under Sharia, it is the religious duty of every Muslim to strive to bring about the day when Islam rules over all other faiths and demands their submission.

And even the rather typical sidestep that some will attempt to do in regard to the opening like of the passage above — that is, make the argument that the Muslim Allah and the Judeo-Christian God are the same being, so the above passage does not apply to other monotheistic religions — is, at best, a half truth. Even if it were completely true, and even if Christians and Jews get a pass (and if one believes the rhetoric coming out of the two major players on the global Islamic scene, Iran and Saudi Arabia, there is no way that Jews will get a pass), that still wouldn’t bode well for many people in Western society, and so is still an idea which cannot be tolerated.

But here’s the thing: the Muslim Allah and the Judeo-Christian God are, theologically, not the same being. Oh, I’m willing to grant that in the final summation, they may well be the same, but unfortunately that is beyond the scope of human knowledge. And if one looks at the revelation that has come to Christianity (which inherits directly from Judaism), and if one then looks at the teachings that purportedly came to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, there is no way to reconcile the Judeo-Christian conception of who and what God is with the Islamic one.

So even Jews and Christians aren’t exempt from Sura 9:29, if in fact they, and Muslims, stick to their theological traditions and exegesis.

War may not have been declared, but there is a war going on, pitting the ideals of the West — which, unfortunately, few enough people in the West have the necessary courage to defend — against those of the jihad. Already, this war has claimed many lives. But mere exchanges of casualties are but a small part of any war. Territory is what matters. And, as has been pointed out on this blog and elsewhere, in many parts of the West, the West is losing ground to radicalized forms of Islam, especially in Europe. That trend may already be irreversible, as well as the trends being seen in places like Pakistan, which even now teeters on the brink of falling into Islamist hands. When nuclear-armed nations like Pakistan fall into the hands of the jihad, and when nations like France begin to adopt an ever more Islamic character — and then of a decidedly Islamist bent — what will that do for the safety and security of the rest of the Western world?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

I’ve been abstaining, in recent days, from commenting on the whole Muslim cartoon controversy, primarily because I’ve been busy getting the new site operative, and also because in a realistic sense I’ve just not been up to writing about it. But I feel moved to wade in with some commentary, some comparison/contrast if you will, because of the recent (rather predictable) turn of events that has come about.

For those who have only just heard of what’s going on with these cartoons, I can recap just briefly what has happened. It began with a Danish author writing a book about the life and death of the Prophet Muhammad. He had wanted illustrations done for it, but found that nobody wanted to touch the project, nor come within ten feet of it. Not surprising — according to Islam, graphical depictions of the Prophet are haram (forbidden), and in the region around Denmark, artists who have in the past flouted the tenets of Islam, or offered direct criticism of that religion, have met with death threats, and even murder in the case of Theo Van Gogh. Many European nations, faced with stagnant birthrates of their own, have opened their doors to millions of immigrants, and many such nations now have large Muslim communities that are almost nations within themselves. This has led to any number of problems in the past: rapes committed for sectarian reasons, violence against people who criticize Islam (see above), race riots in France and Cronulla, Australia, and so forth.

And it has contributed to a climate of fear in, among other places, Denmark. That is why the Danish author could not find illustrators for his book: the artists feared a backlash from the Danish Muslim community.

As a result of this, one Danish newspaper — Jyllands-Posten — challenged artists to come up with pictures of Muhammed, and received twelve submissions. Some of them were rather lame, and others flirted with offensiveness, and one or two were kind of funny. Some of them — depicting fearful artists and violent Muslim rage at the cartoons — turned out to be rather prophetic in nature. Not that it was a hard call, I suppose. The composite image on the right is an assembled montage of all the cartoons that I cribbed off of Kathy. The pictures, clockwise from the upper right, depict the following:

