Wow, that's interesting and an important lesson. Between this and some
offline conversations with Eugene, Chris, and my family, I've decided to
take down the Muhammad cartoons. Except the "stop stop we ran out of
virgins" one. I also have a picture there of a sculpture on the wall of
the US supreme court depicting Muhammad carrying a sword. I found out
about that from one of the articles James pointed us to. Pretty
interesting.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves/improvetheworld/muhammad/
(If you want to see the originals, they're now linked to on wikipedia.)
Oh, and in case anyone missed the article Matt sent, it has some great
observations on this whole controversy:
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/oped/would_you_like_havarti_wit...
reedom_fries.php
Here's the full text, with some formating lost:
Embassies have been torched, several people have died, ignorance flows
from all corners?all for a few cartoons less intelligible than your
average ?Cathy? strip. Welcome to the new medievalism.
And then the Vatican weighed in on the Danish cartoon freakshow that is
now literally burning up Eurasia. ?The right to freedom of thought and
expression,? said the little city-state that could, ?cannot entail the
right to offend the religious sentiment of believers.?
Cannot? Really? Uh, screw you, New Pope!
Who?d have thought World War III, the war between secular societies and
theocratic ones, would have come to a roiling boil over a dinky Danish
newspaper?
But last week, bat-shit crazy theists of all stripes, international policy
suckjobbers, NGO lifers, and European and American publicist-trained
politicians and their dumb-eyed lackeys together hit a wall with the
international incident.
Instead of blaming imams who toured the Arab world with inflammatory
material of unknown origin, instead of say, keeping their mouths shut, the
only way politicos could find to weasel out of their troubles was by
trashing the international free press.
(Certain disclaimers should apply here: Is the international free press
really free? Anyone who?s worked for a newspaper publisher would have a
good chuckle over that. Yet still.)
Because there is a war on, Western politicians?undoubtedly because of
animalistic impulses from their reptile brains?began to replicate the sort
of thinking that motivated the Sedition Act of 1918. Except, somehow, this
time, it?s in reverse.
Now no one must speak badly of his enemy.
This is pretty funny in America, for sure, where a majority of the
citizenry doesn?t particularly want to even be at war with an enemy.
[People have revealed themselves to be, in varying degrees, psychotic,
venal, petty, superstitious, medieval, opportunistic, and very, very
stupid.]
Even the rah-rah-kill Bush administration, the Bush administration
of the Axis of Evil, the pro-torture Bush, the Let?s Roll! Action Figure
Bush and the Mission Accomplished, No Really! Bush, seemed to morph into
the wussy-handholding (yet secretly bomb-friendly!) Clinton
administration?and not at all in a good way. Before President Bush?s
extremely odd borrowing of the classically liberal verbiage of ?addiction
to oil,? and his pledge of Best Friends Forever with Iran in his fifth
annual talking points run-down, or State of the Union, as it was once
called, the State Department took a wacky we-feel-your-pain stance on the
Danish cartoon fracas currently burning up Europe.
?So while we share the offense that Muslims have taken at these images,?
said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, ?we at the same time
vigorously defend the right of individuals to express points of view.?
Mr. McCormack, who spent his 9/11 hunkered down in the U.S.?s situation
room with the big boys, has long been in a position of offering
congratulations to free speech champions, such as Chinese journalist Jiang
Weiping and Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, both of whom recently escaped
nasty fates. ?We urge the Chinese government to release all those held for
exercising their fundamental rights to free speech,? Mr. McCormack once
said.
Yet now he?s been pulled out of his cubbyhole to say that ?Anti-Muslim
images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images.?
Hey, is that the rhetoric of a government that knows it has no control
whatsoever over the kind of brutal folks who kidnapped Christian Science
Monitor reporter Jill Carroll nearly a month ago?
* * *
Part of the problem is that the cartoons in question are so bad as to be
unintelligible, so their defenders and their offendees stake their
position solely on their principles. Seriously: Does the image of
Muhammad?drawn by an as-yet unnamed U.S. resident, incidentally?with a
bomb in his turban mean that all Muslims are terrorists? Is it a
commentary on the tragedy that Muhammad?s religion has given rise to
Wahhabism? Or is it a reference to a racist Western conflation of Arabs
and terrorists?
