The cartoon jihad—a miscellany

I will keep adding new items to this blog entry as they come in, so keep checking back here from time to time. Be sure to read the e-mail sent by a VFR reader to Hugh Hewitt and John Podhoretz, and be sure to see the photos of the Muslim protest signs posted by Michelle Malkin. But there is much else of interest as well.

VFR’s American-English reader writes:

Great news!! Keep demonstrating and Jihading please don’t stop! I just hope they keep up their abominable behaviour and maybe just maybe the majority may start thinking the unthinkable, time for many Muslims to out-migrate. You can always depend on these guys to make themselves hated just when antagonism (7/7 and 21/7 and 9/11)to them is cooling down. I love an enemy you can depend on! Now if only we can depend on ourselves to be strong, but that’s another story.

Muslims stage cartoon protest

Chants calling for further atrocities like the July 7 bombings echoed around central London as hundreds of Muslims gathered to protest against the recent publication of cartoons satirising the prophet Muhammad.

SFGate.com has a story rounding up the Islamic protests over the cartoons, followed by readers’ comments that are worth perusing. Unfortunately, several of the comments say that Christianity and Judaism are as bad as Islam, but here are a couple I like:

This is hilarious! A group of people are offended by their prophet being depicted as a source of violence—so they threaten violence! The world has officially become a big, fat cartoon.

OK, it’s not really news that radical Muslims are mad and want to kill people … that’s just every Thursday for Osama and his boys.
But it’s kinda funny that they now want to blow up anybody who laughed at that cartoon. It’s funny to think of Denmark as a threat to Islam, isn’t it? Denmark isn’t even a threat to Finland.

I wonder: How can a culture that justifies crashing planes into buildings or beheading innocents find a piddling editorial cartoon too offensive? Is it any wonder we’re a little nervous about these folks getting nukes?

Michelle Malkin has the best collection yet of those wonderful Muslim protest signs in London and the delightfully attired people holding them. We don’t know when, or whether ever, the West will wake up and repent of its openness to Muslims, but if that day is to come, every sign carried by a Muslim in Europe threatening mass death to Europeans brings us closer to it. Malkin also posts some quotable quotes from some charming Muslims.

A VFR reader who calls himself Nosy has written a superb letter to Hugh Hewitt, who condemned the European papers for “offending” Muslims, and to John Podhoretz, who at The Corner said he found Hewitt’s comments to be “wise.”

Dear Mr. Podhoretz (and Mr. Hewitt, via CC:)

It is an axiom of logic that an argument commencing with a false premise cannot reach any meaningful conclusion. So if I start off to solve hunger in Africa with the premise “The Moon is made of cheese” and begin designing rockets to bring cheese back, nothing useful will be accomplished, no matter how clever I am, because the Moon isn’t made of cheese. False premise, no meaningful conclusion, end of story.

Mr. Hewitt clearly assumes that the Danish cartoonists intended from the start to offend Moslems, and that was their sole intent. This is a disappointment, because that is simply a false assumption. Mr. Hewitt usually does better research before commenting than this. Had he looked further into the matter, he would have known the following facts:

1. An author writing a book about Islam (for children, I believe) wanted some illustrations, including sketches of Mohammed but

2. couldn’t find anyone in Denmark who would consent to draw a picture of Mohammed for publication because

3. they were all afraid of beein assassinated like Theo van Gogh or at least assaulted/threatened/etc. like Rushdie.

Therefore, the Jytlands-Posten decided to commission 12 images of Mohammed, because they felt that free expression was being chilled by the threat of grave bodily harm or death from Islamic sources, leading to self-censorship. Thus a demonstration of free expression in the face of perceived intimidation was the point of the cartoons, not offending Moslems. See the difference?

Now, the cartoons were followed by demands from Moslem countries that the Danish government shut down the newspaper, which rather supports the original point about freedom of expression being threatened by Islam. Mr. Hewitt also should know that among the countries demanding the Danish Prime Minister “take action” against the newspaper were such countries as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Pakistan…as expected…but also “moderate” countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Bosnia. Mr. Hewitt should think long and hard about what this means: that even “moderate” Islamic countries demand that their religion should take precedence over the constitution of Denmark, the laws of Denmark, the culture of Denmark, the long tradition of free speech in Denmark. Even the “moderate” Moslem countries demand just a little bit of Sharia law be included in Denmark’s legal system. This is not a small issue, it is at the heart of European problems right now: shall Europe become Eurabia or not? Mr. Hewitt rightly opposes the death threats against artists, the newspaper, and other Danish persons, but doesn’t seem to understand the full implications of what is going on.

If I read him correctly, he’s calling for the West saying less and less about Islam, in the interests of peace and respect. But this is the exact opposite of what the world needs now. If anything, we need more discussion about the reality of Mohammed’s life, the reality of how Islam expanded, the reality of life for Jews and Christians (and later Zoroastrians, Hindus and Bhuddists) under Moslem rule, the reality of life today in most Moslem countries…but all of these things would offend some Moslems, and Hugh Hewlitt wants to condemn and shut up anyone that might offend Islam, so far as I can tell.

Bearing the above in mind, what friend Hugh is proposing is to give an unlimited power of censorship over all Western art, writing, music, poetry, television, movies, newspapers, etc. to any random Moslem. Given a choice between free speech and offending Islam, friend Hugh seems to choose…Islam. This is not good, and I hope I am misunderstanding him. But he, in turn, has totally misunderstood what the Jytlands-Posten cartoon “rage” is all about, and is ill served by this lack of knowledge.

Mac Johnson at Human Events has a good article summing up the history of the cartoon controversy.

Here are thumbnails (not full images) of the 12 cartoons themselves, which no mainstream media organ in the United States has yet shown, out of “respect” for Islam:

Melanie Phillips has a very good column capturing the extreme of dhimmi madness into which Britain has sunk. She also provides a link to something quite suprising. It turns out that images of Muhammad’s face are not absolutely forbidden in Islam after all. Someone has created a fascinating web page with many striking artistic images of the M man from both Europe and Islam. Its introductory material says:

[D]espite the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammed under any circumstances, hundreds of paintings, drawings and other images of Mohammed have been created over the centuries, with nary a word of complaint from the Muslim world. The recent cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are nothing new; it’s just that no other images of Mohammed have ever been so widely publicized.

This page is an archive of numerous depictions of Mohammed, to serve as a reminder that such imagery has been part of Western and Islamic culture since the Middle Ages—and to serve as a resource for those interested in freedom of expression.

The art collection is well worth a look.

Meanwhile the Telegraph reports about the refusal of the London police to arrest the Muslims carrying signs threatening mass murder against Westerners. The police said concerns about “public order,” i.e., setting off a riot, militated against their taking direct action. However, they said they are gathering information about the protesters and will arrest them, or whatever, when suitable. That’s nice.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 03, 2006 11:26 PM | Send