The Power of Cartoons
They can cause an entire part of the world to resort to physical attacks against you merely by failing to bar their display.
Simply unbelievable.
Here is a great round-up.
Inconsistent chatter from a Sacramento-based 'Sconi attorney.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
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Editorial from the MPLS star tribune
Both sides in the cartoon firestorm igniting the Muslim world could learn quite a lot from this saying of the Prophet Mohammed: "Verily, god is mild, and is fond of mildness, and he giveth to the mild what he doth not to the harsh."
At the risk of mildly violating the prophet's injunction we'd put it this way: Stop with the stupidity, all of you on both sides.
There can be no excuse for the violence coming from a small minority of Muslims in numerous countries. Many of the violent demonstrators are ignorant of the facts, by design: Their unrest has been coordinated and encouraged by secular Muslim governments eager to burnish their Islamic credentials and redirect the anger of their own domestic radicals. Many of the cartoons those governments have had a hand in circulating -- like one showing a man dressed as a pig and labeled the "real" image of Mohammed -- are bogus. Where they came from is unclear, but they have never appeared in a European newspaper.
We understand clearly why Muslim people are upset, but there are many peaceful ways to express that upset and help educate equally ignorant Europeans to why this is an important issue.
This is also a teachable moment for Muslims themselves. Perhaps they should reflect on the unhappy reality that the Muslim world is imploding. What was once a glorious and learned culture is today in many places a culture of ignorance and radicalism. There is too little genuine education in too many Musllim places. There are too few jobs to keep young people focused positively on their own futures and not on corrosive, scapegoating resentments of what is seen as a domineering West. And the anger they now feel should lead them to examine the widespread Muslim scorn for everyone who is other than Muslim, especially Jews and the Christian "crusaders."
Then there is the ignorant Western notion that this is a "free press" issue. Baloney. Sure, a free press CAN depict Mohammed any way they want, but that doesn't mean they SHOULD, knowing how deeply Muslims feel about it. The Danish editor who started all this hadn't a clue what he was doing -- perhaps because racism is so widespread and virulent in Europe. The editor was so Eurocentric he didn't know that depicting Mohammed would cause offense. Equally ignorant was the decision by other European newspapers to reprint the cartoons in "support" of the Danish newspaper. They weren't supporting a free press, they were supporting a stupid press.
A free press can do a lot of things it doesn't do. The Star Tribune, for example, has the right to run any image it wants of Mohammed, but it has long declined to do that because it caused Muslims great discomfort. We can make fun of the Virgin Mary, but we don't. We can run the "N word" and the "C word" and the "F word" and the "MF word" every day if we wanted to, but we don't. We can call Jews and Italians and Irish and gays and Asians and Native Americans and Iowans by common vulgarisms, but we don't. We can run photos of bare-breasted women daily, as is done widely in Europe, but we don't.
Muslim leaders seeking to put out the fire are telling the angry mobs that they have made their point and need to move on. That's right with regard to the violence. But this is also an extraordinary opportunity for the West and the Muslim world to decide they will seek understanding and not a clash of civilizations. That clash is what Al-Qaida and other terrorists, radicals and extremists want, but it would be a devastating path for both communities and for the world. Let both sides take the Prophet's words to heart, reject harsh radicalism and seek mildness in their relationship.
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