Today's assault on freedom of speech and march toward protected status for Islam comes from Italy. "Muslims outraged by new cartoon of Prophet in Hell," from the Telegraph, with thanks to all who sent this in:
An Italian magazine has infuriated Muslims by publishing a cartoon showing the Prophet Mohammed cut in half and burning in Hell.The drawing appears in Studi Cattolici, a monthly magazine with links to the ultra-conservative Roman Catholic group, Opus Dei. It shows the poets Virgil and Dante on the edge of a circle of flame looking down on Mohammed.
"Isn't that man there, split in two from head to navel, Mohammed?" Dante asks Virgil.
"Yes and he is cut in two because he has divided society," Virgil replies. "While that woman there, with the burning coals, represents the politics of Italy towards Islam."
Cesare Cavalleri, the editor of the magazine, said last night that he had not meant to cause offence. "If, contrary to my intentions and those of the author, anyone felt offended in his religious feelings, I freely ask him in a Christian manner for forgiveness."
That was a marked change of tone from an earlier statement, when he said: "We must not fear freedom of opinion." If the cartoon provoked an attack, it would only confirm "the idiotic positions" of Muslim extremists.
"This is not a cartoon against Mohammed. It is a cartoon which addresses the loss of the West's identity.
"Why all the fuss over a cartoon which only represents that which has already been written centuries ago by Dante Alighieri?"
Because Europe is weak, vulnerable and confused in a way that it was not in the days of Dante Alighieri.
I find it odd that the had the courage to print that cartoon, but not the courage to stand behind it. But then again, Italians were never good fighters. They give up almost as fast as the French. Where's that Sicilian vindictiveness when you need it? Where's that tough mob guy culture when they need it? Where's that "You-lookin'-at me?" aggressiveness when Italians could actually put it to good use?
Time to remove "The Divine Comedy" from Borders bookstores?
And all U.S. university library shelves?
And all school classrooms?
Let's be consistent.
And then remove that paragon of hatespeech-filled vindictiveness, anti-semitic/anti-Christian threats, misogyny, and global intolerance known as "The Recitation" (AKA Qur'an/Koran).
I would be willing to sacrifice Dante if we could get rid of the sanctimonious "Mein Kampf" of Mohammad as well. (And maybe all of his followers would storm out of the West in righteous indignation over this slight to their faith's founder? Please?)
We would still have thousands of great poets.
And happily be free of a pedophile "prophet"'s "holy" handbook for terror.
Read Cavalli's apologies carefully before you say it was forwarded "hastily."
He does not give in. He makes clear this is not a muslim apology. In fact he does not back off a single inch.
He first said a terror attack would prove the idiocy of extremists, He later said "If, contrary to my intentions and those of the author, anyone felt offended in his religious feelings, I freely ask him in a Christian manner for forgiveness."
And that means: Let's discuss what this is about. No pirouettes. No taqiyya.
Oh didams, poor mo mo... And maybe all of his followers would storm out of the West in righteous indignation over this slight to their faith's founder... Now there's some wishful thinking.
Why not depict the savage nature of Islam and name check the instigator? Question or display the facts openly and it's "islamophobia" giving the poisoned muslim minds reason to show their bi-polar nature - go on bite you fools! Give us a show! let us laugh at you as you transpose from apparently peaceful tolerance to frothing at the mouth hateful murderous vengence in the swipe of a pen.
If anything ought to wake up Europeans as regards the future - this bleak picture of Europe from the middle of this century ought to.
Europe's Chastisement? -- How the Abandonment of Christianity May Be Leading to Disaster
Feature by Ed Vitagliano
April 12, 2006
(AgapePress) - Anyone know where we can find some Etruscans? You know, members of the Etruscan civilization that existed in ancient Italy, predating even Rome?
Well, there aren't any. The Etruscans were absorbed by the Roman civilization and ceased to exist as a distinct people.
Ominously, if a growing number of experts and cultural observers are right, it's entirely possible that the same question may be asked 100 years from now -- only about Italians or Spaniards or Russians.
As writer Mark Steyn glumly put it in The New Criterion, "Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries."
