Freedom and Muhammad Art

Apparently, unbeknownst to me there has been an uproar caused by a Danish newspaper's publishing of drawings of Muhammed. Islam forbids the graphical rendering of Allah or the Prophet most likely because there was a fear of idol worship. Unfortunately a large number of Muslims think that their rules apply to everyone else. They do not. The Danish paper has since capitulated to an economic boycott by Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries as well as numerous death threats against the newspapers. First here are the pictures in question:



Now one may ask. Why post pictures that others may find offensive? Easy answer, an answer to be repeated later is because I have the right to. I am not a Muslim and therefore I am not bound by any Islamic rules regarding anything. Secondly, any, every and all religions should be subject to critique. I believe that the art above makes some very potent moral and ethical points about how Islam has developed.

Second here is a quote from The Brussels Journal:

Islam is no laughing matter. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten is being protected by security guards and several cartoonists have gone into hiding after the newspaper published a series of twelve cartoons (see them all here, halfway the article) about the prophet Muhammad. According to the Islam it is blasphemous to make images of the prophet. Muslim fundamentalists have threatened to bomb the paper’s offices and kill the cartoonists.

The newspaper published the cartoons when a Danish author complained that he could find no-one to illustrate his book about Muhammad. Jyllands-Posten wondered whether there were more cases of self-censorship regarding Islam in Denmark and asked twelve illustrators to draw the prophet for them. Carsten Juste, the paper’s editor, said the cartoons were a test of whether the threat of Islamic terrorism had limited the freedom of expression in Denmark.

The publication led to outrage among the Muslim immigrants living in Denmark. 5,000 of them took to the streets to protest. Muslim organisations have demanded an apology, but Juste rejects this idea: “We live in a democracy. That’s why we can use all the journalistic methods we want to. Satire is accepted in this country, and you can make caricatures,” he said. The Danish imam Raed Hlayhel reacted with the statement: “This type of democracy is worthless for Muslims. Muslims will never accept this kind of humiliation. The article has insulted every Muslim in the world.”

Flemming Rose, the cultural editor at the newspaper, denied that the purpose had been to provoke Muslims. It was simply a reaction to the rising number of situations where artists and writers censored themselves out of fear of radical Islamists, he said. “Religious feelings cannot demand special treatment in a secular society,” he added. “In a democracy one must from time to time accept criticism or becoming a laughingstock.”

The affair, however, has also led to a diplomatic incident. On Thursday the ambassadors of eleven Muslim countries, including Indonesia, a number of Arab states, Pakistan, Iran, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, complained about the cartoons in a letter to Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. They say the publication of the cartoons is a “provocation” and demand apologies from the newspaper.

Jyllands-Posten was also included on an al-Qaeda website listing possible terrorist targets. An organisation which calls itself “The Glorious Brigades in Northern Europe” is circulating pictures on the internet which show bombs exploding over pictures of the newspaper and blood flowing over the national flag of Denmark. “The Mujahedeen have numerous targets in Denmark – very soon you all will regret this,” the website says.

Meanwhile in Brussels a young Muslim immigrant published a poster depicting the Virgin Mary with naked breasts. Though the picture has drawn some protest from Catholics (though not from Western embassies, nor from the bishops), this artist need not fear being murdered in the street. On the contrary, he is being subsidised by the Ministry for Culture.

Ok...OK...that was the entire article... I know...sorry. ;-|

I want to point out the highlighted portions:
The Danish imam Raed Hlayhel reacted with the statement: “This type of democracy is worthless for Muslims. Muslims will never accept this kind of humiliation. The article has insulted every Muslim in the world.”

Well you know it's really funny how someone who gets to live in a country, though it has it's faults, has pretty much allowed the Imam to live how he wants and to practice his religion how he wants and only asks in return that he respect the other citizens of the country's rights to live as they like. Perhaps the Imam would like to return from whence he came. I mean really If he doesn't like the democracy why stay? Oh yes because:

Meanwhile in Brussels a young Muslim immigrant published a poster depicting the Virgin Mary with naked breasts. Though the picture has drawn some protest from Catholics (though not from Western embassies, nor from the bishops), this artist need not fear being murdered in the street. On the contrary, he is being subsidised by the Ministry for Culture.

Oh yes, He is free to insult anyone elses religion, if he so chooses and not have to worry about his life or economic boycotts. But it's more than that.This question will be dealt with later. Interestingly the young man who painted the virgin Mary with bare breasts has only really gone back to the roots of the Virgin Mary story as found on the Temple of Amen, where a virgin queen suckles the baby Horus. And of course all over Yorubaland one can find bare breasts everywhere. SO the picture was really insulting to whome? himself since it is against Islamic law for a woman to bare herself to any man but her husband.

But I would like to post a rather long post by a reader of the article above because he has a point, a point that I is conceded by very very few in Islamic circles:

"Denmark unlikely front in Islam-West Culture War."
- title of the newspaper article discussed above

This title is already a dead giveaway to what is wrong, so wrong, with the coverage of Islam at The New Duranty Times.

