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:
“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.”
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.