Read it all on http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/4/122006a.asp
Hey, this isn’t the first time Mo’s been depicted in Hell and it won’t be the last time. Heck, here’s my depiction of Muhammad in Hell thanks to nodhimmitude.blogspot.com for posting it.
As soon as we stop questioning Islam and are forced to become silent, it’s at that point we’ve lost altogether.
More cartoons! More pictures of Muhammad! More, more, more!!
It is very common nowadays to hear the phrases"Muslims Outraged"," Muslims got angry"and "Muslims protest".
Recently Saudi Arabia jailed one catholic priest for conducting a prayer meeting inside his house. When just praying inside one's own home is a crime in Islamic country. Christians should not get angry,
The fault lies with us. We still stick to our Christian priciples of"turning the other cheek" to all the attrocities commited in our lands by these Islamists.
They argue that
We should not get "outraged" when they killed our own people during Sep 11, 7/7.,and bobmings and killings in Netherlands,Denmark,London,Russia,and almost every Christian country.
They think we are weak ,as we never reacted to Sep 11,and other attacks ,wherein,they expected there will be a heavey blood bath of Muslims in America,and in Europe. When nothing of that sort happend,and added to this our own 'useful Dhimmies' supported their actions,they got bold,and now a days,they get angry at the drop of the hat.Our Medias are compleatly at their disposal as most of them are bought for Saudi oil money.
It is time for us to get "Angry" too.
Only if we know how to take revenge for every action they plot against us,we can control them in our lands.
In France, Muslim students refuse to study World War II, the Resistance, and the murder of Europe's Jews. They disrupt classes, and refuse ot read, those writers -- Voltaire among them -- whom they think, or have been told to think, were "anti-Muslim." Their refusal to follow the syllabus of the Ministry of Education disrupts not only their own education, but that of others in the class or in the school. I have received from teachers in the French system horror stories, one after the other, of how even in a small town, far from the banlieues of Paris, Marseille, Lyons, a single Muslim family can, with its six or twelve children in a small local school, utterly disrupt things.
The result? More non-Muslim French will take their children out of the public system, at much greater expense. A loss to the state, a loss to the state's cohesion. And that greater expense, now factored in as part of the price of raising a child, will lead non-Muslim French, already at a below-replacement level of reproduction, to have still fewer children. And the proportion of Muslims, with their gigantic families on the French cradle-to-grave dole paid for by Infidel taxpayers, will continue to increase. Bruce Bawer gives the figures for representative suburbs or cities in Norway and Holland. But the same applies all over Europe.
So will Europeans decide that the legacy of their own civilization deserves to be protected, even if they, in their own present debasement, do not -- do something about this, including a halt to all Muslim immigration and then the institution of measures, up to and including something akin to the Benes Decree. That Decree, by which more than 3 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia, was believed by Masaryk and Benes and everyone else in the Western world to be justified, given the considerable evidence that much of the ethnic German population -- the "Sudeteners" -- porovided, both before and during the war, of where their deepest loyalties lay. And the belief-system of Islam makes clear that Believers must be loyal to, and only to, the umma al-islamiyya, the Community of Believers, and to Islam, and cannot conceivably be offered to Infidels or to an Infidel nation-state that flatly contradicts, in almost every way, the principles of Islam.
This is not a problem that will go away, or that one can pretend does not exist. It is there. Look at it. Study it. Do you want the civilization of Europe to be preserved, or to disappear, as all the pre-Islamic or non-Islamic civilizations have disppeared, at varying rates, with remnants holding out, just a little, everywhere that Islam triumphed, and came to dominate?
What is worth saving -- saving at very little cost, if only people come to their senses in time, and allow themselves the minimal act of self-defense that the government of Czechoslovakia thought entirely justified, and so did the rest of the civlized world then, and now, when it passed the Benes Decree?
Apologies will lead only to more demands for dhimmitude.
Did the free world learn nothing from the 1930s and the days of appeasing Hitler?
Has anyone been able to locate a link that actually shows the latest Mohammed in Hell cartoon? Thanks!
