Islamic Cartoon Jihad

I've been wondering how long this firestorm over the Mohammed Cartoons has been going on. Did the riots against the Koran Flushing, or the Abu Gharib prisoner abuse go on this long?

Max Boot has the linked Op-Ed on the West being scapegoat for the problems.

I got an earful of those views last week in Kuala Lumpur while attending a conference sponsored by New York University and the Malaysian Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations. The ostensible subject was: "Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?" We never did answer those questions, but the infidel attendees did get a red-hot blast of indignation from the Muslim participants, who hailed not only from East Asia but also from Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Even though all of the Muslim delegates were intellectuals, activists, politicians and other movers and shakers, they resonated with the rage of the dispossessed. With considerable justification, they fulminated against the backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West. With considerably less justification, they blamed their frustrations on the West.

Must have been a wonderful place to be for a conference when there was so much discontent over the cartoons.

David Pipes has a piece at RealClearPolitics on the harm that will come to Muslims due to this issue.

What are the long-term consequences of the Muhammad cartoon furor? I predict it is helping bring on not a clash of civilizations but their mutual pulling apart. This separation, which has been building for years, has dreadful implications.

Some of the effects that he lists I think will have poor consequences here in the West as well.

These developments suggest what the prime minister of Malaysia, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has called a "huge chasm" between the Muslim world and the West. Or, in the more bellicose wording of the influential Sunni imam Youssef al-Qaradawi, "We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us."

Should the chasm widen, with its concomitant lessening of human interaction, commercial relations, and diplomatic engagement, the Muslim world will likely fall further behind than it already has. As I wrote in 2000, "Whatever index one employs, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom – whether measured in terms of their military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, human rights, health, longevity, or literacy."

Jonathan Gurwitz has commentary on this topic being news throughout the world, except for here in the US.

Have you actually seen any of the cartoons extremists have used to foment violence across the Islamic world? If you have, you almost certainly saw them on the Internet, not in print. You might ask yourself why that is so.

As I have previously written, one need not subscribe to Islamic theology to understand or deplore the offense caused by some of the 12 cartoons originally published last September in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten. A few of them are plainly in bad taste. Others are sophomoric. Others, in my opinion, are simply poor representations of the cartoonist's art.

I've seen them. Posted on the internet only. I do believe that the Weekly Standard published them. (That's a link to commentary on the topic at the Weekly Standard if you're interested.)

About the fascists claiming to speak for a rich and varied Islamic tradition, Taheri says, "They are not the sole representatives of Islam, just as the Nazi Party was not the sole representative of German culture. Their attempt at portraying Islam as a sullen culture that lacks a sense of humor is part of the same discourse that claims 'suicide martyrdom' as the highest goal for all true believers."

With the myths of Islamic iconoclasm and humorlessness dispelled, why wouldn't American newspapers publish at least some of the cartoons? In Europe, a handful of newspapers have reprinted all 12 in acts of solidarity with the imperiled journalists in Denmark, while also acknowledging their offensiveness.

But in the United States, where the press is usually highly sensitive to the mildest perceived chill of censorship, far fewer newspapers have published a single Jyllands-Posten cartoon — even the ironically appropriate one I describe above.

Let's postulate that all the cartoons are so tasteless as to be beyond the pale and that the sincere desire not to offend religious sensibilities has caused the American media to suppress the images. Has the same care been exercised in the past, for instance with regard to Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" or Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary?"

In this context it is quite humorous to see how many American flags and protests against America are being noted in the MSM. You'd think if the US is being so shy about this that they wouldn't be blamed for it. But I suppose any reason to blame the US for some offense must be taken up by the Islamic protestor.

Then Gurwitz pretty clearly points to the MSM's clearly identifiable hypocrisy on religious symbols.

Even as America's newspaper of record, the New York Times, sensitively editorialized last week that "people are bound to be offended if their religion is publicly mocked," its Arts page ran a picture of Ofili's dung-covered Madonna.

This raises the issue of newsworthiness alongside the principles of journalistic freedom. Doesn't the public, as in the Serrano and Ofili cases, deserve to see and judge images that release religious furies?

The Times editorial page said the cartoon blackout was "a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words."

Really? I wonder how many editors considered that it might have been easier or more prudent to describe a human pyramid rather than publish the handiwork of a few miscreants from Abu Ghraib they knew would elicit a lethal response directed at American servicemen and women.

I suppose there is no relation to cowardice on the editorial staff of the Fourth Estate. Since patent Hypocrisy is enough to deserve derision in these cases.

I personally don't see why this has had such wide-spread offense. But then, it's not my ox that has been gored.

It also strikes me that this topic has an interesting progression. The cartoons were printed and then nothing happened for five months. Then the Muslims began protesting in Europe over the topic, and tried to strong arm the press into censorship. (Which appears to be working in several EU countries.) Because of their actions, the European press reprinted the cartoons, for the reason of solidarity. This caused further reprinting and posting on the web, because now it was news. So, could I make the leap of logic, that part of the problem was caused by the Muslims protests in the first place?

This is all further proof that reality is far stranger than fiction.