First, why is Denmark an "unlikely front"? Well, because Denmark, it is well understood, behaved well during World War II. And from then on Denmark has been seen, like Holland, as a place of easy-going tolerance, relaxed about religion, mores, and so on. And if Denmark is an "unlikely front" in something (in a minute we'll get to how The New Duranty Times describes that something) it must be because we expect "likely fronts" to be European countries that have historically been seen as less tolerant, less easygoing, not like Denmark at all. Because, you see, the problem is with the European countries themselves, and how they respond -- not with Islam, or with Muslims, and what Islam teaches, and what Muslims believe, and act upon. Denmark is only an "unlikely front" if you think the problem is with the various countries involved. Everywhere Muslims are taught from the same canonical and immutable texts, or inhale the atmsopherics of Islam from other Muslims (not necessary to attend mosque regularly yourself -- it is quite enough to think of yourself as a Muslim, owing your allegiance to Islam, and to the umma al-islamiyya, the Community of Believers).

If The New Duranty Times saw the problem correctly it would have fashioned a different title. If the reporter and editors had recognized the phenomenon of the Jihad to cause Islam everywhere, sooner or later,
"to dominate and not to be dominated" (as a Hadith puts it, and as the entire life of Muhammad insists), if the problems in Denmark posed by Islamic attempts to censor what can and cannot be written or said in Denmark were seen as being of a piece with the various attempts by Muslims, wherever they may be within the Lands of the Infidels (temporarily, as they see it, the Lands of the Infidels), to transform the laws, customs, manners, undertandings, and ability to behave with wonted freeedom, of the indigenous non-Muslims, so that the threats and fury directed by the entire Muslim world at little Denmark, for a dozen cartoons, most of them so mild as to cause one to wonder why anyone could cause a fuss, is no different from the demands made for the wearing of the hijab in French schools, or the removal of all crosses from public places in Italy, or the insistence that the Shari'a law apply to local Muslim communities in Canada, or any number of other such demands, made so insistently, and so outrrageously, and at a time when Muslims are only a small percentage of the population, and held, correctly, in deep and growing suspicion, that one can only wonder how things will be if the percentage of Muslims in the population is permitted to grow, and mosques and madrasas -- almost all supported by money from abroad -- allowed to be built, to spread the doctrines to be found in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and that anyone bothering to look into will come away from, if he is an Infidel, with a feeling of dread. For that matter, within those countries firmly under Muslim control, such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, Iraq), and precisely to the extent of the fervency of the local Muslims, and their ability to work their will, all local communities of non-Muslims, whether Christians or Hindus or others (no Jews are left, but there are Bahai'a, Buddhists, Sikhs, followers of Confucius, animists, and of course those without any attachment to an organized religion) made to suffer, from discrimination and a feeling of permanent insecurity, all the way to expulsions and attacks on churches and Hindu temples, attacks on church-run schools and hospitals, and any other non-Muslim institutions that can be identified and attacked.