Who could tell? The cartoons sucked, mostly. (See for yourself. One of ?em
is pretty good.) And they weren?t even statements of fact: They can?t be
considered subject to defamation tests, because they weren?t really
describing much more of anything than your average nonsensical ?Family
Circus.?
Still, as the politicos roiled in their PR game, the press was happy to
join in.
?You want to make sure that you are sensitive to the cultural
sensitivities,? Mike Days, the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, told
Editor & Publisher last week.
Sure you do. Wait, why?
It was Mr. Days?s decision that, in the reporting of the news in his
paper, verbal descriptions could suffice for reproductions of cartoons
that first ran last September in Jyllands-Posten, a small Danish paper.
(Denmark, as it happens, was tied for first place in 2005 on the Reporters
Without Borders list of countries with the freest press.) The Washington
Post said, more explicitly, that it ?chose not to reprint the images on
grounds they would give offense.?
Those cartoons, most of which depict Muhammad, were a riff on a competing
Danish newspaper?s story about the difficulties of finding an illustrator
for a children?s book about Muhammad; they were drawn by a dozen different
artists, at the request of an editor. (Which means that at least a dozen
Danish artists were willing to violate the Islamic proscription against
depicting Muhammad, which rather undermines the original story.)
Still, why was it supposedly so hard to get cartoonists to illustrate this
book? Well, there was the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in late
2004 by radical Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri?and the 2004 attack on a lecturer
in Copenhagen by five fellows who opposed the reading of the Qur?an to
non-Muslims. And the 2002 assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn by
a leftist concerned about Mr. Fortuyn?s anti-Muslim politics. There?s
certainly a chilling effect with political violence in that part of the
world?after all, Denmark only had 14 murders by handgun from 1998 to 2000.
A number of other papers in Europe, but so far only one in the U.S.?the
New York Sun, which has editorial standards regarding Islam and Israel
somewhere near those of the Jewish Telegraph?have published some or all of
the cartoons.
In fact, the Americans have taken a pass, and in doing so, are missing out
on a rare phenomenon?a meme spread in newsprint. (Hey, might sell papers,
too!) On Feb. 3, the Irish Daily Star added to the stack of European
papers republishing the cartoons. But, conspicuously, they printed just
one of the cartoons, and just for the point of doing so: Their columnist
Joe O?Shea wrote that it was done as ?a stand for freedom of the press and
democratic rights.?
Of course, the Irish Foreign Affairs office was quick to say that not
everyone would ?share Western points of view.?
[You can?t take a god?s name in vain if you don?t take to it at all.]
Hey,
it?s a good thing Mr. O?Shea wasn?t writing about, say, a Dutch medical
ship, docked in Dublin to provide abortions in Ireland. Because, you know,
not everyone shares Western points of view.
And while allegedly blanket Western points of view are up for dispute, the
case of Islamic outrage at the Muhammad cartoons also refutes one of the
U.S.?s greatest idiocies: the reaffirmation of the Roth test of obscenity
in Miller v. California, which invokes ?contemporary community standards?
to judge obscenity. If a small Danish newspaper can so disastrously
violate what is apparently the obscenity standard in Gaza, can there even
be such a thing as a ?community??
At the end of last week, the Danish embassy in Damascus was burned down,
along with the Swedish and Chilean embassies, for the three shared a
building. Over the past few months, ambassadors have been recalled from
Denmark: Tehran?s, Syria?s, Saudi Arabia?s. The Danish embassy in Jakarta
was stormed on Sunday. People have, reports say, marched in the streets
demanding?literally?heads and hands.
On Sunday, the Danish consulate in Beirut was burned?and the Austrian
embassy and the Slovakian consulate, also in the same building.
And people?both Europeans, Americans, Christians, Muslims?have revealed
themselves to be, in varying degrees, psychotic, venal, petty,
superstitious, medieval, opportunistic, and very, very stupid.
* * *
But hey, it?s been a great couple of weeks for mealy-mouthed
dumb-assitude!
Bendt Bendtson, vice-prime minister of Denmark, told the Copenhagen Post,
?I?ve got nothing against freedom of speech?it is important for us all?but
if it can offend and hurt a lot of people, why use freedom of speech for
that?? The paper wrote, ?Bendtsen said Danish newspapers could possibly
learn something from U.S. newspapers, which tended not to try to push the
limits of what was permissible.?
