Reprinting THE Cartoons
With the Danish Mohammed cartoons posted all over the web, it may, by now, be an empty gesture on my part, but there are a number of reasons for posting them.
1. Most of the main stream media is too craven. They talk big, pretending that they talk truth to power, but now that they may suffer in some way by doing so, they are suddenly against offending religion. So much for the first amendment.
2. Denmark isn't in this alone. What ever rights the Danes lose through appeasement, we will all lose eventually.
3. Islamic hatemongers are using this as another tactic to force us into dhimmitude.
4. The world has not declared war on Islam. Islam has declared war on the world. Some people in the West don't want to admit that fact. It's so much easier to pretend that Islam is the religion of peace, and hope it will be their children and not them who will be condemned to dhimmitude.
5. I'm sick of the monumental hypocricy of the Islamists, their supporters, enablers, and useful idiots who expect us to accept the double standard between Islam and the rest of the world, where Muslims are never responsible for the violence they perpetrate against the rest of us, and the rest of us are Islamophobes for defending ourselves against them.
6. I'm sick of Muslim societies blaming all of their ills on others, especially the Jews.
7. My grandparents and great grandparents left Russia and Poland 100 years ago to come to America. They worked, and built businesses, and created families so that their children and grandchildren could live in freedom, and have all of the opportunities they were denied by Russian despots. I will not allow their sacrifices to have been made in vain.
8. Just as during the Passover seder we read how Moses and the Children of Israel left bondage in Egypt for our sake, so I try to do my tiny part in the battle against Islamic totalitarianism for the sake of my children and future decendents.
9. Everyone should be able to see these pictures and know what the uproar is about. They need to see the trivial provocations Muslims need to engage in violence and mayhem. And it seems that everything is a provocation to some in the Muslim Ummah.
10. The violence really began due to other cartoons peddled around the Middle-East, but falsely presented as being done by Danish cartoonists. And the MSM still panders to them.
11. Cartoonists, artists, and newspaper editors are having to live under guard and in fear, with the very real fear of ending up murdered like Theo Van Gogh.
12. As the Ummah grows, everyone else's piece of the planet shrinks. As we in the West take pride in our tolerance of others, and allow them to live in peace, we are not accorded the same privilege by Islam. Their hypocricy, their lies, and their hatred for anything non-Muslim has to be exposed and admitted.
And just for good measure, I added this Larry Wright cartoon, that the Detroit News pulled from their website because people from guess-which-religious-group were offended.
Labels: Danish Mohammed cartoons, Larry Wright
A Small Hit to the Funny Bone
In the continuing Muslim Cartoon Mania, the Detroit Free Press, besides running this great
cartoon by Mike Thompson, ran this
article called, "Religious groups decry reaction to caricatures". My favorite line is:
"This kind of violence is contrary to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad," said Dawud Walid, Michigan head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "These cartoons should never have been printed, but the Prophet Muhammad said that we should not reciprocate by returning evil for evil. We are to reply to evil only with good."
Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said the cartoons were offensive, but "under no circumstances do we accept the harming of any individuals or destroying any property or embassy in any country."
No matter how many times I hear about the peacefulness of Islam, it never fails to make me chuckle. The most honest line in the article is:
Bilal Dabaja, a student at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, said the cartoons only add "fuel to the fire" of stormy relations with the Muslim world. "There is freedom of the press, but there should be limits," Dabaja said.
In other words, "say what you'd like about anything else, but pay tribute to Islam, Dhimmi."
Nuts to that!
Labels: Danish Mohammed cartoons, Dawud Walid, Detroit Free Press, Imad Hamad, islam
Muslim leaders urge restraint over cartoons.
Yep, that's what the headline read above
this article in the Detroit Free Press. Here is the whole thing.
Michigan Muslims joined others in the Islamic world Friday in denouncing European newspapers that have published cartoons they say defame Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
Muslims spoke out against a cartoon that depicts Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb, and others. Originally published in a Danish newspaper in the fall, some of the cartoons were reprinted in several other newspapers across Europe this week, in reports about the outrage and in editorials on free speech in secular societies.
Fueling the anger is the fact that Islamic law forbids the depiction of Muhammad, even positively, in order to prevent worshiping idols or people.
On Friday, thousands of people held loud demonstrations, with some in the Sudan and in Israel's West Bank calling for terrorist leader Osama bin Laden to strike back.
But in Michigan, the concern was restrained. There were no demonstrations. One leader, while saying the cartoons are in bad taste, urged Muslims not to overreact.
Still, they were upset.
"Freedom of speech and expression -- all those things are great and we need that -- but there should be some understanding that freedom of speech does not include defamation," said Victor Begg, 58, of Bloomfield Hills, who's an interfaith Muslim activist in Michigan. "It's just ignorant."