Another day another muslim outrage. Yawn.
Think of all the authors whom Muslim students in France will refuse to read. Right off the bat, writers who are known to be Jews or partly-Jewish: Montaigne, Proust, Perec. The writers of lai-de-France chivalry (too close to the Crusades, and besides, who wants to read about men taking women seriously). The writers who are too much in praise of Infidel France, such as that Infidel Du Bellay, with his nationalism ("France, mere des armes, des arts, et des lois" -- when it is Muslims who are the arms-bearers, and Islam which will decide which "arts" are halal and which haram, and "lois" mean nothing if they do not accord with the Shari'a or Holy Law of Islam). The writers who are homosexuals (with a taste for Arab boys picked up during their trips in Tunisie and Algerie), such as Gide. The writers who take Christianity seriously, whether or not they belief in it: Roger Martin du Gard in "Jean Barois." The writers who are, flat out, too-Christian: no more sonorities of Bossuet's "Oraisons funebres" no more Francois Mauriac, no more Maritain, no more Charles Peguy. No more study of those who glorified the individual rather than the umma -- no Reveries d'un promeneur solitaire, no Confessions. Rousseau will not do.
None of that stuff about the pre-Islamic period. All those Roman places by Racine and Corneille will have to go. All that stuff about the heaving passions of women -- what does Islam have to do with that? Baudelaire, with his mistresss's chevelure, and his drugs, and his "nuits" meaning "nuits st.-georges"? Impossible. Ditto with Apollinaire for "Alcools." By the time we are done, there will scarcely be a single author in French literature who will not turn out to be verboten in Islamic terms.
Even where a writer has done something that works on Islam's behalf, that can be cancelled out by something else he has done. Take Chateaubriand, of Combourg and points east, west, south and north. He did, after all, produce "Le Dernier des Abencerages" about the last Arab dynasty in Grenada. In French-reading Europe that work did as much as Washington Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra" did in America and England to promote myths about the wonderfulness of the convivencia in Islamic Spain. That myth lives on in college courses today, wherever (as in those taught by Mesanostrans -- google "MESA Nostra" for more) "The Ornament of the World" about Cordoba is included, so carefully, on the syllabus. That book, the writing and marketing of which deserves to be studied by students of the state of Western scholarly standards, was turned out by the former head of the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale, just recently appointed to be one of four new Sterling Professors, Professor Maria Rosa Menocal. Menocal, who presumably reads French easily, cannot explain her failure to consult the major Western scholarship on Islamic Spain, including above all the work of Evariste Levi-Provencal, who along with many others is not even mentioned in Menocal's bibliography. The enthusiasm for this feel-good project, beginning with early encouragement of a train-riding companion, Harold Bloom's wife, and the failure of Menocal to address any of the severe and unanswerable criticisms made of that book (glowing reviews by apologists for Islam do not convince), tell us much about "scholarship" today, at Yale and outside Yale. Feelgoodness in many places triumphs over mere facts or even obviates the felt need for presenting such facts, and consulting the recognzied authorities whose lifetimes of scholarship are not to be ignored.
Chateaubriand was writing nearly two hundred years ago, and he and Irving can be forgiven their errors about Islamic Spain; they were having fun. It was as much fun as tales of Atala in the American wilderness. A professor enjoying the scholarly resources that Yale provides, and failing to take advantage of them, as she writes a book of false history, not a romance, cannot be so easily forgiven.
And Chateaubriand of course will not be forgiven by Muslims for another reason. Though he did write "Le Dernier des Abenceratges" he also wrote two works of Christian apologetics: "La vie de Rance" and "La genie du Christianisme." Those works would certainly offend Muslims, and outweigh, in the Muslim scale, his abenceragiste moor's-last-sigh fantasia.
And what about Diderot and D'Alembert and all that Enlightenment, Les Lumieres, Aufklarung stuff? How can Muslims, knowing that all of wisdom is contained in Qur'an and Hadith, be expected to endure discussion of some silly Encyclopedistes, and their pointless enterprise? It makes no sense. It offends them. And Muslims are not in French schools to be offended by Infidels, Infidle history, Infidel literature, Infidel teachers, Infidel syllabi and lesson plans. No. Out with the 18th century, and of course with the Revolution itself. Who really cares what one group of Infidels does with another gorup? Does it really matter to Muslims? Should it? Should they be expected to spend their time learning about European history, quarrels among Europeans? Why? What business is it of Muslims?
