$1 Million to Kill Cartoonist

[Blurry]

shoot 'em up.............

A Pakistani cleric announced Friday a $1 million bounty for killing a cartoonist who drew Prophet Muhammad, as thousands joined street protests and Denmark temporarily closed its embassy and advised its citizens to leave the country.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060217/ap_on_re_mi_ea/prophet_drawings

[Velvet]

Maybe Salmon Rushdie will take a shot at him.

[payce-ley]

lol

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Thanks! I think I've got a good topic to work with today with my animation students - How to Write a Negative Letter.

I'm surprised this has taken this long. And,

Qureshi did not name any cartoonist in his announcement. He did not appear aware that 12 different people had drawn the pictures.

Great to see he's getting all his facts straight before condemning a man to death.

[Freak By Night]

In related news, Iran has their own version of " Freedom Fries"

[SaggyBalls]

how can millions of people come together to be so ridiculously stupid and arrogant?

wouldn't the easiest way be for muslims around the world to condemn their terrorost bretheren sothat no more cartoons willl need to be drawn?

[Velvet]

Nobody needed to draw those cartoons.

Geez, isn't it enough to have free speech, or do we have to flaunt it?

[SaggyBalls]

but velvet the universal laws of supply and demand will insist that the cartoon needed to be drawn, as since there was a demand for the cartoon there must be a supply.

i don't think it was a very kind gesture...

but wholly necessary due to the demand for bondary-pushing political commentary.

flaunting freedoms lost us our legalized marijuana. nobody really needed to smoke weed on the steps of the police departments and blowing it in the faces of our police officers, taunting them with immaturity.

[Alexis]

check out this topic in this thread

[StoneMtn]

Apparently, it's not as easy to publicly flaunt our Canadian freedom of expression, as we might think...

School pulls Muhammad cartoon

Last updated Feb 17 2006 09:11 AM AST

CBC News

A private school in Halifax has removed a page of a student newsletter, which contains a cartoon that has sparked protests around the world.

Tim Mitchell, 17, a Grade 12 student at the Halifax Grammar School, included one of the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in The Student Voice, the newsletter he sells at the school for 50 cents.

The aspiring journalist says he wanted to spark a discussion about the controversy, and even asked Muslim students if they would be offended if he published the cartoon.

"None of them had any problem with it whatsoever. In fact, one Muslim girl was actually willing to write up a little blurb next to the comic which I published just saying what she felt about the situation," Mitchell said.

"I just put [the cartoon] in to try to raise social awareness to show everybody the futility of the whole situation, just that one comic can cause so much chaos, can cause all this rioting and deaths."

Protests and riots erupted around the world after a Danish newspaper published a dozen cartoons depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. Images of the prophet are banned under Islamic tradition for fear they could lead to idolatry.

When a school administrator, Matthew Moffatt, flipped through Mitchell's publication and saw the cartoon on the last page, he removed the page from all the remaining newsletters.

Mitchell calls it censorship. But the headmaster of the school, Paul Bennett, says the cartoon had to be pulled.

"We defend the student's right to express their own opinions but there have to be some limits on it. And our feeling is that this crossed the boundaries," said Bennett.

The newletter was Mitchell's initiative and not a school-sponsored newspaper, he added, "and as a result of that we felt that it would be better if he kept it to himself."

Mitchell has a meeting with school administrators Friday morning. He says he's not sure if he'll be punished for publishing the cartoon, or simply given a stern lecture.

Several newspapers around the world and in Canada have reprinted the cartoons, arguing readers need to see the caricatures for there to be an effective debate on the issue.

There were demonstrations in Halifax last week when one university professor posted the cartoons on his office door.

http://www.cbc.ca/ns/story/ns-school-cartoon20060217.html

[Hal Johnson]

One day those who dont, will, see.

[balogna pogna]

One time Marmaduke made me that mad.

[djmelbatoast]

Even if these cartoons were totally offensive(which is imposible for me to say as I haven't seen them) what right do the thought police have for censoring them. I equally make fun of all belief systems. I never thought Ray Ramano was funny but that didn't provoke me to burn down any buildings.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Even if these cartoons were totally offensive(which is imposible for me to say as I haven't seen them) what right do the thought police have for censoring them. I equally make fun of all belief systems. I never thought Ray Ramano was funny but that didn't provoke me to burn down any buildings.

I'm still not in the least convinced that "thought police" is a useful concept. We can govern ourselves just fine if we act with a bit of respect for others, and don't need any sort of cop to tell us how. My comparison of choice these days is still how we handled the question of whether the Bernardo tapes ought to have been allowed to be published, if only because it shows us that there are things that we (most of us, anyway) consider beyond the pale. There have been cultures in human history that have sacralised the sexual usage and immolation of children (really, you can sacralise pretty much anything) who wouldn't see what the big fuss was about.

Much of the energies in our culture in the last couple of hundreds of years have been spent taking the taboo out of things - making it possible to talk about things, in other words - and, imo, this has been a commendable project, wherever it undermines excuses for the blind use of power and gets people thinking with sensitivity. In getting rid of all this mystification, though, we've no doubt compromised our sense of mystery. In other words, we've blown up a lot of the roads to the sacred, traditionally understood, which has forced us to come up with ever new ways to find it, which often need to be reinvented every generation (or even throughout every generation). I understand music in this way, which is why I don't hesitate to say that the music in jambands (my idiom of preference) has the potential to be conducive to the sacred (corny as that might sound). That's where our culture is at; probably no other culture in history has been so disembedded from tradition. I'm perfectly happy to give it a go, fwiw, but we should remember that it's still an experiment.

