Danish cartoons generating the [deliberately scheduled] current crisis were originally part of a Danish newspaper's experiment resulting from an effort to recruit reluctant [ed.: Reluctant, huh?...] illustrators for a book on Mohammed, intended to "create understanding," gentle, multi-culti-toned, education for non-Muslims. The author "hoped Danish children would be in a better position to understand their Muslim counterparts."
The newspaper published the cartoons when a Danish children's 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. -- Brussels Journal
Most appear to the Western eye mildly ironic, several make fun of the cartoonists themselves.
Danish imams, it appears, fabricated three more -- these, genuinely crude and disgusting ones -- to circulate in orchestrated outrage.
Not Good, or Happy, but we discover that generally informed members of our circle did not know about the three premium-outrage versions that manifest the ethically-convoluted strategy of doing intensified evil in order to attribute it to someone else to show how evil they are.
Diagnosis: vile intoxication by an inflated superego exhibiting serious humor-, perspective-, and cartoon-drafting-skills-deficiency.
And the US press corps, usually in full cry about freedom of expression when showing transgressive art, is strangely timid on this issue. [Cox & Forkum cartoon.]
The CBS blogger opines:
Perhaps part of the reason the U.S. media is reluctant to show them is because most of us would scratch our heads in disbelief over how they could possibly spark such violence. Just about any group or belief you can imagine – Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks, Men, Women and even Canadians – are treated much worse....
It seems to me that by not airing or running these images, the U.S. media is sending a clear signal of understanding to the Muslim world. I worry though that it’s also sending a signal that we, as a society, care more about not offending that particular segment of the world than we do about our own freedom of expression. Perhaps the sword is mightier after all.
The other side of the news-story fallacy: refusal to put action in context with provocation. Here's it's non-provocation. And it should be noted that the meme of its being forbidden to represent the Prophet at all anyhow is a canard.
Update: Pages and pages of 'toons, via The Anchoress. This one has been making the rounds. Here, with apologies to Dan Wasserman, is ours. The A. especially liked this one from Chile.
How'd you download that cartoon? There was one I really liked and I couldn't figure out how to do it.
Posted by: amba | February 11, 2006 at 09:51 PM
Amba, check your e-mail. We can figure it out.
Posted by: dilys | February 12, 2006 at 09:26 AM