And even in a vast corpus, a single misstep can be fatal in the Muslim scheme of things. Think of the prolific Victor Hugo. Americans may think first of his prose writings, especially as brought to the stage by Andrew Lloyd Weber, but Hugo was mainly a poet, the author of some 158,000 lines of verse. And here are four of those lines:
"Le divin Mahomet enfourchait tour à tour
Son mulet Daïdol et son âne Yafour;
Car le sage lui-même a, selon l'occurrence,
Son jour d'entêtement et son jour d'ignorance."
This is translated by the indefatigable Blakemores (in “Selected Poems of Victor Hugo”) thus:
“Sacred Muhammad rode alternately
On Doldo and Yafur, his ass and mule,
Because a sage himself is apt to be
Stubborn the one day, and the next a fool.”
There may be more lines by Hugo, deemed islamically unacceptable. But four lines out of 158,000 will do to cause Muslim students to reject Victor Hugo, and all his works and days.
So to that list of French Authors Muslim students in French schools will believe themselves entirely justified in rejecting, not only in refusing to read, but in disrupting classes where such authors are being taught to non-Muslim students, one must add, as a final summing-up, one more name, that of
Victor Hugo, helas!
15th Century fresco of Mohammed targeted in Italy
(ANSA) - Cagliari, April 6 [2006] - Terrorists planned to stage attacks on the Milan subway and in a Bologna church but were thwarted by Italian secret services, Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said on Thursday .
One of the targets was the San Petronio church, which had been threatened before by Muslims. This article (I believe from the Times of London) is from June, 2001:
Muslim leaders in Italy are demanding the removal or destruction of a priceless 15th century fresco in Bologna that they say offends Islam by showing the Prophet Muhammad being cast into the flames of Hell.
The row over The Last Judgment by Giovanni da Modena, in Bologna Cathedral, could threaten the already strained relations between the Roman Catholic Church and members of Italy’s Muslim community.
The recently established Union of Italian Muslims has written to the Pope and Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, the outspoken conservative Archbishop of Bologna, complaining that the fresco shows clearly Muhammad, the founder of Islam, among those condemned to burn in eternal flames.
The protesters said that Giovanni da Modena had shown Muhammad being “thrown into hell, completely naked, with a snake wrapped around his body and a demon next to him about to torture him”. They said that Muslims had never depicted Jesus or the Virgin Mary on the walls of a mosque.
In the letter they called for the “barbarous” fresco to be removed from the wall of the Bolognini chapel, inside the 14th-century cathedral of San Petronio.
In 2002, Al-Qaeda tried to blow up the church:
An Islamist terror group linked to al-Qaida is suspected of plotting to blow up Bologna's most important church to erase the offence of a 15th-century Gothic fresco showing Mohammed being tormented by devils in hell.
A key alleged figure known as "Amsa the Libyan", who was arrested in Britain three weeks ago for possessing false papers, is suspected of having passed orders from al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan and Iran to terrorist cells in Europe.
The Milan daily Corriere della Sera reported that in a telephone call intercepted by police in February, one of the suspect's alleged associates discussed plans for an attack on the Church of San Petronio, which has a large fresco by Giovanni da Modena showing the founder of the Islamic religion in hell.
The painter was inspired by Dante, who consigned Mohammed to the ninth circle of hell - reserved for religious schismatics - in his Divine Comedy. The fresco, held in a side-chapel, is seen by many Muslims as a symbol of Christian intransigence.
Amsa was monitored as he allegedly passed instructions to al-Qaida cells in Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. In one intercepted telephone call he apparently discussed an attack on the US embassy in Amsterdam.
For pictures of the fresco:
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2006/04/15th-century-fresco-of-mohammed.html
They probably never gave a thought to the fresco of mo in hell until they invaded Italy. NOW, they're inflamed. It took over 500 years to get their ire up, but, by golly it's got to go!!