They do, sadly, tend that way. But try Europe. ?THE PRICE OF FREE SPEECH,?
blared the Feb. 3 Daily Mail, which pointedly placed a photo of a crowd
burning a Danish flag alongside two British National Party members leaving
court after ?being cleared of race-hate crimes??apparently the two had
called Asians ?evil? and asylum-seekers ?cockroaches.?
?The principle of freedom should be exercised in a spirit of tolerance,
respect of beliefs, respect of religions, which is the very basis of
secularism of our country,? chimed in Philippe Douste-Blazy, the former
cardiologist, anti-euthanasia activist, and current French foreign
minister.
Whereas the American Heritage Dictionary defines secularism as ?a doctrine
that rejects religion and religious considerations.? Not, you know, the
exact opposite of that.
Poor U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has been humiliated by his
greedy son and who had also spent much recent time trying to get former
U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter to keep his mouth shut in the press,
just had to come out and say, ?But of course freedom of speech is never
absolute.?
In protest of the cartoons, Libya closed its embassy in Denmark. Stupid
Libya, which not only controls its media, but even prohibits political
parties, and backed Charles Taylor?s thrashing of Liberia?a land with
essentially no electricity or water?and which still has no embassy in the
U.S.
Bill Clinton?the real one, not the weird lizard-president who?s parroting
him now and claiming to be his best friend?had to open his chunky mouth:
?Appalling,? he said, calling the images ?totally outrageous cartoons
against Islam.? Well, whatever, he?s got a lot to make up for in the
Islamic world: Khartoum, anyone? (And don?t think the Arab world doesn?t
remember Rwanda, even if fewer than five percent of its populace is
Muslim.)
Hey, look, it?s Vladimir Putin, now head of the Group of Eight! ?Take
Denmark, the situation with Islam there today, those disgusting cartoons
offending religious feelings of Muslims. I can recall that the Danish
leadership used to support some extremist movements, including
anti-Russian movements, on that country?s territory. In fact, they are now
encouraging those offending religious feelings. This inconsistency cannot
lead to anything good.?
Still bitter! Oh, Vlad! ?The government has no intention of raising the
media?s social awareness by curbing free speech,? he told the journalists
invited to the Kremlin for his sixth annual press conference on Jan. 31.
(He also told them that Russia was full of spies. ?You do know, don?t
you,? he said, ?that there are residencies in the diplomatic missions of
every country. There are diplomats pure and simple and there are secret
service officers.?)
Of course, last August, the Russian foreign ministry declared it would no
longer allow ABC to interview any Russian officials or agencies, because
the American network had aired an interview with Chechen terrorist Shamil
Basayev, the numbskull who got 139 killed in Nalchik?most of them his own.
So, you know, who needs to curb the so-called free press any more than
that?
Speaking of Mr. Basayev, on Feb. 1, a statement made on a web site on his
behalf denounced the Danish insult to Islam. Ain?t it nice to see him
agree with Mr. Putin for once?
Back in September 2003, Zimbabwe crushed what was then the country?s only
non-government-controlled newspaper. It was ?another attempt to silence
critical voices,? said British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the time.
Except this time, somehow Mr. Straw is the one calling publication of the
cartoons ?gratuitously inflammatory.?
* * *
Should people care about other people? Should people care about the
beliefs of other people at all?
Elsewhere in greater Arabia this weekend, a passenger ferry caught fire
and tipped down into the Red Sea, taking a thousand or so people with it,
most of them Egyptian.
[Though the religious nutters fight each other plenty, they know that the
real enemy is the unbeliever. These are people who don?t know where they
stop and your free will begins.]
?If I take out my concern about those
drowned Egyptians and take a good look at it,? wrote John Derbyshire on
the National Review?s blog, ?it really is a pretty feeble, abstract sort
of caring.?
Harsh. But. ?It is, in my opinion,? he went on, ?a very good thing, and a
great step up for humanity, that religious and ethical teachers have
trained us to give a passing thought to the sufferings of strangers in
distant places.?
