| GREG-STRANGE.COM |
"If you haven't found something strange during the
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
PROVIDING SUBSTANTIVE COMMENTARY ON THE
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
“Death to Denmark” and Other Cartoonish Islamic Inanities
Remember the old Looney Tunes cartoons that so many of
us grew up watching? Warner Brothers never failed to delight
us with its gallery of delightful characters and their wacky
antics: Bugs Buggy, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety and
Sylvester, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, and all the rest.
But none of those silly cartoon characters can hold a candle
to the wackiness of the real, live, living and breathing loony
tunes who are animatedly running amuck throughout the
Islamic world and elsewhere since a Danish newspaper made
the mistake of printing a series of cartoon caricatures of the
prophet Muhammad.
Ordinarily, one could live to a ripe old age and never hear
the words “Death to Denmark” being chanted by an angry mob.
That’s because that tiny, inoffensive, liberal northern
European country basically minds its own business, never
bothers anyone and wouldn’t intentionally hurt the proverbial
fly. But that was before the great cartoon kerfuffle of 2006.
Now, Danes, as well as all civilized peoples, are wishing that
those mindless death chants were the worst of it.
Given that any representation of Muhammad at all in art is
forbidden by Islam, it’s not particularly surprising that
caricaturing him wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a
burning fuse would stir up a hornet’s nest. The only surprising
thing is the degree and longevity of the ruckus.
The situation as it stands now is that thousands have gone
on the rampage in cities around the world, rioting, burning
infidel flags, torching infidel foreign embassies, calling for the
severing of infidel heads and generally raging at infidels at
large, shouting things like “Death to the infidels,” “Infidels
must die,” and, as has already been noted, “Death to Denmark
(which happens to be an infidel country)!”
Some also carried placards with none too subtle messages,
like “Annihilate those who insult Islam,” and, my personal
favorite, “Europe, take some lessons from 9/11.” A gratuitous
repartee to that might be, Islamic world, take some lessons
from 9/11 yourself -- they’re called Afghanistan and Iraq, but
that wouldn’t be very sporting or tolerant.
On the other hand, perhaps the time for tolerance -- or at
least an extreme degree of inappropriate tolerance -- is over. It
needs to be said that this cartoonish commotion isn’t
happening because something is rotten in Denmark, but rather
because something is rotten in a large swath of the planet
stretching from Casablanca to Khartoum to Karachi to
Kubang. That swath happens to be predominantly Muslim and
that can’t be simply a coincidence. And despite the platitudes
of multiculturalism, which in the West have become something
akin to gospel in recent years and whose main tenet is that all
cultures are pretty near equally worthy of respect, the West
may finally be starting to wake up and smell the coffee as it
boils over onto its lap.
Lord knows, the West has gotten wake-up calls galore over
the past couple of decades about Islamic extremism, but has
persistently hit the snooze button, rolled over and gone back to
sleep. Now it’s like an alarm that can’t be turned off. The only
way to block it out would be with earplugs. Or intellectual
blinders, the likes of which rule over some who are so stupefied
by the exalted ideal of multiculturalism as to be incapable of
perceiving reality. But when the foreign embassies of
innocuous countries like Denmark and Norway get torched by
Islamic mobs gone bananas over something as inconsequential
as a few cartoons, the virulent cultural pathology of Islam is on
display for all the world to see.
In this day and age, newspaper cartoonists, however
opinionated or tasteless their drawings might be, should not
have to go into hiding for fear of their lives as those Danes
reportedly have. There’s a cartoonist in the newspaper I
subscribe to who ticks me off almost every day. It’s Bush this
and Rumsfeld that, every cartoon, every day. Can’t the guy do a
negative cartoon about the other side just once? It’s not like he
doesn’t have plenty of material to work with: Ted Kennedy,
Howard Dean, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi,
Robert Byrd, Michael Moore. Come on, already. It’s a ready-
made gallery of caricaturables that nobody could invent.
But being a good citizen of the West who is well-adapted to
modernity, part of which is the ability to tolerate opinions with
which I disagree or even abhor, I’m not overcome with the need
to riot, burn down the newspaper office or behead its chief
cartoonist. The problem for the modern world today is that
such simple and basic tolerance has yet to be inculcated in the
Islamic world and that would seem to make it and modernity
largely incompatible.
As the exercise lady with the crew cut used to say in the old
television infomercial, it’s time to stop the insanity. And not
just the insanity of Islamic extremism, but also the insanity of
stupidly placating the insanity of Islamic extremism. So for
instance, when a Muslim complains to Burger King that a swirly
looking thing on the lid of its ice cream cones resembles the
word “Allah” in Arabic script and is therefore offensive, rather
than pulling the item off the menu, he ought to be told to buy
his ice cream cones elsewhere if he doesn’t like it.
Or instead of a hospital deleting ham from the Christmas
day menu because it might offend some pork-averse Muslim,
the choice of ham ought to remain on the menu for the benefit
of people other than Muslims. Or instead of a school banning
books with stories about pigs from the classroom because they
might offend Muslim children . . .
You get the idea. In other words, stop bending over
backwards to placate members of the world’s most intolerant
culture because it only works against you in the long run. The
ultimate paradoxical conundrum of multiculturalism is that
its indiscriminate and/or overindulgent application actually
encourages more intolerance and, therefore, could simply
destroy itself in the end.
And then one day we all wake up and . . . Poof! No more
multiculturalism, and it’s back to intolerance the world over.