Maybe it's a good thing they have no artistic culture or they would find more things to whine about.
Wah,wah, wah. Whine, whine, whine. OH Boo Hoo we have to protect mo's image.
Grow up muslims. If you're over 18 you're an adult...act like one.
OT, but the 'Borders' Quran story might just have turned out to be urban legend. At my local Borders, the Quran is sold on the very bottom shelf of the 'Religion' section.
Interestingly, at 'Barnes and Noble,' it stands aloft on the very top shelf. Hmmmm.
Interestingly, at 'Barnes and Noble,' it stands aloft on the very top shelf.
In British newsagents the mucky mags are on the top shelf. Out of reach of the very young.
So this sounds about right.
Cornelius, at my local Borders they have the Quran at the very top shelf.The whole top shelf full of Qurans and not one Quran on the lower shelves below it.
Well where the hell else should Mohammad be situated in a picture or a cartoon?
If he ain't roastin' in hell, then hell must be empty.
Dante took much of his imagery from Islamic sources--but that's not to attribute anything to mo.
"And what about Diderot and D'Alembert and all that Enlightenment, Les Lumieres, Aufklarung stuff? How can Muslims, knowing that all of wisdom is contained in Qur'an and Hadith, be expected to endure discussion of some silly Encyclopedistes, and their pointless enterprise?" (Hugh, above)
The "sophisticated" Moslem attitude to the enlightenment is summed up by Ziauddib Sardar, in a New Statesman article of 6th Feb:
"Then there was this from Will Hutton in the Observer: Islam is "predominantly . . . pre-Enlightenment". This statement has several layers of ignorance. It projects Islam "predominantly" as monolithic. It suggests that being "pre-Enlightenment" is inferior to being post-Enlightenment. It assumes that "Islam" and "Enlightenment" have nothing to do with each other - as if the European Enlightenment emerged out of nothing, without appropriating Islamic thought and learning. It betrays an ignorance of postmodern critique that has exposed Enlightenment thought as Eurocentric hot air. And, of course, it frames Muslims as "pre-Enlightenment" irredeemable barbarians."
full article:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200602060013
Among many other things this writer thinks liberal humanism was an Islamic gift to European culture.He writes for the Observer,as well, and turns up on UK chat shows as a reasonably witty Muslim with views that don't scare the horses - and to be fair, he opposes terrorism in the name of Islam. His autobiographical "Desperately seeking paradise" was described as "enchanting" by Jonathan Dimbleby when the guy appeared on BBC radio 4's 'Any questions'. Personally I thought it showed a tacit hostility towards European culture and contempt for Christianity. On the other hand he loves post-modernist philosophers (they appear to demonstrate that most European thought, to date, has been nonsense) and also has a weakness for Thomas Kuhn's ideas (he thinks it shows that with one shift of the paradigm Western science could be replaced with a re-juvenated Islamic science). Does anyone else find this guy an intensely irritating 'jihadist of the pen'?
sorry about typo: should have been Ziauddin Sardar
"to be fair, [Sardar] opposes terrorism in the name of Islam."
Sure he does -- as long as "terrorism" is carefully and tacitly defined as any physically violent actions that are not serving the interests of Islam's "self-defense" against "enemies", leaving the usual Islamic wiggle-room for plenty of physically violent actions done in the past, and yet to be done in the future.
"His [Ziauddin Sardar's] autobiographical "Desperately seeking paradise" was described as "enchanting" by Jonathan Dimbleby...
-- from a posting above
Would that be the Jonathan Dimbleby, or his execrable father, who was such a constant promoter of Arafat and the PLO back in the 1970s? I'm not surprised that a Dimbleby should find the autobiography of an obvious phony and flake and apologist for Islam likeZiauddin Sardar "enchanting."