Gee, it sure is. But what about a passing thought to the craziness of
other people? When what so many people believe is by any rational standard
crazy?that depicting human beings is a major sin, or that you?ll go to a
fiery pit if you don?t get sprinkled with water, or that witches float, or
that bad thoughts are caused by an infestation of pissed-off alien
spirits, or, you know, that your spiritual leader was reincarnated in some
infant in Seattle?well, why should anyone give two shits about any of it?
For unbelievers, the world is a hell of warmed-over medieval
superstitions.
In England, you can only be punished for blasphemy against the Church of
England. (Knock yourself out on the other religions, sure.) Blasphemy is
illegal in Finland, in the Netherlands, and in Massachusetts, where it is
punishable by a fine of not more than $300 and not more than a year in
prison.
None of these laws are enforced in those locations?but, neither did they
ever take into account that unbelievers could not possibly commit
blasphemy. You can?t take a god?s name in vain if you don?t take to it at
all.
But the Catholics never got that, just like Muhammad never got it either.
On this matter, the religious bonded against the non-religious early. ?No
Believer will help an un-Believer against a Believer,? says the Medina
Charter. Back then, Jews and Muhammad?s gang might have gotten along just
fine?but it was every infidel for himself. And today, though the religious
nutters fight each other plenty, they know that the real enemy is the
unbeliever. These are people who don?t know where they stop and your free
will begins.
Similarly, countries don?t seem to have a clue how other countries work.
Why else would Bahrain demand an apology over the cartoons from little old
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark? If you have no clue that a constitutional
monarch figurehead?even if she is the chain-smoking cutie 213th in line to
the throne of England?doesn?t control her state?s media, then how are you
even qualified to take part in geopolitical conversations for grown-ups?
Meanwhile, the press, the international embodiment of real secularism, is
the one that bites it over a bunch of crappy, ill-advised cartoons. In
South Africa, late on Friday night, the Johannesburg High Court granted a
petition by an organization of Muslims to forbid newspapers from
publishing the cartoons. Not that any of them even wanted to anyway.
* * *
Last Thursday, Feb. 2, Donald Rumsfeld delivered a speech at the National
Press Club to a group, according to Mr. Rumsfeld?s remarks, mainly
composed of reporters and journalists. Congressional Quarterly published
the transcript.
?[Inaudible] administration [inaudible] and [inaudible] this program with
you. You are torturing people,? said an audience member.
?Anyway,? said the moderator, John Salant, the president of the National
Press Club.
?You are signing off on torture,? said the audience member. ?It?s
happening.?
?Boo! Boo!? said another audience member.
?This world needs to wake up and stop this war, this criminal war,? said,
presumably, the first audience member. ?You are a war criminal!?
?Shut up!? said an audience member.
There was applause. ?Well, we?ll count her as undecided,? Mr. Rumsfeld
joked. It wasn?t his first time being shouted at.
?Secretary, I?m sorry,? Mr. Salant said, ?that your First Amendment rights
were not respected at a press club that is dedicated to the First
Amendment.?
Shortly after that, another audience member questioned Mr. Rumsfeld?s
reaction to a Tom Toles cartoon in the Washington Post. That cartoon
depicted Mr. Rumsfeld describing the condition of a soldier with no arms
and no legs as ?battle hardened.?
?You know,? Mr. Rumsfeld told the journalists, ?No one questions the right
of a cartoonist to do what they want to do.?
--- \/ FROM Alyssa Pozniak AT 06.02.09 13:59 (Today) \/ ---
> a friend out in california forwarded the below on to me and i thought it was
> interesting with respect to the ongoing interest in the "other" religious
> cartoons. and i know danny is a big anti-smoking advocate, so maybe i'll get
> brownie points for that :)
>
> full disclosure - i did not check the references, but the original email was
> sent directly from one of the authors, and most of us have access to pubmed
> so feel free to do some double fact checking...or just take it as an
> interesting read.
