Theodore Dalrymple muses how in regards to the cartoon controversy, it’s the French who’ve been courageous, the Americans and British spineless. In City Journal:
This time, the French have put the British and Americans to shame. From the outset of the crisis over the Danish caricatures, they have vigorously defended the right of free expression, unlike the British and Americans, whose pretence that they “understand” Muslim outrage has fooled no one and given the fanatics the (correct) impression of weakness and lack of conviction—and thus encouraged them.Two French satirical weeklies with Voltairean aplomb, Le Canard Enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo, have published a series of cartoons mocking the Islamists and their beliefs as they deserve, with a courage and frankness almost entirely missing from the British and American media.
Charlie Hebdo’s front page, for example, has Muhammad, grimacing with his hands over his eyes, saying: “It’s hard being loved by all these idiots.” On the next page, Muhammad looks at the Danish cartoons and says, “It’s the first time the Danes have made me laugh.”...
A Muslim association tried in the French courts to have Charlie Hebdo banned, but the courts firmly rejected the request, and the edition sold out quickly. The two papers have inflicted a humiliation on the Islamists, in the best possible way, by exposing their intellectual nullity to withering scorn. No one can accuse the two papers, either, of racism, xenophobia, or any of the other crimes of lèse-PC, since they criticize and mock everyone (who deserves it) without fear or favor.
The French have emerged in this crisis as far stauncher and more fearless and unapologetic defenders of freedom than the Americans or the British. In this instance, they have stuck to an important principle without calculation of immediate interest or even short-term consequences. They find the equivocations of the Anglo-Saxons strange, spineless, and reprehensible, and in this instance they are absolutely right.
For what its worth, I believe its important to make a distinction between the American people and our media outlets.
Even here in the liberal bastion of Minnesota, the main Twin Cities newspaper has been chastised for its failure to show the cartoons in concert with the articles written about them.
Go online and you will find a great deal of consternation and indignation at the outrageous muslim reaction to the cartoons.
Unfortunately I dont own a newspaper, if I did you can be sure this story would be front page as long as it remained current.
Feawess Fwench? Au contraire!
OT, but sort of related:
The Blog 'America Awakes' has disappeared. It was a fairly new one, I believe, and like many others was covering the islamofascists movement.
Is anyone aware of any others disappearing? (outside of the Spanish one, which I hear is now reinstated)
The two previous comments show two excellent point: the first comment shows that these days, the media does not represent the opinion of the bulk of the population. The second post shows that some companies will sell their soul to the devil to earn a buck.
Carrefour sucks. They start by having a large variety of products, and after the costumers get used to going there to buy their monthly "supplies", they slowly replace the products in their shelves with "made in France" products only, some of them of relatively poor quality. I stopped buying there years ago.
To see or not to see: that is now our question. For the past week and a half, the biggest global story has been the rioting, violence and murder that has exploded over a dozen cartoons in a Danish newspaper.
Former president Bill Clinton has called the cartoons “totally outrageous”. Many mainstream Muslims have claimed that they are indeed offended by them. The Archbishop of Canterbury has opined that they have hurt many feelings and cast a shadow over Christian-Muslim relations.
Others have claimed, in contrast, that the cartoons are tame and cannot even faintly be described as offensive — certainly no more offensive than any number of other cartoons that are published all the time.
That’s my position, by the way. I think that much of the “offence” is contrived, that it has been manipulated by Islamists and the Syrian and Egyptian governments to advance their own agendas, and that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published them, deserves high praise for facing down Islamist bullies.
But enough about me. What are you to think? 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.
But then, of course, there is what makes this war different. This war is the first to take place in the online era. The web has made it possible to see almost all of it, if you look hard enough. Only the government-withheld Abu Ghraib pictures are seriously out of view for most people.
And so we have two media now in the world. We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward for what is fit to print, to become an arbiter of sensitivity, good taste and political correctness. And we have web pages like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, data, images and opinions that readers can judge with the benefit of all the facts, not just some of them.
If you want to see why newspapers are struggling, surely this is part of the reason. They have forgotten their fundamental task: to provide information.
