Why I Published Those Cartoons

[Traditional_Ang]

BROTHERS AND SISTERS - Please read this first article as it wwill be be yanked on SUNDAY!

I believe this article is important - It says why Fleming Rose published the original cartoons back in October.

Why I Published Those Cartoons
By Flemming Rose
Sunday, February 19, 2006; Page B01

Those examples have to do with exercising restraint because of ethical standards and taste; call it editing. By contrast, I commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam. And I still believe that this is a topic that we Europeans must confront, challenging moderate Muslims to speak out. The idea wasn’t to provoke gratuitously – and we certainly didn’t intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.

At the end of September, a Danish standup comedian said in an interview with Jyllands-Posten that he had no problem urinating on the Bible in front of a camera, but he dared not do the same thing with the Koran.

This was the culmination of a series of disturbing instances of self-censorship. Last September, a Danish children’s writer had trouble finding an illustrator for a book about the life of Muhammad. Three people turned down the job for fear of consequences. The person who finally accepted insisted on anonymity, which in my book is a form of self-censorship. European translators of a critical book about Islam also did not want their names to appear on the book cover beside the name of the author, a Somalia-born Dutch politician who has herself been in hiding.

Please read the rest ofthe article here before Sat. Night!
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021702499.html

I will post a response from a moderate Muslim as well as a non-Muslim, and what the riots have done to Islam worldwide.

In Christ, Michael

[mod note: edited down as per forum guidelines. Changed title to reflect news article as per forum guidelines]

 

[Traditional_Ang]

Brothers and Sisters - The following is a response from a “Moderate” Muslim to the Cartoon Controversy.

How Muslims are caricaturing ourselves
By Irshad Manji - Posted Feb. 12, 2006
As Printed in the Wall Street Journal Feb, 4, 2006

*To judge the root problem here, let us first determine how the cartoons became an international incident. Last September, these comics ran beside a story about the hurdles encountered by a Danish author in finding someone – anyone – to illustrate his children’s book about the Prophet. Every artist he approached declined the job out of fear of having to contend with Islamist extremists.

As if on cue, two of the people who produced these drawings received death threats in October 2005. We Muslims love to lecture about the need to assess touchy matters – such as offensive Koranic verses – “in context.” The context in which the Muhammad cartoons first appeared suggests that frustration, not malice, was the motive.

Then a group of Danish imams took the cartoons to the Middle East. Complaining of press bias, they distributed the drawings – and fabricated a few of their own to ensure that unrest would be sown. One of the extra sketches, for example, portrays the Prophet with a pig’s snout.

Muslims have little integrity demanding respect for our faith if don’t show it for others. When have we demonstrated against Saudi Arabia’s policy to prevent Christians and Jews from stepping on the soil of Mecca? They may come for rare business trips, but nothing more. As long as Rome welcomes non-Christians and Jerusalem embraces non-Jews, we Muslims have more to protest than these cartoons.

For one thing, the Koran itself points out that there will always be non-believers, and that it’s for Allah, not Muslims, to deal with them. More than that, the Koran says there is “no compulsion in religion.” Which suggests that nobody should be forced to treat Islamic norms as sacred.*

Please read the article and the responses here:
muslim-refusenik.com/letters.html#wsj_2006_02_04

I believe that the “High moral tone” of the the responses, along with their literary value, is indicative of how this debate is handled in the Muslim world.

In Christ, Michael

 

[Traditional_Ang]

Brothers and Sisters - The following represents the frustration many have had with the self-censorship impossed as a result of death threats and the bombing of embassies and newsrooms.

The Sunday Times - Islamo-bullies get a free ride from the West
andrew sullivan
February 12, 2006

*…You’d think, wouldn’t you, it might be helpful to view the actual cartoons so you can see what on earth this entire fuss is about. But the British and American media have decided that it is not their job to help you understand this story. In fact it is their job to prevent you from fully understanding this story. As of this writing no major newspaper in Britain has published the cartoons; the BBC has shown them only fleetingly and other networks have shied away. All have decided not to give you this critical information, without which no intelligent person can construct an informed and intelligent position on the matter. You’re on your own.

