Letters to the Editor
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How?
I'm a Canadian female Muslim who feels physically ill about the riots and deaths and reaction to these cartoons. Of course 99.9% of us Muslims would and indeed are just rolling our eyes at the cartoons themselves. There are so many more important things in the world to worry about. But how am I supposed to rise up and "to condemn those who so disgrace their faith?" as the writer asks? That's not as exciting or as newsworthy as riots and mobs and savages dancing in the street in the middle east. Muslims in several cities in Canada protested peacefully regarding these cartoons. Do you hear about that? Do you hear anything good about Muslims. There's so much more I could write here, like how I'm terrified some fanatic is going to attack Canada and I won't be able to live with peace and dignity and respect in this country anymore. Like how if a Christian hijacks a plane, of course, we only identify him or her by his nationality and suggest s/he is mentally unstable i.e. the headline goes something like "Swedish man attempted to hijack plane" NEVER "Terrorist Christian ..." It is all about labelling and branding and sometimes it makes me want to take off my hijab. I could say that any image of a human or animal is against Islamic beliefs, let alone depictions of the Prophet Mohammed. I mean, I have a passport photo but that's because it is the year 2006 and I live in Canada. But we're not supposed to have paintings depicting living creatures in our homes, or pray in the same room as photographs. That's why Islamic art is mostly composed of shapes and patterns. And please stop to think that the violence in for example Pakistan or Iran regarding these cartoons is being stirred up by local religious leaders in those places for their own ends! Some of those people have been shown even more offensive and disgusting cartoons that were not even part of the original Danish cartoons, just to get them riled up and perpetuate the violence (check out CBC). Corruption is everywhere. Don't take things at face value. And most of all, the world is not black and white. West vs East, Good vs Evil...just too simplistic.
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Wrong fight
This is the wrong fight, at the wrong time. I think just about anybody who wants to see these cartoons has seen them, and they don't matter. It is not a significant First Amendment case. If I was running a paper in the West, in America particularly, I would not be under serious threat, but I still don't see any useful function of these cartoons except to inflame, to give the jihadists an excuse to drive a wedge between the west and the majority of good people of the Muslim faith.
Is it a "free speech" cause to draw a portrait of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban? What have I said with that? Muslims are evil and violent, because their prophet was? That's not true, and it's just insulting. I was raised a Catholic, and I know Catholics who would be mortified by a cartoon of, say, a naked Jesus sodomizing a young boy. Would it be a first amendment right to publish such a cartoon? Yes, but... why? The point it would make, if any, would be to say that pederasts exist in the Church because Jesus was one. Untrue and insulting to boot.
I don't believe for a minute that the cartoons themselves have been responsible for these riots. I guess cartoonists would love to think their drawings have that power. They have been organized by those who would like the rioting to continue, and provoked by Danish right-wingers who wanted to start a rumble.
I suppose it is my constitutional right to curse and swear at a baptism, but I'd be a nasty piece of business to do so. Please, before I volunteer to die for your right to say something, don't make what you say idiotic.
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Responsible Cartooning a Contradiction in Terms?
I'm a big fan of cartoons; I've watched the waves of "alternative" cartoonists come and go for about 35 years, from the early undergrounds, to Jim Woodring. Admittedly, I'm a little out of the loop these days, being abroad.
I was just thinking about this particular massive difference between Islam and Christianity. I once went to an exhibit of Eastern Orthodox iconography at a museum in Dallas, Texas. There was a large multipanel image depicting the umpteen tortures undergone by a particular saint and thought, "If this guy'd been born in the 70's, in the West, he would've been another Dan Clowes." But the issue is that Christianity--for reasons that art historians must certainly be more in touch with than me--seemed to encourage the making of images of Christ. Even the Protestants, though they may have distanced themselves early on from this fascination with crucifixes and iconography, eventually succumbed, and one finds images of a saintly Christ in bibles and religious materials of all kinds, even in the Fundamentalist hinterland. But Islam, up-front, as a matter of policy and principle, forbade this. Well, that's to ponder, ain't it?
Consider Larry Gonick's approach in his justly famous "Cartoon History of the World" series. When the time came to tell Mohammed's story, Gonick put him off-panel; you never actually see Mohammed in the [cartoon] flesh. Gonick says he did this out of respect for Islam. Some might suggest he was just secretly chickenshit. Should we take him at his word? I, for one, say yes. I think part of an artist's job discription, almost by definition, is to turn water to wine; in other words, they work with limited means. Cartooning, even more so. I think Gonick's decision was the right one. After all, he *is* trying to tell us about Islam, and putting up an image of Mohammed to do so would be to engage in a kind of disinformation. I think this is part of the noble legacy of Islam, and it doesn't hurt anything--except perhaps the pride of certain people--to work within that constraint, and *still* put forth a message that incorporates countervailing values (if so desired), in all their glory.