Yes, the internet has its own censorship problems. Google just caved in to China. Yahoo! may even have helped identify a dissident to the Communist authorities. Many oppressive governments have found ways to shut down websites, police access to the online world and censor what readers can find. Your privacy may be at risk.
On the web there are no editors filtering fact from fiction. But in a case like this it’s an easy decision. If you want the full story, including indispensable information to make sense of it, you have to go online. The good news, of course, is that the truth is still out there. Maybe we have the perfect solution: newspapers can sustain public propriety, while readers can find out the raw facts for themselves on the web. But the bad news is that the Islamists have just scored a huge victory.
Their hope has always been what can only be called creeping sharia. Bit by bit, free societies abandon small freedoms to accommodate the sensitivities of Muslims or Christian fundamentalists or the PC police or other touchy fanatics. Bit by bit, we cede our freedoms to fear and phoney civility — all in the name of getting along.
Yes, in this new war of freedom versus fundamentalism I always anticipated appeasement. I just didn’t expect the press to be among the first to wave the white flag.
Respect is not a right. Almost anything one can think of these days is, supposedly, a right, and judging from the angry demands on all sides for respect, one might easily be bamboozled into thinking respect is somehow a right as well. Not so, rightly not.
Yet all the terrifying Muslim uprisings across the world in response to the Danish cartoons have all been about a demand for respect, as of right. They are demanding respect for religion, or at any rate for their own religion and their own religious sensibilities. The same is true of the more moderate demonstrations in London yesterday. Worse, many westerners are penitentially admitting that Muslims do indeed have a right to respect for their faith, and that it is wrong to express disrespect for a religion. This is disastrous.
Yesterday’s demonstrations were organised by the new Muslim Action Committee, which claims to represent more than 1m Muslims. They may indeed be moderates, as they claim, yet what they say sounds anything but moderate. They demand changes in the law and a strengthening of the Press Complaints Commission code to outlaw any possible publication of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in the UK. “What is being called for,” said Faiz Siddiqi, the committee’s convenor, “is a change of culture. In any civilised society, if someone says, ‘don’t insult me’, you do not, out of respect for them.”
Here in one sentence lies the entire, tangled problem; it is all entwined round several different uses of the word “respect”. First of all there is a tendentious conflation of respect for one’s religion and respect for oneself. It may be true that in traditional Muslim thought a perceived insult to the Prophet is an insult to the believer, but in western culture there is a crucially important — and highly prized — distinction. Freedom of speech depends on people accepting that criticism of a belief, even aggressive, satirical or offensive criticism, is not necessarily intended to insult a person or an ethnic community.
Even in cases where perhaps it might be — where the criticism of a belief is quite clearly disrespectful — then putting up with that is the price of freedom of speech, and a price well worth paying.
Freedom of speech is the keystone of western civilisation, of individuality, of scientific discovery, of wealth and of democracy; without it, the entire edifice would collapse.
Indeed it is arguable that it has been the lack of freedom of speech, along with an excessive respect for authority and religion, that has for centuries held back and impoverished the once great civilisation of Islam. Faiz Siddiqi’s call for a change of culture is indeed nothing less, and a very destructive and retrograde one at that.
Of course, Siddiqi is right in saying that in any civilised society, most people do generally avoid insulting other people’s beliefs, but that is not necessarily out of respect for them, or for their beliefs. It is very often out of an overriding respect for something impersonal — for the benefits of civility in a civil society and above all for the ideal of tolerance.
I personally have always been enraged by Catholic teachings, or by Maoist doctrines but I have no desire to insult Catholics or Maoists personally, merely a temptation to argue with some of them. I have been to parties where thumping crooks have been treated with great civility by other guests, for a similar reason. But it would be wrong to mistake that sort of civility for respect.
Respect cannot be demanded, or imposed by a free state. It can only be freely given. The demand of Muslims for uncritical — and legally binding — respect for their beliefs is simply not one that can be met in a society like ours. And the failure, by some Muslims at least, to perceive these distinctions is, without exaggeration, tragic.
