Oh dear, what seems to be the problem?
If four courts tell you No, then try a fifth. Don’t worry about boring people or being a nuisance or making a fool of yourself.
Danish Muslims are planning to take Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten daily to Europe’s highest human rights court over the publication of satirical drawings of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him)…The move comes a day after a Danish court rejected a suit by seven Muslim groups against newspaper editors for publishing the offensive cartoons…”It is a known fact that acts of terror have been carried out in the name of Islam and it is not illegal to make satire out of this relationship,” the court said.
Well that’s the problem, isn’t it: it is not illegal to make satire out of this relationship. That’s what we’re saying. It should be illegal. It should be illegal to say things we don’t want to hear. The law should say ‘Nobody may write or say or sing anything that these seven Muslim groups don’t want to hear. Never you mind how you’re supposed to know what that is; use your common sense.’ The law would say that, if Denmark weren’t such a poxy secular infidel decadent feeble degenerate impure shithole of a place. Why did we ever come here? Well apart from the jobs and the prosperity and the freedoms and the drink and the infrastructure and the peace and the good governance and crap like that.
Thursday’s ruling was the fourth by Danish courts to reject legal charges against the daily….The drawings, considered blasphemous under Islam, have triggered massive and sometimes violent demonstrations across the Muslim world and strained the Muslim-West ties.
And rightly so. Because the drawings are considered blasphemous under Islam and therefore no one in the world ought to be allowed to draw such drawings because what is considered blasphemous under Islam ought to be considered blasphemous by everyone everywhere because Islam is – well because Islam is Islam and so everyone ought to obey it. Not everyone is under Islam, but everyone ought to be, so people can’t just ignore what’s considered blasphemous under Islam, because if they were doing the right thing they would be under Islam. Because Islam ought to be in charge of everything and everyone and telling everyone without exception what to do. And if they won’t do it we’ll just sue and sue and sue and sue until finally they’ll get so bored they’ll give in.
Bilal Assaad, Chairman of the Islamic Faith Society, one of several plaintiffs, also lamented the court ruling…”We had hoped that we could put this unfortunate matter behind us and that the High Court would draw the line that establishes the limits of freedom of expression in religious matters.”
You see we want the High Court – of Denmark – to draw the line that establishes the limits of freedom of expression in religious matters in a place where we want it to be drawn rather than where the High Court or the people of Denmark or both want it to be drawn. We get to decide these things you see because we are Religious Leaders and in particular we are Muslim Religious Leaders so courts ought to be drawing lines where we say they should be drawn and not anywhere else. Because what we say goes. Can’t say fairer than that, can you.
Following the cartoons crisis, Muslims in Denmark and worldwide took many initiatives to remove widely circulated stereotypes about Islam in the West. Danish Muslims established the European Committee for Honoring the Prophet, a grouping of 27 Danish Muslim organizations, to raise awareness about the merits and characteristics of the Prophet.
Ah, did you? I’ll tell you something, guys: it’s not working. To tell you the truth it’s doing the opposite of working. It’s marching smartly backwards. The more you try to force me to admire and love the prophet, the more I hate the very word. You might be better off if you could grasp that. A lot of people don’t like being told what to think about this or that long-dead religious figure. We even more don’t like it when people try to force us to think something in particular about this or that long-dead religious figure. We find it an imposition, and an impertinence, and a species of bullying, and we do not like it. If I were you I would give it up. You’re teaching people to hate your religion, not to admire it.
And I can’t help but point out the bullshit claim – a nearly universally believed claim, but no less bullshit for that nigh-unto-universal belief* – implied by the verb “triggered” in the sentence, “The drawings, considered blasphemous under Islam, have triggered massive and sometimes violent demonstrations across the Muslim world.”
Uhm, no, actually. Yes, it’s true that the cartoons were published in Jyllands-Posten. But the widespread anger and demonstrations and riots and such-like were not triggered by the mere publication of those cartoons, several of which had been published before in an Egyptian newspaper (with no widespread controversy). The angry rioting only occurred several weeks later, after Islamist activists (note the word “Islamist” rather than merely “Islamic”) traveled the Muslim world showing mosque-based political groups and the like the infamous Danish cartoons along with some other (much more culturally offensive) cartoons that they added, which Jyllands-Posten never published.
So let’s see here: Individuals and groups actively working towards Muslim theocratic totalitarianism traveled the world showing these cartoons – suitably enhanced with extra-offensive cartoons that were never actually published – with the express (and achieved) purpose of fomenting a massive controversy and stirring up a fury of anti-Western anger, and somehow it’s the mere publication of the cartoons that “triggered” the Muslim reaction? That’s a bit like saying that the Boston Tea Party triggered the Civil War. Sure, the second thing wouldn’t have happened without the first thing, but the analysis seems to miss a few key causal steps…
And now the very same people who deliberately generated the wave of public displays of offended Muslim sensibilities (or at least their political allies) are demanding that it be made illegal to publish/say anything that offends Muslim sensibilities. For the second time in as many days, my rage is tempered only by a level of near-admiration for such a magnificent display of sheer chutzpah.
I have an alternative legal proposal. If we’re going to go around imposing speech behaviors on people as a matter of law, I think we should start here: Every journalist or other purveyor of public discourse who is aware of these WELL-ESTABLISHED FACTS about the real causes of this “controversy” should be compelled to discuss these facts EVERY DAMNED TIME THE TOPIC COMES UP so that the truth might actually have a chance to lodge in the public’s collective mind in place of this pernicious bullshit narrative that the mere publication of the cartoons caused the rioting and such. Anyone who is not aware of these well-established facts should be blackballed from any position in the media or other form of widespread public speech forever to protect the citizenry from their lazy ignorance. And anyone who is aware of but ignores these facts and blames Jyllands-Posten for “triggering” or causing the rioting and such-like – even by implication – should likewise be blackballed to protect the public from their willful stupidity.