For a very revealing example of the sheer craziness that Ziauddin Sardar offers, take a look at his review of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu's apologist history of Islamic science, that attempts to explain away the last thousand years of non-achievement -- look especially at how Ziauddin Sardar seconds the bizarre explanation by Ihsanoglu of why the Muslims, who after all needed accurate time-keeping for their five canonical prayers, never managed to develop time-pieces as happened in the Western world (see David Landes on the development of time-keeping in the Western world).
Bizarre, is Sardar. And even more bizarre is the fact that the reputable magazine "Nature" allowed Ziauddin Sardar to publish this review of Ihsanoglu's apologist history of "Islamic" science.
Hugh
Why would French Muslims bother to read Montaigne, Proust, Perec, Dante, Hugo, et al? They have all they need in the Quran.
And the ahadith. And the Sira. Allah, Bukhari, Muslim, et al were greater laureates.
I'm just offering a list of many of the writers who would be antipathetic to Muslims intent on writing their own curricula in France, a country where the Ministry of Education has been used for more than a century to deciding not merely the subjects, but the very texts, that every little French schoolchild will read, this year, and then that year, and then that year.
I could have expanded the list. I could have listed other subjects -- art history, the kings of France (just try visiting St. Denis today, to see what remains of those kings of France), music, all kinds of things. I offered only a grim sample.
well what else can we exprct from a faith that is more non tolerant than the natsis ever were under herr hitler and wats worse there proffot has tolt them that nonmuslims are not worth as much asa muslim and theyall seem to belive it
The cartoon and a few clarifications:
http://bibelen.blogspot.com/2006/04/mohammed-in-hell.html#links
The protesting muslims got it all wrong. Anyone surprised?
WallyUK
Did you see Ziauddin Sardar on the Last Word recently? (link below)
http://www.channel4.com/more4/microsites/L/lastword/top-stories/topstories-feature.jsp?id=96
Watch his smooth 'moderate' Muslim turn become increasingly hysterical when challenged - a phenomenon Hugh has commented on here in the past.
The "pre-Islamic period of Ignorance" is something that factors in heavily to the ideology of jihadists and feeds their belief that Islam is a gift to humanity and that all good comes from the Islamic way of thinking.
Perhaps this is preaching to the converted, but the achievements of what is known as Western civilization are being denied, and this idea is gaining popularity in academia, which is defeating itself and the aims of education by not instilling a pride of one's own cultural heritage.
The idea of a pre-Islamic period of Ignorance...what a repulsive, arrogant idea. Improvements may have been made in the society during the time of their prophet's life, but they are not to be found now, and those improvements or "progressive ideas" that gained ground at the time can be attributed to the existing religions that Islam built upon. Of course, this will never be accepted by those who are true believers because life before the prophet was something to be ashamed of, something backward.
Islam is nothing but good. It cures everything, and you'll learn this whether you like it or not.
Effractor,
Thanks for the interesting link. Sardar's disdain for the culture of the country where he was born and grew up has redounded on him in one way at least: his Urdu accent is so thick that at times he comes perilously close to being unintelligible.
"Islam is nothing but good. It cures everything..."
-- from a posting above
So am I to understand that in "Pennies From Heaven" (the original Dennis Potter version) in that classroom in the Forest of Dean, c. 1933, Cheryl Campbell sings to the schoolchildren not "Love" but rather "Islam" is "good for everything that ails you"? In that case, I'll have to rethink keeping that as part of my song-and-dance routine.
I stopped caring after
Muslims blew up the uss cole
Muslims blew up two embassies
Muslims blew up the marine barracks in lebanon
Muslims rammed 3 airliners into 3 buildings
Muslims butchered school girls in belsan
Muslims and the mass murder campaign in sudan
Muslims and the mass rape campaign in darfur
Muslims oppression murder and rape of christians in egypt..
So to all the muslims
Personally STUFF IT...
www.jimgoism.blogspot.com
Hugh-
It's actually even worse and earlier, circa 1925, to the tune of "Swanee" (music by Gershwin):
Is- lam,
how I loathe ya, how I loathe ya,
My daft old Islam.
(To a sprightly softshoe, ending with a perky pirouette.)
"I'd run a million miles
To escape all your wiles,
My, Ih-uh-ihssss-lam!
(Remove head, and bow.)