In Ypsilanti, Dawud Walid urged Muslims in his Friday sermon at the Masjid Ibrahim mosque not to react with hate.
Walid, director of the Michigan branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he recounted the story of Muhammad's visit to a hostile village. The villagers stoned Muhammad but he didn't strike back and, eventually, they accepted Islam.
"What would Prophet Muhammad have done in a similar situation?" Walid said. Muhammad "encouraged us to be compassionate, tender and also patient. We should always take the moral high ground."
Walid and other Muslim leaders planned to meet Friday night at the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights to criticize the cartoons, but also urge restraint.
Last year, cartoons in the Detroit News and Oakland Press that negatively depicted Arabs and Islam upset local Muslims. Editors at both newspapers apologized for printing them. No American paper is known to have reprinted the European cartoons.
Pretty bland isn't it? Even the dishonest, self-serving quotes from local Muslim spokesliars are dull. If it weren't for other, nonprofessional sources of information, Detroit Free Press readers would be unaware of the massive violence going on in the name of censorship by Muslims against us infidels. Not to mention the extra spicy cartoons so thoughtfully added by Danish Terror Imam,
Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban. Add to that, thinly veiled threats of violence from Muslims in Europe and
Australia.
Are local Detroit papers purposely trying to keep us in the dark, or are they afraid of the local Arab/Muslim community, the largest in the United States? Either way, I am certainly thankful for the legion of pajama-clad bloggers who are beholden to nobody, and are constantly gathering and synthesizing information that American newspapers are afraid to touch.
Labels: Danish Mohammed cartoons, Detroit Free Press
Another Good One
Here is a good piece on the current Muslim Cartoon Mania from Charles Moore at the Daily Telegraph.
It's some time since I visited Palestine, so I may be out of date, but I don't remember seeing many Danish flags on sale there. Not much demand, I suppose. I raise the question because, as soon as the row about the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten broke, angry Muslims popped up in Gaza City, and many other places, well supplied with Danish flags ready to burn. (In doing so, by the way, they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass.)
Why were those Danish flags to hand? Who built up the stockpile so that they could be quickly dragged out right across the Muslim world and burnt where television cameras would come and look? The more you study this story of "spontaneous" Muslim rage, the odder it seems.
The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had.
It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking. Peter Mandelson, who seems to think that his job as European Trade Commissioner entitles him to pronounce on matters of faith and morals, accuses the papers that republished the cartoons of "adding fuel to the flames"; but those flames were lit (literally, as well as figuratively) by well-organised, radical Muslims who wanted other Muslims to get furious. How this network has operated would make a cracking piece of investigative journalism.
By the way, this article and the one in my previous post were linked by commentators on
Little Green Footballs.
From a
news article also in the Telegraph:
Some Muslim ambassadors expressed anger that the Danish government could go no further, repeating earlier distaste at any "expression, action or indication that attempts to demonise groups of people on the basis of their religion or ethnic background."
. . . unless you're demonising Jews, as we can see from
these cartoons from the Arab world.
Labels: Daily Telegraph, Danish Mohammed cartoons, Little Green Footballs
Some in the MSM Do Get It.
Tim Rutten offers this
piece in the L.A. Times. It's thoughtful, intelligent, and it doesn't pander to the "delicate sensibilities" of CAIR or other Islamic pressure groups who are determined to destroy our freedoms in order to avoid offending their "Religion of Peace."
Mr. Rutten begins with the Danish cartoons of Mohammed (sorry, but I can't bring myself, even jokingly, to call them offensive) and then goes on to look at the big picture.
Tolerance goes both ways
The West's current struggle with a murderous global Sunni Muslim insurgency and the threat of a nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran makes it clear that it's no longer possible to overlook the culture of intolerance, hatred and xenophobia that permeates the Islamic world. The hard work of rooting those things out will have to be done by honest Muslim leaders and intellectuals willing to retrace their tradition's steps and do the intellectual heavy lifting that participation in the modern world requires. They won't be helped, however, if Western governments continue to pander to Islamic sensitivity while looking away from violent Islamic intolerance. They won't be helped by European diplomats and officials who continue to ignore the officially sanctioned hate regularly directed at Jews by the Mideast's government-controlled media, while commiserating with Muslims offended by a few cartoons in the West's free news media.
The decent respect for the opinions of others that life in modern, pluralistic societies requires is not a form of relativism. It will not do, as Isaiah Berlin once put it, to say, "I believe in kindness and you believe in concentration camps" and let's leave it at that.
It's a great piece and so opposite almost everything else coming out of the MSM in their fear of offending Muslims.
Labels: Danish Mohammed cartoons, islam, MSM, Tim Rutten
War's legitimate object is more perfect peace. Flavius Vegitius Renatus
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CHALLAH AKBAR