Second, there is the second half of that meretricious title: "Islam-West Culture War." Wrong on both counts. The war of Islam is not against the West, but Against the Rest -- that is, all the Rest of the World, all of the peoples, wherever they are located, and all of the polties, that are not Islamic. The victims include the Hindus, Sikhs, Jains of India, Kashmir, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bali, Malaysia. These Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists have always been under assault by Muslims, and only superior power, such as that which the British offered, or superior numbers (Hindus in India today, free of the Muslim military domination) prevent even more assaults. And then there are the Christians of Asia and Africa. Look at what happened in the "Jihad" (Col. Ojukwu's word) against the Christians of Nigeria, which led t the declaration of a free Biafra, smashed by a Muslim army and outside Muslims, including Egyptian air force pilots who strafed and bombed hundreds of Ibo villages. Look at the 1.8 million casualties, murdered or deliberately starved to death, among the non-Muslim Christians and animists of the Sudan. Look at the constant pressure of Muslim Arabs on the blacks of sub-Saharan Africa, sometimes employing quasi-arabized black Muslim tribes to push Islam, or a corrupt leader or two, to promote Islam in countries formerly Christian (see the Ivory Coast, see Togo). Look at the Christians in Pakistan (remember the martyrdom of Bishop John Joseph, remember all the attacks, past and present, on Christian church services, Christian schools, Christian hospitals, individual Christians accused of the capital offense of "blasphemy against Islam"), in Bangladesh (where it is the Hindus bear the brunt of the Muslim persecution and murders), in Indonesia (attacks by Muslims on Christians, and then counter-attacks by the Chrstians in revenge, always descrbed most inaccurately as "communal violence" as if both sides were equally at fault, and the Christians were just as guilty), the attacks by Muslims, especially in the Moluccas, the mass murder of 200,00 Christian East Timorese by Muslim Indonesians, the murders of 600,000 non-Muslim Chinese from 1965-1967, with the Muslim component carefully erased from all reporting, to confrom to mental templates provided by Cold War attitudes. Look at continuing attacks on Hindus in Bali, and Buddhists elsewhwere in the East Indian archipelago. What about them, and what about the Christian villagers decapitated by Muslims in the Philippines -- is this all part of a "culture war," a war fought between "Islam" and "the West." How is the "West" fighting "Islam"? Aside from participating in the largest transfer of wealth in human history, how does the "West" attack "Islam" in Dar al-Islam? How? By mildly suggesting that it wouldn't be a great idea to wipe out Israel? By buying Christian black slaves back from their Arab Muslim masters in Sudan? By trying to create a decent society and nation-state in Iraq, despite the obvious hostility directed at Infidels from the very recipients of such liberation, not to mention the tens of billions being spent by Infidels to make life better for Iraq's Muslims? Or is the war that "the West" is conducting that of protecting Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo (with Infidels bombing fellow Infidels)? Is it the Gulf War, whereby the Muslims of Kuwait were rescued from Saddam Hussein? Is it the almost unlimited access given, until recently, to Western educational instiutitons (here, sign up for this course on nuclear physics, or this one on bacteriology -- go ahead, the Western taxpayers will pay your tuition for such useful coursees), to Western medical care, to Western goods of all kinds, to Western armaments (hundreds of billions of Western armaments), to Western goodwill (here, have 7 acres of land in the midst of Rome, to build the Rome Mosque, or here, we'll sell you this land in Boston at below-market value, or here...fill it in for yourself). Western leaders have been falling all over themselves trying to insist that Islam is a good religion, a religion of peace and tolerance. Just look at what Bush and Blair and Rice have said -- the uninterrupted series of falsehoods about the wonderfulness of Islam, their great respect for Islam, their understanding that Islam has nothing whatever to do with the perceived behavior of Muslims world-wide.

And what about the attacks on Buddhists in Thailand (and Buddhists in Indonesia, wherever they get in the way of Muslims)? What about that? Is that attributable to, or to be subsumed under the idiotic rubric of an "Islam-West Culture War"?

It is not a Culture War. It is Jihad. It is a war no dfiferent in goals from, though conducted by more varied instruments of warfare, than the Jihads that have been waged by the adherents of Islam, following the teachings clearly expressed in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira (with Muhammad the very model, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, for all Muslims everywhere, whenever such a war was feasible, over 1350 years, from Spain to the East Indies. For as Muhammad declared, "Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated" and that applies to the entire known world. It is a war to be conducted by military means where possible, and by other means when necessary. In Western Europe, at the moment, it is conducted by Da'wa and slow but steady demographic conquest, accompanied by relentless demands made on Infidels to change their own societies, their laws, their customs, their understandings, their ways of doing things, in order to accomodate Muslims. This is not "integration." This is occupation -- Europe is now Muslim-occupied, and as the ranks of the occupiers, who do not wish to integrate with, much less accept the ways of, the locals, but rather to dominate, to subjugate the locals, to transform their societies so that Islam will dominate and Muslims will rule (and it will occur long before Muslims are an absolute majority, as it did all over Dar al-Islam, over the past 1350 years, in a pattern of conquest by a few, and subjugation of many who, over time, became Muslims, for they lost their original identies and histories, and those who were not killed upon conquest, or in intermittent mass violence by Muslims (and there was a good deal of that) were slowly converted, forcibly in the sense that they did so not because of some intellectual or moral wonderfulness of Islam, but rather in order to avoid for themselves and their children the status of dhimmi, that is the state of enduring humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity that was the permanent fate of all non-Muslims under Islam.

Nor is the war of Islam against the West. It is, rather, Against the Rest, All the Rest of the Non-Islamic World. Of course, to call it, as it is not an "Islam-West" War, but a war directed as much against the less powerful, and less challenging, non-Muslims everywhere, from Hindus in India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Kashmier in Bali, to Buddhists in Bangladesh, and Thailand, and parts of the East Indian archipelago, and Sikhs wherever they may be, so dangerously martial, so deeply hostile to Islam, the very origins of the faith perhaps owing something to the desire to have not merely a warrior caste (Kshatriya), but an entire faith, a literally fighting faith, capable of withstanding the Muslim conquerors, the Muslim invaders, the cruel Muslim masters of most of India.

(This has all been dashed off in one fell and very fast swoop, so there may be repetitions, anacolutha, infelicities of all kind. But the idiocy of The New Duranty Times needs to be exposed right now, without further delay, and I didn't have more than a few minutes. Sorry.)

Posted by: Hugh[sic]

While I'm not entirely concerned with the demographic changes in Europe, nor the forced "assimilation" or "integration" of Muslims in Europe or elsewhere I completely agree that there are some bright ass lines that need to be drawn regarding what non-Muslims are going to accept from Muslims who choose to live with us.

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