It is a failure for which we in the West — we in this country — bear a great deal of responsibility. Until very recently, the doctrine of multiculturalism reigned supreme here. For at least 15 years public services and the liberal media have been riddled with the idea that all cultures are equally deserving of respect, and that the values of the host culture are not supreme, but on the contrary, rather racist and oppressive (so possibly not equally deserving of respect). At last this has come to be understood. There are countless examples: the finding of the Climbie report that social workers were inclined to apply different standards to different cultures, and therefore overlooked or explained away what was happening to the wretched Victoria; a similar lack of will to question religious practices such as exorcism.
Others include the decision of HM chief inspector of prisons not to allow the English flag in English prisons, in case the red cross might be offensive to Muslims; the blind eye that is turned to physical punishment of young children and long hours in some madrasahs; the shameful tolerance here of domestic violence and arranged marriages of convenience to highly unsuitable strangers, in the name of religion; the public library in Buckinghamshire that banned a notice of a Christian carol service and yet held a party to celebrate Eid at the end of Ramadan. These things are done, apparently, out of a desire to show equal respect to all faiths.
Quite why large sections of the host culture here were taken in by the confused claims of multiculturalism remains a mystery to me. But the consequence is that many Muslims (among others) have come to believe that we agree that their religion and culture are entitled to unquestioning respect. They must have seen that the post-Christian majority, especially in the state sector, has been mired in an unthinking relativism, and has lost the conviction to stand up for essential western values.
What’s more these state organisations have humbly accepted the charge that they are institutionally racist, which has further demoralised them. This is a very extreme form of trahison des clercs — the betrayal of the functionaries. It is hardly surprising, now, that the more extreme and politicised Muslims and their unthinking hangers on feel entitled, in defiance of our greatest freedoms, to demand respect from us, as of right. The tragedy is that what they are now getting from the rest of us is not respect at all, but fear, posing as respect
Who controls our news sources? I have provided the link below and one of the examples in this post.
http://www.thinkandask.com/news/mediagiants.html
Time Warner Inc. owns all Time Life Book companies (27 in all)
On Cable:
HBO, CNN (8 CNN networks), Court TV, Time Warner Cable services, Road Runner interactive services, New York 1, Kablevision (Hungary)
On Film and Television:
Warner Bros. (studios, film production and distrbution,) WB Television Network, Hanna Barbera Cartoons, Telepictures Production, Witt - Thomas Productions, Castle Rock Entertainment, Warner Home Video, Warner Bros pay TV, Warner Bros Theaters, TBS Superstation, Turner Network Television, Turner South, Cartoon Network (3 channels), Turner Classic Movies, TNT, New Line Cinema, Fine Line Features, Turner Original Productions
In Print:
Time Magazine (8 publications,) Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated (3 magazines,) People (4 publications,) Entertainment Weekly (2 publications,) and 58 additional monthly or weekly publications.
In Music:
Time Warner Music, Atlantic Records, Rhino, Elektra, and 49 other music production companies.
In Partnership:
Joint ventures with Sony on Columbia House marketing, Music Sound Exchange, Viva, Channel V, Heartland Music,
Online:
CompuServe Interactive, AOL and subsidiaries, The Knot Inc, MapQuest.com, Spinner.com, Winamp, DrKoop.com, Legend.
In Sports:
Atlanta Braves
In Retail:
MovieFone, iAmaze, (partial) Amazon.com, Quack.com
"The two papers have inflicted a humiliation on the Islamists, in the best possible way, by exposing their intellectual nullity to withering scorn."
-- from the article above
Mockery is a valuable supplement to all other weapons. Ali Sina, who knows his world of Islam, keeps suggesting at www.faithfreedom.org that the more Defenders of the Faith are simply shown as ludicrous this can do much more good than declarations of "respect" and one more call for empty "dialogue" -- for all "dialogue" that does not deal with specific passages in the Qur'an, stories in the Hadith, and details of Muhammad's life. The "dialogue" that the Catholic Church has attempted in the last forty years to have with both non-Catholic Christians and with Jews has been useful because it was not one of empty delcarations, but of examination of specific passages, particular doctrines, and the way they could or should or might be either interpreted or changed).
