Raking The Coals for War

[Nbadan]

http://www.danishmuhammedcartoons.com/tp.gif


The supreme authority in Iran, the chief cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared on Tuesday that the cartoons of Islam's Muhammad published in Europe, which have caused an ongoing and violent uproar in the Muslim world, are a Zionist plot against Islam.

The Associated Press reports that Khamenei told a radio audience that the cartoons are a "conspiracy by Zionists who were angry because of the victory of Hamas."

None of this would have been a big deal if a commission of Danish Muslims touring the Middle East seeking support for their outrage against the cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten hadn't embellished on the cartoons.


Quist says the dossier they shared in Egypt may have been far more damaging than the Jyllands-Posten episode -- and it may have further exacerbated misgivings between Denmark and the Arab world. In addition to the now notorious caricatures published by the newspaper which have now spread like wildfire in the blogosphere, it also included patently offensive anti-Muslim images that had been sent to the group by other Muslims living in Denmark. The origins or authenticity of the images haven't been confirmed, but their content was nevertheless damaging. Quist says the dossier included three obscene caricatures -- one showed Muhammad as a pedophile, another as a pig and the last depicted a praying Muslim being raped by a dog.

Spiegal (http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398624,00.html)

You can see the original cartoons at this Link (http://www.danishmuhammedcartoons.com/), and the embellished cartoons here (http://ekstrabladet.dk/VisArtikel.sasp?TemplateID=1)

The original cartoons were published in September 2005...


30 Sept 2005: Danish paper publishes cartoons
20 Oct: Muslim ambassadors complain to Danish PM
10 Jan 2006: Norwegian publication reprints cartoons
26 Jan: Saudi Arabia recalls its ambassador
30 Jan: Gunmen raid EU's Gaza office demanding apology
31 Jan: Danish paper apologises
1 Feb: Papers in France, Germany, Italy and Spain reprint cartoons
4 Feb: Syrians attack Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus
5 Feb: Protesters sack Danish embassy in Beirut

[Nbadan]

And on the other end of the spectrum we have...


More people in this country now rate Iran as the biggest threat to the U.S., 27 percent, than say that about any other country, including North Korea, China and Iraq, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.


As recently as October, Iraq and China were seen as the biggest threats, closely followed by North Korea.

Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/07/AR2006020700983.html)

http://learning.cc.hccs.edu/Members/cschweitzer/images/mrburns.jpg
Excellent!

[Nbadan]

Interesting piece from Asia times...

Why can't Muslims take a joke?
By Spengler


Religious humor has become commonplace in the secular West, but it came with a price.

More than any people on Earth, the Danes should know the terrible price of religious humor, for the first great Christian humorist arose from their dour midst as if by immaculate conception. "Humor is intrinsic to Christianity," wrote Soren Kierkegaard, because "truth is hidden in mystery". But Kierkegaard the humorist was sent to the Danes after the Enlightenment had laid waste to Christianity, that is, after the French revolutionary army had conquered traditional Europe. He wielded humor out of desperation, after Denmark already had started down its long slide toward secularism.

<snip>

Deprecatory cartoons of Jesus would have earned you the dungeon or the stake during most of Christianity's 2,000-year history. Britain still has not abolished the Blasphemous Libel Law against mockery of the Church of England, although the last Englishman punished for blasphemy was a certain William Gott, who received nine months' imprisonment in 1922 for comparing Jesus to a circus clown.

<snip>

With freedom of choice and access to information come doubt. Western scholars doubt whether Mohammed ever existed <2> or, if he existed, whether the Koran was invented two centuries after his death, or indeed whether the Koran even was written in Arabic. Christianity and Judaism are bloodied - indeed, drained almost dry - by nearly two centuries of scriptural criticism; Islam's turn barely has begun.

More revealing than the refusal of the mainstream American media to repost the Mohammed cartoons is the disappearance of more dangerous material previously available. Newsweek's "Challenging the Koran" story of July 28, 2003, has vanished from the magazine's website. The government of Pakistan had banned that issue, which among other things reported a German philologist's contention that the Koran was written in Syriac rather than classical Arabic, translating the "virgins" of Paradise as "raisins". As I observed before, the topic of Koranic criticism has disappeared from the mainstream media. Since the suppression of the Newsweek story the Western media have steered clear of the subject.

<snip>

Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the modern world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. <3> That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries, whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century of religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to the modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.

<snip>

With stable institutions and material wealth, the secular West evinces a slow decline. Not so the Muslim world, where loss of faith implies sudden deracination and ruin. In the space of a generation, Islam must make an adjustment that Christianity made with great difficulty over half a millennium. Both for theological and social reasons, it is unequipped to do so. Muslims might as well fight over a cartoon now; they have very little to lose.

Asia Times (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak02.html)

Statistics show that there exist a close statistical relationship between literacy and the percentage of non-religious people in a population in the cross-section of countries.

Once a country's literacy rate reaches 90%, the percentage of secularism jumps into two digits. That is as true for Muslim countries as well as for non-Muslim countries. Because the Muslim literacy rate is so far below the average, though, few Muslim countries have a high proportion of secular people".