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

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I think they're not comparing the two subjects and equating them. They're saying that people take offense to jokes about the holocaust and so newspapers normally temper their freedom of speech with some consideration. That lack of consideration where Islam is concerned shows a generalized and popular prejudice.

This has fed into, apparently, a persecution complex that "the west is against Islam -- look!" Wherever Muslims are already angry the cartoons seem to be a proof that the west as a whole is united against them, that it's not just the United States seizing Iraq. It seems the cartoons are looked on as tacit approval of the Iraq war and Isreal. That's how I read these riots.

Since in the Qaran the world is divided between (was it Dar Islam and Ar Islam?) the Islamic world and the non-Islamic world, where it was safe to practice Islam and where it was not (perfectly reasonable in Mohammad's time as a persecuted religion where they had to abandon his homeland to practice Islam) the cartoons seem to say "our supposed freedom of speech and freedom of religion doesn't apply to Islam and therefore we are the non-Islamic -- anti-Muslim -- world." Suddenly the political actions of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq have a much more credible religious flavor.

It looks like the fact that the U.N. refusal to participate in the war helped keep the "enemy" the U.S., and Iraq framed as a political war for a lot of people. Since Islam (if I recall correctly) defines different types of wars, I'm guessing they couldn't call it a religious war, jihad. By saying all the west is against Islam and attacking (a pretty weak case frankly), it seems certain people are trying to upgrade so they can call for more popular support in Muslim countries against the U.S. and Isreal.

Icarus