Cartoon protests - yes, still spamming.

[icarus]

In a new turn, a prominent Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri, invited artists to enter a Holocaust cartoon competition, saying it wanted to see if freedom of expression — the banner under which many Western publications reprinted the prophet drawings — also applied to Holocaust images.

Good point. Suddenly the Islamic cartoon protests make sense to me (if not the violence).

Comments

[cheshyre]

Get a load of this story: http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/02/cycle-of-disrespect.html

In brief:

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have caused a storm of protest throughout the Islamic world, refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ, it has emerged today.

The Danish daily turned down the cartoons of Christ three years ago, on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers and were not funny.

In April 2003, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to Jyllands-Posten.

Zieler received an email back from the paper's Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: "I don't think Jyllands-Posten's readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them."

The illustrator told the Norwegian daily Dagbladet, which saw the email: "I see the cartoons as an innocent joke, of the type that my Christian grandfather would enjoy."

"I showed them to a few pastors and they thought they were funny."

He said that he felt Jyllands-Posten rated the feelings of its Christian readers higher than that of its Muslim readers.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Uhn-huh. They have a point. "Freedom of expression" is generally tempered with tolerance. Of course, isn't Holland the place where the Islamic extremists killed that prominent director for producing a film about spousal abuse in Islamic marriages? I'm seeing a cause and effect, domino effect relationship here.

Icarus

[cheshyre]

I'll confess, I haven't been following all the details, but folks around me said Wikipedia's coverage is (currently) managing to remain pretty balanced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw clips of it on 60 Minutes. So Holland isn't feeling as tolerant as they have in the past.

Icarus

[ahina-gold.livejournal.com]

Theo van Gogh was the murdered director. I actually have the video. It isn't particularly offensive...if you're not a Muslim. Verses from the Koran written on partially clothed women could be seen as crossing quite a few lines.

Not that most people would argue that was justification for murder, but sadly all it took was one young crazy.

[orca-girl.livejournal.com]

I think the greater problem, though, is that the young crazy had the rock-solid, overt support of a segment of his culture/religion. The young crazy doesn't have enough role models within his religion telling him that that response is wrong; he has too many that are too loud telling him that it's right. Most people in the West would argue that writing a novel critical of a religion isn't justification for murder, either, but tell that to Salman Rushdie.

Someone in the West publishes a toweringly offensive cartoon, and you know, at most there's stiff words, maybe a monetary fine, maybe losing a job, social ostracization. Yet there are not insignificant number of voices out there right now calling for the beheading of these cartoonists, and they're perfectly sincere in thinking that is a legitimate response, and they aren't just a few young crazies (they're... a lot of young crazies, mobs of them, being incited by older crazies). That's the basic disconnect going on here. That's the ground lying between the two sides, right now, I think. And I start to fear that it's not possible for either side to walk across that ground to reach the other.

(Though, are there moderate Muslims who *can* cross that ground? Yes. I certainly believe they outnumber the extremists making the most violent arguments, too. But they are not finding ways to make themselves heard, or success solving the problem from within.)

[rydra_wong]

From what I've read, I think a lot of moderate Muslims feel they're being "squeezed out" between the fundamentalist crazies on the one hand and the many Westerners who seem to seize on it as a justification for Islamophobia on the other hand.

There was a thoughful piece by Tabish Khair, a Danish Muslim academic, at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoonprotests/story/0,,1703944,00.html