There is no need to take those who argue in a primitive fashion seriously. There is no need not to expose the obvious taqiyya-and-tu-quoque. There is no need not to remind people of which civilization has steadily made progess over the last two thousand years, and which, after a few hundred years of "civlization" based in large part on the conquest of others, the enrollment of those Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians in what was then claimed to be the result of Islamic civiliziation, when in fact the Jewish and Christian translators and scholars, or those who were officially Muslim but in fact only a generation or two away from their Christian and Jewish background, and all this in the period before the iates of Ijtihad swung shut with a thud, and Islam itself became permanently paralyzed, as it was doomed to do given the insistence that the Qur'an was the immutable Word of God, and the elevation of Muhammad as the model for all mankind, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, a Muhammd quite different, in every way, from the figure of Jesus (whether human or divine). The difference between the figure of Muhammad and the figure of Jesus, and the way in which Islam became a system for the Total Regulation of Life, and in which all mankind was divided between the Believers and the Infidels. The former were the umma al-islammiyya, the Community of the Believers in Islam, Islam "which is to dominate and not to be dominated." The latter, the Infidels, were either to be killed, converted, or if they were people of the book, could be allowed the third option -- that of a permanent status of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity.
Blake's famous first line may here be appropriated, and applied in quite a different manner, one that does not denounce but rather approves:
"Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau."
Don't you love the way that this whole controversy revolves around pride and humiliation? What humiliation? Mohammed has been dead for 1350+ years. He is beyond humiliation. More to the point is the humiliation we mount upon each other in the form of physical and verbal abuse.
Institutionalized abuse and humiliation by Christianity upon non-Christians and Christian heretics, in the name of Christianity, was the norm that was given up hundreds of years ago. As we speak, Islam continues to abuse and humiliate non-Muslims and co-religionists in the name of Islam. This is humiliation. The publication of cartoons is no more the same as humiliation as labeling the wearing of underwear on one's head: torture.
The cartoons may be tasteless and insensitive, but they convey a truths about Mohammed and the behavior of many Muslims. They are not abuse. The intimidation of the Danes, vandalism, burning of embassies, threats on freedoms and free speech is abuse.
This is what I heard on BBC online by a British muslim woman.
"The prophet is so central to our sense of self, and that shapes everything that we think and that we do. It's like they are attacking the very essence of our being. Our religion is implicated with our personal identity and personal self-hood. An offence against the prophet is an offense against us. It's a personal thing. We feel it as personally against us muslims as though they were attacking the source of our very existance."
So to attack Mohammad is to attack muslims, because their personal identity is wound up with Mohammad. This is why it is such a dangerous cult. But we also know their weakness. Attack Mohammad, and you attack them.
Mohammad, the pedophile warlord despot, deserves all of the satirical scorn that a sea of india ink could wash over his intolerant corpse.
The colossal and catastrophic failure of the U.S. press (except for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a partial handful of others) is that they have failed to do the backround analysis of the meaning of the cartoon's main character: Mohammad.
Any such biographical portrait, drawn from the Hadiths, would be enough to make anyone in the audience understand that the verboten caricatures were far too mild, and were themselves, with one or two exceptions (like the bar-across-the-eyes sword-wielding Mo) ham-strung and uninformed as to Mohammad's real, brutal character.
Not showing political lampoons, since Mohammad is a political as well as "religious" figure, betrays the Press's cowardice.
They are simply spineless, lickspittle pansies.
Toadying for Islamo-buck, and fearful of the miliant bomb- whether shaped like a turban or not.
They fail to address the story's roots in the fear that ALL Danish children's book illustrators displayed when a popular Danish author, Kare Bluitgen, tried, and utterly failed, to find ONE artist in Denbmark with the testicular fortitude enough to merely draw little pictures of Mohammad's life for his tiny kiddie book.
The editorial cartoonists- of the 12 Mo's- were commenting as much on Danish artworld cowardice (one shows an artist at his drawing board cringing as he sketchs the face of an angry Mohammad) as it was on the Hadithic/Koranic details of the iontolerant behavior and core violent tenets of Mohammad's life.