The reasons given are conventional enough: the press doesn’t want to inflame matters further; the cartoons are indeed offensive, and no editor has to publish images that would appal readers; reprinting would merely play into the hands of extremists, and so on.

The one argument you haven’t heard is the one you hear off-camera. Many editors simply don’t want to put their staffs at risk of physical danger. They have “offended” Muslims in the past and learnt to regret it. In New York the editors of a free alternative paper, the New York Press, decided they wanted to run the cartoons so their readers could have a grasp of what this huge story is about. The owner refused. The staff quit en masse. The editor claims the owner gave him a simple explanation: “I’m not putting lives in danger. We’re not getting things blown up.”

None of these arguments is risible. An editor has no responsibility to publish anything he doesn’t want to. A publisher has every right to protect his own staff from physical danger. But what all the arguments amount to is simple: the press is refusing to do its job.

The fundamental job of journalists is to give you as much information as possible to make sense of the world around you. And in this story, where the entire controversy revolves around drawings, the press is suddenly coy. You can see Saddam Hussein in his underwear and members of the royal family in compromising positions. You can see Andres Serrano’s famously blasphemous photograph of a crucifix in urine, called Piss Christ. But a political cartoon that deals with Islam? Not our job, guv. Move right along. Nothing to see here.

The withholding of truth has, of course, been one of the recurring themes of this war. We were not allowed to see the video deaths of those who jumped out of the World Trade Center. We were not allowed to see the coffins of soldiers arriving back in the US. We are still not allowed to see the most revealing photographs of what really happened at Abu Ghraib (the legal case is still tied up in appeals). We were not allowed to see the beheading of Nick Berg. And now we are not allowed to see . . . cartoons. Cartoons! The very things newspapers are designed in part to publish.*

timesonline.co.uk/article/0,2092-2035815,00.html

What this means is that most people have never been able to see the Cartoons that were supposed to be behind the riots, or the ones that actually were being the riots, or the difference between the two.

This means that many have been commenting either on the basis of Islam’s demands that no Muslim portray the Prophet, or that people have been commenting thinking that the cartoons were more offensive than they actually were.

Neither is a good starting point when commenting on the subject of Freedom of Speech v. Defamation and Incitement. It is better to start with the truth than with the distortion most of us were handed as a result of what was described above.

In Christ, Michael

 

[Traditional_Ang]

Brothers and Sisters - This describes how the riots have furthered the isolation of the Islamic world from the rest of the modern world

How the Cartoon Protests Harm Muslims
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun - February 14, 2006

*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.

Signs of disengagement are all around.

Trade: Boycotts now exist in both directions. Even as the U.S. government sanctions Iranian products, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says his government will “revise and cancel economic contracts” with countries where newspapers published the cartoons. Several Muslim countries have suspended trade with Denmark, while Muslim-owned stores in Canada have removed Danish products. The Pakistani medical association even announced a boycott of medicines from five European countries.

Financial investments: As a result of freezes on funds and the designation of terrorist entities, Muslims have moved large amounts of capital out of the West and invested these either in their own countries or in other places around the world, such as East Asia. Middle Eastern oil exporters before 9/11 annually put as much as $25 billion into American investments; since then, the amount is about $1 billion a year.

Tourism: Islamist atrocities such as the murder of 60 Japanese, German, and Swiss tourists in Luxor in 1997 or the abduction of 32 German and other travelers in the Sahara in 2003 had already led some Westerners to avoid discretionary travel in the Muslim world. Cartoon-related violence has prompted a Danish advisory warning citizens against travel to fourteen Muslim countries. Scandinavian tourist companies have cancelled many tours to North Africa.

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.”

Disengagement will only worsen the Muslim predicament. Reduced contact with the world’s most modern, powerful, and advanced countries would likely cause Muslims to do even worse in those indexes and lapse deeper into a condition characterized by self-pity, jealousy, resentment, anger, and aggression.*

Read the Reast of the article here:
danielpipes.org/article/3386

This is very important, because Islam is gradually isolating itself from the rest of the world, and this Islam isn’t the islam that generated ideas and created things like the Islam the Mongols devasted in the 11th and 12th Centuries.

In Christ, Michael