Cartoon rage, cont.

  • More on the guano-storm over the Dan­ish car­toons:

    • The Vat­i­can man­aged to have it both ways:

      In its first offi­cial com­ments on the car­i­ca­tures, the Vat­i­can, while deplor­ing vio­lent protests, said cer­tain forms of crit­i­cism rep­re­sent an “unac­cept­able provocation.”

      “The right to free­dom of thought and expres­sion … can­not entail the right to offend the reli­gious sen­ti­ment of believ­ers,” the Vat­i­can said in a statement.

    • Hugh Hewitt won­ders WWCD — What Would Churchill Do? — and ends up think­ing that though the West­ern world should come to the res­cue on the basis on free­dom of speech and coun­ter­ing Mus­lim bul­lies, the car­toon­ists acted irre­spon­si­bly:

      There is a chasm of dif­fer­ence between seri­ous com­men­tary on the Islamic chal­lenge fac­ing Europe and the West … and crude, sweep­ing anti-Muslim pro­pa­ganda. It isn’t nec­es­sary to defend the lat­ter in order to uphold and praise the former.

    • via Hugh Hewitt: this blog­ger thinks that the Syr­ian response at least is just a case of the gov­ern­ment cre­at­ing a smoke­screen:

      Thou­sands enraged, huh? More likely sce­nario: the dic­ta­tor­ship is using The Car­toon War as a con­ve­nient issue to deflect the anti-regime heat build­ing inside Syria and shift media focus from the mur­der investigation.

    • via InstaPun­dit — an Iraqi blogger weighs in:

      Any­way, since when did stu­pid, taste­less car­toons start stir­ring such pas­sions among the Mus­lims? Ara­bic lan­guage news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines reg­u­larly run car­toons that offend all sorts of com­mu­ni­ties. It would be eas­ier to respect all this rage if these angry peo­ple applied the same stan­dards all around.

      You know, in 2002, 15 Saudi school­girls burned to death when Saudi reli­gious police wouldn’t let them escape their build­ing because they were not in hijab.

      Wait­ing for my fel­low Mus­lims to react to that kind of crim­i­nal­ity with the same impas­sioned out­rage they save for offen­sive news­pa­per car­toons has been rather like wait­ing for a desert-blown Godot. Our com­mu­nity lead­ers, as always, fail us.

      (For a sam­pling of the type of car­toons the blog­ger describes, go here.

    • Lit­tle Green Foot­balls on the double-standard I went off on yes­ter­day:

      CNN has been accom­pa­ny­ing every story about the car­toon jihad with the boil­er­plate mes­sage: CNN has cho­sen to not show the car­toons out of respect for Islam.

      But they appar­ently have no such “respect” for Chris­tian­ity; they didn’t hes­i­tate for a sec­ond to show this image of the vir­gin Mary made out of ele­phant dung …

    • I said yes­ter­day that I thought Europe would assume a sub­mis­sive atti­tude in the face of the protests. They did, but the US State Depart­ment was right there along­side, crank­ing up their Cap­tain Sen­si­tiv­ity suits:

      “These car­toons are indeed offen­sive to the belief of Mus­lims,” State Depart­ment spokesman Kur­tis Cooper said in answer to a ques­tion. “We all fully rec­og­nize and respect free­dom of the press and expres­sion but it must be cou­pled with press respon­si­bil­ity. Incit­ing reli­gious or eth­nic hatreds in this man­ner is not acceptable.”

      “We call for tol­er­ance and respect for all com­mu­ni­ties for their reli­gious beliefs and prac­tices,” he added.

      Oh give me a break. When has the State Depart­ment given a rip about giv­ing due respect to Jew­ish, Bud­dhist, Chris­t­ian, Zoras­trian or any other religion’s beliefs and prac­tices, let alone telling the press to be respon­si­ble? Will some­one give these guys real jobs to do? And will some­one tell Reuters that since the State Dept. is out on its own island, the head­line “US sides with Mus­lims …” is erro­neous?
      The story ends with an embar­rass­ing comparison:

      Major U.S. pub­li­ca­tions have not repub­lished the car­toons, which include depic­tions of Moham­mad as a ter­ror­ist. That is in con­trast to Euro­pean media, which responded to the crit­i­cism against the orig­i­nal Dan­ish news­pa­per that printed the car­i­ca­tures by repub­lish­ing the offen­sive images themselves.

      I don’t know. I agree with Hewitt that we should pick our bat­tles, and to cause vio­lent reper­cus­sions in unde­fended areas of the world may just be stu­pid. But when it comes to this “We’re offended and crazy and if we see those car­toons we’re going to make you pay,” line that is being drawn in the sand, you only have two ways to go: (1) Make sure that they never see the car­toons any­where and hope that they’ll get bored and go home for some hum­mus or (2) Put the car­toons every­where and call their bluff. The Euro­peans went with the lat­ter strategem and for “major U.S. pub­li­ca­tions” to go with the for­mer, I think they not only look weak by com­par­i­son, but leave the Euro­pean press twist­ing in the wind.


    Related posts:

    1. Gosh. Can’t they take a joke?
    2. Government-regulated Chris­tian­ity
    3. Updates on terrorism
    4. Decem­ber 20
    5. Why I don’t think the war is a failure

    February 5th, 2006 | Grace | No Comments |

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