Paging Dr. Huntingon...
Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" crossed my mind when this whole Muhammad cartoon situation first came about. But now that the cartoons have been reprinted in France and Germany, the book's thesis seems to gain some traction.
Is it as simple as the Western value of free press vs. Sharian tradition? One is reminded of the riots after the Newsweek Koran desecration story. That wasn't a free-speech issue, but there are some similarities between the situations.
You can find the cartoons here, but it loads slowly.
Is it as simple as the Western value of free press vs. Sharian tradition? One is reminded of the riots after the Newsweek Koran desecration story. That wasn't a free-speech issue, but there are some similarities between the situations.
You can find the cartoons here, but it loads slowly.
posted by bp at
12:07 PM
3 Comments:
The problem is that some (some, not all) seem to want to impose Sharia law throught the world, even in the West, which spent centuries struggling to create the principle of separate of church & state.
I find it ironic that the controversy was principally fueled by a few Danish Muslims who deliberately travelled throughout the Arab world w/ the images (is it wrong, in Islam, to carry around representations of Muhammad?) in order to show them to other people (again, inconsistent w/ their outrage). It was also later learned that since the cartoons weren't offensive enough, they took three OTHER cartoons that were much more offensive (where did these come from? is it wrong in Islam to lie? etc). Something is very very wrong here.
The ultimate irony is that the Danish ministry of culture (sort of like our NEA) subsidized a Muslim artist who drew some mildly pornographic images of the Virgin Mary. That's OK, of course. I mean, I know the Falwells & Robertson's out there are cranks, but no one stormed the NEA offices after the Mapplethorpe exhibit.
On a related note ... the British government recently banned pig images in public offices (no stuffed Piglet, no piggybanks, etc) because these were offensive to Muslims.
By
Miguel Centellas, at 12:24 PM
There's a slippery slope argument to be made about kowtowing to muslim sensitivities. If govts begin making such concessions to muslims, they'll insist on increased treatment - as would other religious groups crying foul at anything they perceive as blasphemous.
Muslims should be treated as are all other religions - at arms length and co-equal.
By
t'su, at 3:32 PM
Good points, good points.
And, as if to show the Muslim world what we really think - at least about free press - newspapers in Spain, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Italy have reprinted the cartoons. And so has the BBC!
So this mess isn't going away.
(Also, these latest reprints remind me of when my university newspaper re-printed a racist flyer - smaller, and with a disclaimer - to indicate a problem that had been appearing around campus. Caught some hell after that one... ended up in the news myself.)
By
bp, at 1:57 PM
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