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

[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