| Wednesday, March 01, 2006 |
| Bad headline avoidance 101: Bring back the Cartoon Jihad!!! |
It may soon become axiomatic in the right wing blogosphere: When you don't like the headlines, change them back to the cartoon jihad... Yep. Everyone's on board!
Alright, then, so what have these brave Danes done this time? Printing pics of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban "in order to signal to Muslims that we in the West love them and want them to be intellectually free..." wasn't enough, apparently. Now, we're "freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all."
Twelve signatories to this "freedom manifesto" hold these truths to be self-evident:
Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.
We reject cultural relativism, which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.
We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas. Right, so giving Muslims freedom, equality and secular values means insisting on the right to insult them? And ... when they accept these insults with grace and humility ... then... they're free??? Okay, I'm confused. Or is it that we ensure their universal rights by selling the bomb turban cartoon thingy as a T-shirt...
What a bunch of overblown, self-important, pretentious, indulgent rubbish. The people protesting those ridiculous, offensive cartoons aren't all Islamists, folks -- they're mainly ordinary Muslims who were freaking pissed off that Jyllands Posten published the cartoons.
This was a pretty straightforward case of offense - reaction. The Islamists may have ginned up the violence where it suited them, but the gut reaction of Muslims to the cartoons had everything to do with cultural/religious insult, and nothing to do with their needing more "freedom."
Tags: politics, News, Bush, government, polls, President Bush, Muhammad cartoon, Cartoons, Religion, Islam, Muslims, Denmark, Jyllands-Posten,Mohammed |
posted by JReid @ 1:13 AM   |
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