>
> alyssa
>
>
> Dear Public Health Colleagues,
>
> In view of the ongoing international furor over the cartoons published by the
> Danish newspaper, it occurred to me that you might be interested in reading
> the story below from our colleague Elizabeth Emerson, who has been a
> (successful) anti-tobacco activist for many years in California. She
> describes how graphical exploitation of Jesus and his mother Mary by tobacco
> companies galvanized outrage and action among a Brazilian audience of health
> professionals and journalists. Note also that she's found that this
> exploitation also galvanizes outrage among physicians of a variety of faiths,
> including Egyptian (Muslim) physicians. Elizabeth's story is embedded in
> these paragraphs excerped below from a publication of mine three years ago (a
> rejoinder to an invited paper which appeared on pages 149-165 of the same
> issue).
>
>
> >> From pp. 209-211 of
> Oman, D., & Thoresen, C. E. (2003). The many frontiers of spiritual
> modeling. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion,
> 13, 197-213.
>
> Spiritual Power
> Having argued for the theoretical coherence and empirical viability of
> spiritual modeling perspectives, we shall close by urging scientific
> colleagues not to under estimate the power of spiritual modeling
> influences in popular cultures. This power is vividly illustrated in
> a story reported to us by a colleague in public health. Our
> colleague Elizabeth Emerson helped rally grassroots support for
> recent groundbreaking tobacco-control legislation in California.
> Because this legislation is recognized as exemplary, Emerson was
> invited to present the California story to a nationwide Brazilian
> conference on drug, alcohol, and tobacco addiction attended by
> more than 300 health professionals and others. She presented statistics
> showing improved public health and reduced health costs from tobacco
> control. She also described examples of effective public health
> interventions to reduce tobacco usage. A slide of a tobacco industry
> advertisement (described briefly by Oman & Thoresen, this issue;
> see full description and reproduction in Simpson, 2001) was
> then presented. In Emerson's words
>
> "At this point, I showed them a replica of the picture of Mother Mary
> blessing and promoting cigarettes in the Filipino advertisement. I told
> them it was an example of how absolutely cynical the industry is-that
> they would use the Sacred Mother to promote cigarettes in the
> Philippines. At that point, there was such an uproar among the audience
> (in this largely Catholic country) that I literally had to delay the rest
> of my presentation as they were all talking to each other rapidly in
> Portuguese while pointing to the picture on the screen in shock.
> Then a man who I later learned was a well known journalist stood up
> and yelled in broken English, "I came to this conference to write an
> article for my magazine. I thought all of the speakers had gone too far
> and were too fanatical in their stand against tobacco, so I was going
> to write a very skeptical article about all of you. But now that I see
> this picture and what they have done to Maria (their name for the
> Blessed Mother Mary), I see how evil the tobacco industry is and I will
> expose them for the rest of my life as a journalist." My new public health
> friends told me that gaining that journalist as an ally was a major gift to
> them, because he is widely read. I was surprised at the ad's impact on
> the doctors, but I was utterly amazed that
> even a hard boiled skeptical journalist could be so devout!"
> (E. Emerson, personal communication, January 17, 2003)
>
> Emerson also noted that Brazil is not exceptional. In other recent
> work with international groups of health professionals, she reported that
> "my showing this type of advertising to Egyptian and Russian doctors
> causes a cultural wall to drop between me and the physicians. Even the
> defensive doctors who smoke decide to become antitobacco activists
> when I show them the statistics of the global toll of tobacco
> and especially when I show them the ads. The pictures of Jesus and Mary
> (there is one with both and one with Mary) seem to cause more outrage and
> trigger more antitobacco activism among international groups than any
> other tobacco ad" (E. Emerson, personal communication, January 17, 2003).
>
> We argued earlier that a conscious intention and key function of
> traditional religious culture has been to ensure adequate opportunities and
> supports for learning from spiritual models. Our colleague's report seems to
> remind us that a deep desire to preserve a beneficial culture of spiritual
> modeling can remain strong even among persons with extensive exposure
> to modern secular culture, including professional education. Might we have
> some responsibility as scientists and as citizens of the world to recognize
> the influence of spiritually powerful models, and to channel and harness
> such influences for the greatest possible global public benefit?
>
> REFERENCE
> Simpson, D. (2001). Philippines: Sacred and profane. Tobacco Control, 10,
> 204-205.
>
>
--
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves - - search://"Daniel Reeves"
I'd like to be buried Indian-style, where they put you up on a high
rack, above the ground. That way, you could get hit by meteorites and
not even feel it.
-- Jack Handey
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