Yesterday, Jihadists attacked the office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Twelve people were slaughtered, including a policeman lying on the ground wounded with his hands up. In the wake of that, I think it’s worth noting that almost a decade has passed since Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper published a dozen pretty tame cartoons of Mohammed, triggering worldwide Muslim outrage that resulted in many deaths. Here are those cartoons.
It’s worth rereading Bob Bidinotto’s Winter 2005 New Individualist column about those Mohammed cartoons. In particular:
Ironically, the violent and deadly response of radical Muslims worldwide to the appearance of these cartoons only confirms the validity of the newspaper’s point. By their bloody reaction, Islamic fundamentalists reveal that they have taken pages from the playbooks of Nazi and communist thugs, and thus have richly earned their new label: “Islamofascists.” Observe that while they deny everyone else the freedom to express any opinion contrary to Islam, these brutes simultaneously claim for themselves complete freedom of expression with regard to their adversaries—including threatening with death those who disagree. Observe, too, that in many Muslim nations, the media publish and broadcast the most insulting language and demeaning images directed against the symbols, beliefs, and practices of Jews, Christians, and other “infidels.” Could the hypocrisy be more transparent?
Offhand, I can think of no other major religion whose followers habitually try to silence their opponents with censorship, death threats, or death itself. Even among today’s religious, radical Muslims stand virtually alone in their unrepentant advocacy of totalitarianism.
The responses to the Charlie Hebdo attack have ranged from brave to cowardly and vile. The former category includes the reaction of many cartoonists, this Bill Maher rant, and this Andrew McCarthy column. The latter category includes:
A week ago on New Year’s Day, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in a profoundly important speech, addressed the imams of the Islamic Research Academy at Cairo’s al-Azhar University. Yes, that’s the leading center of learning for Sunni Islam, which endorsed the Sharia manual quoted at length in the Andrew McCarthy column linked above. Al-Sisi called for a “religious revolution” to turn Islam away from “that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries” and toward a more moderate path. As Jonah Goldberg notes, this is a big deal that’s been virtually ignored by our mainstream media.
Rather than issuing pro-forma declarations of “Islam is the Religion of Peace” and weaselly “we condemn these killings, but…” statements, opinion leaders of the Muslim world would do their faith and the entire world a favor by invoking and endorsing the words of al-Sisi.
UPDATE: This latest Islamofascist assault against cartoonists engendered an online response similar to 2010’s Draw Mohammed Day (a response to threats against South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker), this time mostly on Twitter. This isn’t a drawing, but it’s one of my favorites:
I’m a sucker for puns.
You can find lots more under the hashtags in the tweet above, but be aware that a number of the drawings involve Mohammed as either sodomizer or sodomizee.
Welcome to 2015. It has to be better than 2014, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?