Who knows what they’ll be rioting about then. Perhaps
something even more inane than cartoons.
Remember the old Looney Tunes cartoons that so many of
us grew up watching? Warner Brothers never failed to delight
us with its gallery of delightful characters and their wacky
antics: Bugs Buggy, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety and
Sylvester, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, and all the rest.
But none of those silly cartoon characters can hold a candle
to the wackiness of the real, live, living and breathing loony
tunes who are animatedly running amuck throughout the
Islamic world and elsewhere since a Danish newspaper made
the mistake of printing a series of cartoon caricatures of the
prophet Muhammad.
Ordinarily, one could live to a ripe old age and never hear
the words “Death to Denmark” being chanted by an angry mob.
That’s because that tiny, inoffensive, liberal northern
European country basically minds its own business, never
bothers anyone and wouldn’t intentionally hurt the proverbial
fly. But that was before the great cartoon kerfuffle of 2006.
Now, Danes, as well as all civilized peoples, are wishing that
those mindless death chants were the worst of it.
Given that any representation of Muhammad at all in art is
forbidden by Islam, it’s not particularly surprising that
caricaturing him wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a
burning fuse would stir up a hornet’s nest. The only surprising
thing is the degree and longevity of the ruckus.
The situation as it stands now is that thousands have gone
on the rampage in cities around the world, rioting, burning
infidel flags, torching infidel foreign embassies, calling for the
severing of infidel heads and generally raging at infidels at
large, shouting things like “Death to the infidels,” “Infidels
must die,” and, as has already been noted, “Death to Denmark
(which happens to be an infidel country)!”
Some also carried placards with none too subtle messages,
like “Annihilate those who insult Islam,” and, my personal
favorite, “Europe, take some lessons from 9/11.” A gratuitous
repartee to that might be, Islamic world, take some lessons
from 9/11 yourself -- they’re called Afghanistan and Iraq, but
that wouldn’t be very sporting or tolerant.
On the other hand, perhaps the time for tolerance -- or at
least an extreme degree of inappropriate tolerance -- is over. It
needs to be said that this cartoonish commotion isn’t
happening because something is rotten in Denmark, but rather
because something is rotten in a large swath of the planet
stretching from Casablanca to Khartoum to Karachi to
Kubang. That swath happens to be predominantly Muslim and
that can’t be simply a coincidence. And despite the platitudes
of multiculturalism, which in the West have become something
akin to gospel in recent years and whose main tenet is that all
cultures are pretty near equally worthy of respect, the West
may finally be starting to wake up and smell the coffee as it
boils over onto its lap.
Lord knows, the West has gotten wake-up calls galore over
the past couple of decades about Islamic extremism, but has
persistently hit the snooze button, rolled over and gone back to
sleep. Now it’s like an alarm that can’t be turned off. The only
way to block it out would be with earplugs. Or intellectual
blinders, the likes of which rule over some who are so stupefied
by the exalted ideal of multiculturalism as to be incapable of
perceiving reality. But when the foreign embassies of
innocuous countries like Denmark and Norway get torched by
Islamic mobs gone bananas over something as inconsequential
as a few cartoons, the virulent cultural pathology of Islam is on
display for all the world to see.
In this day and age, newspaper cartoonists, however
opinionated or tasteless their drawings might be, should not
have to go into hiding for fear of their lives as those Danes
reportedly have. There’s a cartoonist in the newspaper I
subscribe to who ticks me off almost every day. It’s Bush this
and Rumsfeld that, every cartoon, every day. Can’t the guy do a
negative cartoon about the other side just once? It’s not like he
doesn’t have plenty of material to work with: Ted Kennedy,
Howard Dean, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi,
Robert Byrd, Michael Moore. Come on, already. It’s a ready-
made gallery of caricaturables that nobody could invent.
But being a good citizen of the West who is well-adapted to
modernity, part of which is the ability to tolerate opinions with
which I disagree or even abhor, I’m not overcome with the need
to riot, burn down the newspaper office or behead its chief
cartoonist. The problem for the modern world today is that
such simple and basic tolerance has yet to be inculcated in the
Islamic world and that would seem to make it and modernity
largely incompatible.
As the exercise lady with the crew cut used to say in the old
television infomercial, it’s time to stop the insanity. And not
just the insanity of Islamic extremism, but also the insanity of
stupidly placating the insanity of Islamic extremism. So for
instance, when a Muslim complains to Burger King that a swirly
looking thing on the lid of its ice cream cones resembles the
word “Allah” in Arabic script and is therefore offensive, rather
than pulling the item off the menu, he ought to be told to buy
his ice cream cones elsewhere if he doesn’t like it.
Or instead of a hospital deleting ham from the Christmas
day menu because it might offend some pork-averse Muslim,
the choice of ham ought to remain on the menu for the benefit
of people other than Muslims. Or instead of a school banning
books with stories about pigs from the classroom because they
might offend Muslim children . . .
You get the idea. In other words, stop bending over
backwards to placate members of the world’s most intolerant
culture because it only works against you in the long run. The
ultimate paradoxical conundrum of multiculturalism is that
its indiscriminate and/or overindulgent application actually
encourages more intolerance and, therefore, could simply
destroy itself in the end.
And then one day we all wake up and . . . Poof! No more
multiculturalism, and it’s back to intolerance the world over.
Who knows what they’ll be rioting about then. Perhaps
something even more inane than cartoons.