The Cartoon Jihad I

Chip decries the lack of freedom to satirize Muhammad in the United States, and explains the Shari’ah of “picture making” and blasphemy for the benefit of the news media. BYF applauds the decision of the European media to thumb their noses at Islamists (for once). Liz has a good survey of attempts to draw the Catholic Church into what she terms the “cartoon trap”, and points out that Cardinal Achille Silvestrini’s recent comments condemning the “deliberate mockery of religious belief” seem to overlook, if not ignore, this sort of filth served up by the Arab world on a distressingly regular basis. Of course, they are Arabs, so, as with children who have not attained the age of reason, we cannot expect them to behave decently. She also points to this and this, as recent examples of serious persecution of Christians by Moslems in, respectively, the Philippines and Pakistan.

So Moslems are killing Christians, while half the world is up in arms about a dozen (pretty unremarkable) cartoons.

Melanie Phillips has this excellent post, about the whole fiasco, highlighting the Foreign Office’s (and, indeed the US State Department’s) typically craven submission to the savage exigencies of political Islam, and commending a comment by, of all people, the French foreign minister, who said in the Telegraph that:

‘It is not normal to caricature a whole religion as an extremist or terrorist movement.’ But the extreme reaction to the cartoons ‘would suggest the caricaturists were right,’ he added.

Indeed. Ms Phillips continues:

The madness of this protest deepens when one considers that the claim at its heart, that pictorial representations of the Prophet are forbidden in Islam, is not true. Like so much else, it is all a matter of interpretation; but the fact remains that there have been many representations of the Prophet in Islamic art over the centuries.

This quote from Charles Moore is also apposite:

There is no reason to doubt that Muslims worry very much about depictions of Mohammed. Like many, chiefly Protestant, Christians, they fear idolatry. But, as I write, I have beside me a learned book about Islamic art and architecture which shows numerous Muslim paintings from Turkey, Persia, Arabia and so on. These depict the Prophet preaching, having visions, being fed by his wet nurse, going on his Night-Journey to heaven, etc. The truth is that in Islam, as in Christianity, not everyone agrees about what is permissible. Some of these depictions are in Western museums. What will the authorities do if the puritan factions within Islam start calling for them to be removed from display (this call has been made, by the way, about a medieval Christian depiction of the Prophet in Bologna)? Will their feeling of 'offence' outweigh the rights of everyone else?

Obviously, in the case of the Danish pictures, there was no danger of idolatry, since the pictures were unflattering. The problem, rather, was insult. But I am a bit confused about why someone like Qaradawi thinks it is insulting to show the Prophet's turban turned into a bomb, as one of the cartoons does. He never stops telling us that Islam commands its followers to blow other people up.

Indeed, the whole article, titled “If you get rid of the Danes, you’ll have to keep paying the Danegeld” is worth reading in it’s entirety.

Finally, there is David Conway's 3 February article on Civitas. Conway points out that the Chairmanship of the Security Council will have passed to Denmark just as the question of Iran’s Armageddon I mean nuclear weapons programmes comes before the Council. Coincidence? I hope so.