Harrumph!
I included that asterisk at the end of the clause “a nearly universally believed claim, but no less bullshit for that nigh-unto-universal belief*” with the intention of adding some snarky footnote about certain other kinds of claims that are very widely believed but are nevertheless total bullshit. But having forgotten to include the footnote in my original comment, and now having over-explained it, I’ll just leave the snark to your imaginations. I’ve been commenting around here long enough that y’all can probably fill in the blank for yourselves.
;-)
G
G.When you are right you are so bloody right it is almost scary! O.B fine job as well you have both made my day.
These people don’t seem to understand that if you want to undermine stereotypes it is good idea not to conform to them. If they really want to ‘remove widely circulated stereotypes about Islam in the West’, they should take some advice from western spin doctors on how to do that. They might try to emulate Tony Blair’s rebranding of the British Labour Party, first by renaming their religion ‘New Islam’ and then by abandoning various long held positions e.g. the idea that the Koran is the word of god. This might just work.
Bob, I was thinking the exact same thing: it’s quite amusing how they proceed to remove stereotypes about Islam by trying to force people to “see” that Islam is the best thing ever, and everything else is filth. Instead, how about condemning honor killings with the same ardor and dedication you condemned the cartoons, for instance? Now *that* would do something to remove stereotypes.
In June 2001, when the taliban ordered Afghanistan’s few remaining hindus to wear a piece of yellow cloth to ‘identify’ themselves, I was deeply impressed when an editor (regretfully I have forgotten his name) of a now defunct American muslim magazine, called Minaret ( again to my regret, net searches for this article/magazine now turn up nothing)wrote impassionedly of how prejudicial such a move would be to the reputation of muslims globally. He declared that, in solidarity with his hindu brethren, he would wear yellow until the taliban repealed their discriminatory law and called on his fellow muslims to join his protest. I forwarded his article to quite a few people and websites that year, as many commentators, muslim and otherwise, seemed to have forgotten basic moral principles following 9/11.
That one article did so much good – not just because it was good PR, which most of us can see through if it is not sincere and consistent with actual behaviour, but because the writer had such clear vision and humanity, cutting through the murky excuses that so many others then offered as ‘explanation’.
This is the the kind of clear-eyed thinking that someone like Bunglawala will never offer, not even in his mea culpas (as in the one supposedly offering his ‘regret’ over calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989).
Who’d have the daring to actually take to task the anti-motoon jihadist who claims the prophet (and his reputation) is dearer to him than his own mother or child? Admonish, “that’s pretty sick thinking- get your priorities sorted out!”, instead of nodding sagely at the professed piety as if it actually meant something?
Yes there is something terribly funny about watching people complain about stereotypes while they are busily and enthusiastically enacting those very stereotypes.
I noticed the ‘triggered’ thing of course, because I always do, and have pointed it out many times, but I didn’t bother in this case because the source is Islamonline. One doesn’t expect impartial reporting there! It’s when the BBC and the NY Times keep recycling that blatant distortion that I go all scarlet with rage.
Heh. For some reason I was so eager to hop on the ol’ soapbox last night that I didn’t even notice the article source. But since the same lie is repeated endlessly by the Beeb and NYT and so on, I suppose it’s largely irrelevant that this time it was from an admittedly biased source that one would expect to distort this particular matter.
I do wish sometimes that it were pragmatically possible to legally require the publication of truth and ban the publication of falsehoods and distortions – but it isn’t possible, because no government or other institution could be trusted with the power to enforce such a law. I am such a fervent free speech/free press advocate for precisely that reason: If free speech/press protections make it possible to publish the truth as well as the falsehoods, there is at least some chance that the truth will win out at least some of the time.
And that’s also why it continually pisses me off that the mainstream media regularly fails to pay much attention to the truth. The world is made immeasurably worse by the failed “fifth estate” and its willingness to feed the public whatever pre-digested, filtered, distorted pablum is consistent with their own shallow, short-term profit motives and the vested, entangled interests of their corporate/government masters. Of course, my awareness of those profit motives and entangled interests at least helps me understand why the mainstream media is such a hotbed of distortion, even if it angers me.
What I don’t understand is how people smart enough to willfully engineer a world-wide display of anti-Western, pro-theocracy Muslim rage can be so stupid as to not see how this “the cartoons triggered Muslim anger” narrative actually serves their enemies’ political interests. The idea that the publication of some cartoons in the free press of a distant foreign nation could spark rioting in the streets of the mythologized, uniform “Muslim world” helps make all Muslims look like dangerous lunatics and infantile primitives that need to be opposed and controlled. A mix of thoughtlessly accepting and willfully perpetuating that sort of sociocultural prejudice would seem to be the very reasons that media institutions like the BBC & the NY Times perpetuate the big lie in this matter. I can see how the Islamsists’ interests are served by the actual stirring up of the anger amongst Muslims, but I don’t see how/why they think their interests are well-served by encouraging the Western media to keep focusing on how unable to tolerate any insult or criticism whatsoever they are – that is, how temperamental and infantile they are.
They probably fail to notice precisly because they are temperamental and infantile. Fundamentalists! Who can figure ’em out?
“European Committee for Honoring the Prophet”. They really are lacking a sense of humour aren’t they ?!
G
How are the Islamist’s interests served by this type of stirring?
My guess: It is not so much about serving their “enemies’ political interest” as consolidating their power/hold/influence over their (and I think this is an appropriate term) subjects.
Otherwise, I am as baffled as you.
As for the failures of the media (particularly those failures articulated in your first post), couldn’t agree more. My pet hate is that word “controversial”, which is usually followed by…..erm, absolutely no explanation of why or how someone/thing may be that way.