Institutionalised sense of humour failure
It's hard to know where to begin.
I'm aware that this is my third post in a row that could be construed, by an idiot admittedly, as anti-Islamic. But I'm at the mercy of the news cycle. The other day Parliament decided the transparent purchase of Muslim votes with unjust laws that favour them unnecessarily was a step too far even for that finely-honed extremist-pandering, vote-buying machine, the Labour party. I applauded that decision not because I am anti-Islamic but because I am against the wholesale purchase of votes - anyone's votes - with bad law. Shortly thereafter a demented "statesman" announced that, "Allah willing", George W. Bush would stand trial in an Iranian peoples' court. I observed that this was lunacy not because I am anti-Islamic but because it is patently absurd: because Ahmadinejad is a delusional lunatic, and not because he chose to invoke his deity whom many perfectly civilised, peaceful people worship their entire lives in nothing but joy.
Unfortunately, none of those civilised, peaceful people is much in evidence at the moment.
Charles Moore makes a very good point today. In the middle of pondering where, exactly, all those Danish flags came from that were getting burned in Palestine this week - a very good question when one consideres that those cartoons were originally published in October, and it wasn't until now, subsequent to the circulation by Danish imams among their counterparts in Muslim countries of a package containing the twleve cartoons plus an extra three of uncertain provenance and far greater offensiveness, that there has been any kind of international outcry - he pointed out, in a throwaway, parenthetical remark, that in burning the Danish flag, "they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass."
"Let that pass." Moore's Catholicism has the ferocity of a convert's (which he was ten years or so ago, I believe) and yet he is capable of taking an inferred but deadly insult in perfectly good part. The parallel is instructive, for the insult to Islam or to Mohammed that the flag-burners et al have perceived in these cartoons is also an inferred one - and one inferred far less accurately than that of Moore's burned cross. My personal favourite, as an admirer of the satirical cartoonist's art, is the one with the queue of suicide bombers at the gates of paradise, and the caption, "Stop, stop! We've run out of virgins!". Leaving aside the implied criticism of the casual, brutal misogyny of Islam's insistence on virginity, which characterises women not as individuals to be loved (or not) for themselves but as goods that are soiled or damaged if they have been "used" previously, the only objects of ridicule in this cartoon are the unimaginably stupid suicide bomber who believes that he will be rewarded for mass murder of the innocent and the inexpressibly sinister and coldly manipulative clerics who pervert the minds of impressionable students of Islam by telling them that in the first place.
Alexis de Tocqueville said, "Mahommed professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith." In other words, while Christianity is a faith that may become a powerful and fulfilling part of one's life, Islam insists on running one's life, holding sway over the mind and dominion over the body. It is therefore inevitable that reactions to plain and simple satire would be so grossly, so pathetically out of proportion as they have been. Tocqueville went on, "This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods." If this is how Islam meets Western liberalism, that can only, unfortunately, be an encouraging thought.
I'm aware that this is my third post in a row that could be construed, by an idiot admittedly, as anti-Islamic. But I'm at the mercy of the news cycle. The other day Parliament decided the transparent purchase of Muslim votes with unjust laws that favour them unnecessarily was a step too far even for that finely-honed extremist-pandering, vote-buying machine, the Labour party. I applauded that decision not because I am anti-Islamic but because I am against the wholesale purchase of votes - anyone's votes - with bad law. Shortly thereafter a demented "statesman" announced that, "Allah willing", George W. Bush would stand trial in an Iranian peoples' court. I observed that this was lunacy not because I am anti-Islamic but because it is patently absurd: because Ahmadinejad is a delusional lunatic, and not because he chose to invoke his deity whom many perfectly civilised, peaceful people worship their entire lives in nothing but joy.
Unfortunately, none of those civilised, peaceful people is much in evidence at the moment.
Charles Moore makes a very good point today. In the middle of pondering where, exactly, all those Danish flags came from that were getting burned in Palestine this week - a very good question when one consideres that those cartoons were originally published in October, and it wasn't until now, subsequent to the circulation by Danish imams among their counterparts in Muslim countries of a package containing the twleve cartoons plus an extra three of uncertain provenance and far greater offensiveness, that there has been any kind of international outcry - he pointed out, in a throwaway, parenthetical remark, that in burning the Danish flag, "they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass."
"Let that pass." Moore's Catholicism has the ferocity of a convert's (which he was ten years or so ago, I believe) and yet he is capable of taking an inferred but deadly insult in perfectly good part. The parallel is instructive, for the insult to Islam or to Mohammed that the flag-burners et al have perceived in these cartoons is also an inferred one - and one inferred far less accurately than that of Moore's burned cross. My personal favourite, as an admirer of the satirical cartoonist's art, is the one with the queue of suicide bombers at the gates of paradise, and the caption, "Stop, stop! We've run out of virgins!". Leaving aside the implied criticism of the casual, brutal misogyny of Islam's insistence on virginity, which characterises women not as individuals to be loved (or not) for themselves but as goods that are soiled or damaged if they have been "used" previously, the only objects of ridicule in this cartoon are the unimaginably stupid suicide bomber who believes that he will be rewarded for mass murder of the innocent and the inexpressibly sinister and coldly manipulative clerics who pervert the minds of impressionable students of Islam by telling them that in the first place.
Alexis de Tocqueville said, "Mahommed professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith." In other words, while Christianity is a faith that may become a powerful and fulfilling part of one's life, Islam insists on running one's life, holding sway over the mind and dominion over the body. It is therefore inevitable that reactions to plain and simple satire would be so grossly, so pathetically out of proportion as they have been. Tocqueville went on, "This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods." If this is how Islam meets Western liberalism, that can only, unfortunately, be an encouraging thought.
posted by Novus at 22:57
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