Offensive?
"A couple of simple caricatures printed in a Danish newspaper has the Arab world outraged. Unfortunately, the paper apologized for the Muhammad-critical cartoons and democratic values lost out to totalitarian ideology. "
Thus begins an excellent article in Der Speigle about the riots in the Middle East. I am not going to focus on what is wrong with Islam (for that you want to check out Anti-Strib's long running series on Islam). What I do want to focus on is the inconsistency of certain members of our society in reaction to this. For the record, I find the cartoons in question to be as crass and tasteless as, oh say, Andes Serrano's dreadful "Piss Christ" or Martin Scorsese's equally dreadful "Last Temptation of Christ". If you want a cartoon comparison, the WaPo's Tole cartoon depicting our military as a quadraplegic with Dr. Rumsfeld calling them "battle hardened" ranks up there on the old insult meter. In fact, Christians and Jews (and their respective deities) have been ridiculed on the pages of most Arab, American and European newspapers for as long as there have been newspapers!
Now, let's take a look at the reactions to said "offenses". When Christians are offended, and they complain, they are told to suck it up a take it like a man. When the military is offended and they complain, they are accused of censorship. When Muslims are offended they take to the streets with plackards reading "Behead those who insult Islam" or "Freedom go to Hell" or calling in bomb threats to the papers who had the audacity to run with these cartoons. Michelle Malkin has the context (of the cartoons) that no one seems to care to look at. What struck me though was the reaction of the broadcast media. MSNCB, in covering the situation last night, refused to show the cartoons out of "respect" of Islam and yet NBC has planned for a Good Friday broadcast an episode of Will and Grace that insults Christians! I am saddened, but not surprised, that our American media has choosen to kow-tow to the fascists in radical Islam. For they are only more than willing to hand over their "cherished" free expression to a regime as long as that regime holds fast to the presses anti American sentiment. Shame on the US Media!
You be the judge readers. Is this
any more insulting than this or this or this? Horribly poor taste yes, but hardly worthy of mass riots, bomb threats and suicide bombers.
posted by The Lady Logician at 4:35 PM permalink
2 Comments:
Part of the left's pathology is that it hates anything that has long been mainstream. On the other hand, anything out of the mainstream with only a minority following is automatically on the "most favored" list.
Dennis Prager comes close to explaining this oddity. Leftists have long ceased making "right" and "wrong" determinations in their moral outlook. But there has to be SOME criterion of judgment. So they pick "weak" and "strong" instead. The weak are good and the strong are bad.
A religion underrepresented in the U.S. that we often associate with weak, third-world countries is a leftist darling because of its pitiableness.
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