Traditionalistic/fundamentalistic Muslims (not to speak of Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, etc. etc.) don't see it that way, though. They see us as godless, and thus at best lost, at worst cancerous. Read Bin Laden's comments to this effect, or the people who informed his thinking, like Sayyid Qutb. In their view, we have completely severed ourselves from the sacred, and for that reason need to be stopped through the most proactive and effective means available. When we train our sights on the heart of their faith through something as frivolous as a cheesy little editorial cartoon, there's not much more proof a lot of people in that camp feel they need that they should any longer hold their fire. And their agitators know very well how to frame all of this for their audiences.

Put another way, there's no way they'll ever understand what we're up to with all this relentless dissing of religion that we ourselves are so used to but that they're continually stung by. Remember how casually Bush used the word "crusade" in the first days after 9/11?

[mattm]

I can run around all day telling all the religions how I don't think it's right and I can make fun of anyone I want to.

I learned something while growing up, though, it's called: Respect.

Granted it's a lesson I've never had an easy time learning but I did. If my buddy is incredibly passionate about something I condsider stupid I'm not going to go insulting him/her about it. I'm going to respect them and keep my mouth shut.

I also learned that sticks and stones don't break my bones so names, comics, whatever don't hurt me. Then again, if I lived in a country kept third world by westerners so that they can keep all their cheap luxuries on my hard labour and all I had to feel good about myself was my religion and people kept bashing that too, I might get mad. I'm not sure 'cause I'm sitting here comfortable, knowing that I'm getting another meal and that I'll have clothes on my back.

Who knows. That's just my opinion. I know I can say whatever ther hell I want but I'm a good person so I'm not going to go around insulting folks just because I can (can we say bully here?) free speech or not.

PS: I have been to third world and developing countries. I've seen first hand the hundreds of children running around missing arms and legs, covered in sores 'cause they've most likely never seen a vitamin, etc. It's hard to be guilt free about our luxary here after that so things like this get to me.

I'm also not very good with articulation of my thoughts so I don't doubt that there is tonnes here that can be critized, it's just my opinion.

Edited February 19, 2006 by Guest

[Im going home Donny]

and a fine one at that.

[Birdy]

check out this topic in this thread

hahah! read this and couldn't help but think it was a plug for the politics forum!

[djmelbatoast]

My thought process was that if we aren't allowed to be offensive, even if it is incredibly ignorant, then where does it stop.

For instance, if we didn't want to offend the government, or a company, or a theory like intelligent design or any other group should we then, out of respect, never make light of what other people may believe all for the sake of hurt feelings?

The argument that free speech is important, but not as important as being sure not to offend anyone holds no water. If this was followed throughout the last 50 years we would still be praying in schools and locking up swingsets on Sundays. Not to mention the fact that everyone would still be laughing at sitcoms like Leave It To Beaver.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

My thought process was that if we aren't allowed to be offensive, even if it is incredibly ignorant, then where does it stop.

I might be splitting hairs, but I think there's an important difference between being critical and being offensive (or maybe I'm just getting too hung up on my sig line this week).

For one thing, there is a higher tolerance for taking the mickey out of bits of our own culture (I'm aware of the difficulties of using phrases like "our own culture"), like Christianity, and we need to be more cautious of when applying that kind of criticism elsewhere, because of what we or others will have to deal with as a result. Personally, I get ticked when people broadside a religion or culture wholesale, hamfistedly, because it's just going to antagonise people and not take anything anywhere (especially one's own thinking). I do, though, think we should be able to do so, if we do it with some kind of sensitivity, and not deliver some kind of metaphorical boot to the head. At the least, some sort of self-censor should be at play here (like the kind I try to remember, not always well, putting things up on this board Truth be told, I've stood on the brink of many, many absurdities, and thankfully, in some cases, I've clicked the Refresh instead of the Add Post. Not like anybody's embassy would have been burned down, or anyone killed in a riot, but shit would have ensued anyway, within its own scale).

Fwiw, I haven't identified as a Christian for a long time, but that's because I find a lot of the popular expressions of it sort of pathetic, self-indulgent, and embarrassing. Yet I do see what's worth respecting in it - namely, not only the mystery in the story, but that sometimes it takes people out of themselves, if only for a while, to look to something beyond themselves, and that that in itself is something invaluable, especially in such an age and culture of so much self-indulgence. But we also know how that dynamic can be cynically used by people trying to expand their own power over other people. There's a long history of criticism that has helped pull us out of that (formally, if not statistically, if you look at the growing numbers for conservative religion in North America).

I think every generation in this culture bears the greater burden of responsibility for how they carry on, if we're supposed to know so much better. Instead, mass culture seems to get consistently more pointless and self-indulgent in its own turn.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass. I have to presume I might be.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

On a related note, I just finished watching Because of Winn-Dixey with the girls, and aside from the gratuitous plug for a department-store chain (and even this can be squared well enough, theologically speaking), it's got a pretty sweet message - Christianity is the religion of losers, and that's its chief beauty. As soon as those losers start pretending they're anything but losers, it all goes to shit. Meanwhile, what are they losing against, and at the same time winning against?

Sorry, guess it's time to cork the bottle .

[SaggyBalls]

i wonder how many suicide bombers you could buy with a million bucks...

i know you could buy a helluva lot of shawarma and that'd make people way happier than death...

...unless it's discounted shawarma left in the sun. then there'd be hell to pay for all that gut rot.