Has the U.S. Press even bothered to report this, cartoons or no?
Almost never.
And, with the exception of Fox and ABC news (once), the t.v. stations are equally culpable of chickening out en masse.
Shameless pandering to the paranoid Islamic Imperialists.
And one more nail in the coffin of the paper press and airwave hucksters as the internet surpasses their shuckin' 'n jivin' with its naked reporting of the facts, ma'am, just the facts.
Let them hide. And dissemble. And pretend to be "understanding". They'll be swept into the same tide of despotic theocratic carnage, kowtowing all the way.
I spit on them.
profitsbeard:
I agree wih you.
What muslims or muslim religious leaders to be more precise, are trying to do in this cartoon affair, is to pre-empt the truth of mohammed's character coming out for general view. They know that if they do not stop this here and right now, it won't be long before a thorough examination of mohammed's life and general character would be under the microscope. It does'nt surprise me one whit that the imams would not like this, and hence this outrage, which has been carefully orchestrated, over a few cartoons.
France upgrades nuclear arsenal in wake of French President Jacques Chirac’s warning – Liberation
February 12, 2006, 10:18 PM (GMT+02:00)
French paper’s military source reports two major changes: nuclear bombs can now be fired at high altitude to create an “electromagnetic impulsion” to destroy the enemy’s computer and communications system; and the number of nuclear warheads has been cut down to enhance the missiles’ range and precision.
http://debka.com/
Hi first time poster here.
Normally I would be in 100% agreement regarding the MSM in the US printing the cartoons. However... given we have soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who require the assistance of the local government and the local populace would it really be a prudent thing to do right now?
I am all for freedom of the press but are posting these cartoons worth jeopardizing the missions we have in those countries?
You know the old saying: "choose your battles wisely".
It is just a thought.
These cartoons might well have been a golden chance to precipitate a decline and perhaps the eventual fall of Islam. Unfortunately, thanks to political correctness, we probably shall never know what might have happened over the next 5 or 10 years. Islam has to be mocked and ridiculed into the 21st century. It's far cheaper to use ridicule and cartoons than bombs or bullets, and it would have achieved far more in breaking the power of the mullahs. For them to be made to see themselves as an 8th century anachronism in a 21st century world could have done wonders. But the spineless and supine PC brigade thought otherwise, and thanks to the PC weenies, the portents for the future, with the global Muslim population doubling in 24 years and quintupling in 55 years - the result of 3% annual growth, will mean that a West, with around 35-40% of its population 60 years old or more, will be confronted by a fanatical Islamic world several billions stronger in the second half of this century - a nightmare scenario that could have been so simple to avert.
Islamic Protestors in Paris Come Face to Face with an Unexpected Counter-Protest
posted by Erik @ 12:49 PM
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/
When they arrive at La Nation, they are met with two figures wearing slightly different costumes and slightly different signs.
qOne, in red and white, is (silently) wearing a sign with the Danish flag saying "Support Denmark, Support free speech". Besides (silently) wearing a sign reading "Free Cartoonist".the BAF protest warrior-type organisation, is holding a (fake) severed hand, a pen among its fingers.
Good on yer' France!
Is'nt it time Americans Brits and Aussies took to the street to defend their democracies?
How would RED KEN react if Londoners demanded to march in peaceful protest against against islamic terrorism ?
cruelworld-
When the cartoon cat is out of the bag, the battle is already on.
To duck it makes you look weak.
That encourages further attacks.
Better to be hanged for a ram than a lamb.
I think we rely too much on the PC culture of government in Europe to judge the whole part of a country. it takes one courageous leader to speak out, and the people will follow! there is a void now in Europe, l think they are all afraid of a Hitler type of person emerging. this fight to free speech will help unite the Europeans! its the spark that began the Revolutions! Voltaire had it right!
Truth4u
Pardon me for asking, but what do you mean when you say that a lack of will to question religious practices such as exorcism is an example of the doctrine of multiculturalism reigned supreme?
You can view the Charlie Hebdo comics here:
http://permanent.nouvelobs.com/medias/20060208.OBS5607.html