• A man in a turban holding up a stick-figure sketch. I can’t remember which one is supposed to be Muhammed…but I think it’s the stick-figure. The orange ball in the turban reads “PR Stunt”.
• Muhammed, with the Islamic crescent forming the bottom of his face and the Islamic star as his right eye.
• Muhammed with a bomb for a turban.
• Muhammed with golden horns that look, from a distance, like a halo.
• A series of sketched balloons — actually the Islamic star and crescent. The words read: “Prophet! daft and dumb keeping woman under thumb”.
• A slightly frumpy Muhammed walking in the desert
• A fearful cartoonist looking over his shoulder as he draws a picture of the Prophet.
• A Muslim holding up his hand to stop two of his bretheren who are wielding swords. He is saying something in Dutch that roughly translates as “Relax folks, it is just a sketch made by a Dane from the south-west of Denmark”.
• A student named Mohammed Valloyskole standing at a blackboard. The Arabic text he has written reads “Jyllands-Posten’s journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs”.
• Muhammed, with his eyes covered by a black box, flakned by two women in full burqas.
• Muhammed greeting a line of suicide bombers in Paradise with the words: “Stop! We have run out of virgins!”
• And the middle picture, which is a line-up different people (Muhammed is second from the right, I think) and a man viewing them saying “Hmmm…I don’t recognize him”.

If you’re really curious, you can view all of the cartoons in detail here, in another posting on the site.

Okay, so these cartoons were drawn. Now what, you might ask, was the result?

Well, I said that some of the cartoons, depicting fear and backlash, were rather prophetic, didn’t I? And you may have noticed the protest rally picture that began this posting. That’s right…outrage resulted from the printing and re-printing of these cartoons. Outrage would, I suppose, have been justified, much as Christian outrage over things like Piss Christ was justified…provided that the outrage over these cartoons also took the same form as Christian outrage over Piss Christ.

Which means that boycotting art shows and writing letters of complaint would be justified. Burning embassies, making death threats against the artists and the newspaper, attacking Danish social workers in other nations, and murdering Catholic priests would not be justified. And, as Lost Budgie points out in the article concerning that priest, the cartoons are not really the incident so much as they are the reason-du-jour for violence and rampage.

Christian communities in Lebanon have been torched, allegedly because of these cartoons. What connection a Christian enclave has with Dutch secularist artists is suspect, and indeed probably does not exist. But it is as Budgie says: the cartoons are not the reason, only the thin justification. Muslim mobs can use these cartoons as the “spark” that starts the fire, but once the blaze is lit, anyone who isn’t Muslim is a legitimate target for “revenge”. That is why a Catholic priest was shot dead in Turkey, allegedly in connection with riots over these cartoons. Father Santoro’s murderer didn’t say anything about cartoons: he simply shouted “God is Great” and fired his gun…his desire was not to avenge himself upon a Dane, but instead to please Allah by slaying the infidel.

It was irresponsible of Jyllands-Posten to provoke this response, I think, but it serves to note that they do have a freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, as we ostensibly have over here as well. And the exercise thereof cannot be trodden upon to accomodate the sensibilities of any particular group…and I apply that even to my fellow Catholics. I think Piss Christ was offensive and vulgar, but I accept that the artist, being made in the image and likeness of God and therefore possessed of free will, had a right to make that picture. And even though I find it offensive and vulgar, I don’t respond by uttering death threats, or by holding up signs like these that are pictured, calling for the extermination of the artist in question, and indeed all who oppose Catholicism.

Tarek Fatah, who I mentioned previously in connection with Khalid Usman, had this to say regarding the reaction of his Muslim bretheren world-wide to the cartoons:

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“The protests in the Middle East have proven that the cartoonist was right,” said Tarek Fatah, a director of the Muslim Canadian Congress.

“It’s falling straight into that trap of being depicted as a violent people and proving the point that, yes, we are.”

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And he is right. And indeed, in all of this violence, there is irony. For when cartoons were published that depicted Muslims as exciteable and murderous, how did Muslims the world over respond? With riots and murder.