Freedom & Islam
This guy says it all:
And he’s just started at this point of the essay. Read the rest. The above author, Ibn Warraq, was raised as a Muslim and treasures the liberty he has found in the West. Sometimes it takes a new American to remind us of what we take for granted. Hat tip AOW.
Update: Daniel Pipes applauds Europe but find the Anglo-sphere's response lacking.
Update2: Tony Blankley Takes on the cowardly American press, excuse-making, and appeasement. Money quote: "The failure of the people to speak small truths leads to the victory of the big lie."
The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our times: freedom of expression. Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom -- freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of people sacrificed their lives?
A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental
freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth.Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.
This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. …
And he’s just started at this point of the essay. Read the rest. The above author, Ibn Warraq, was raised as a Muslim and treasures the liberty he has found in the West. Sometimes it takes a new American to remind us of what we take for granted. Hat tip AOW.
Update: Daniel Pipes applauds Europe but find the Anglo-sphere's response lacking.
Update2: Tony Blankley Takes on the cowardly American press, excuse-making, and appeasement. Money quote: "The failure of the people to speak small truths leads to the victory of the big lie."
posted by Jason Pappas at 8:40 PM
6 Comments:
I saw an interview yesterday with a French film maker who has recently finished a film on what motivates Palestinians to become suicide bombers. It was chilling to hear his views. Palestinian society is totally sick, corrupt and dysfunctional. I'll post his name and the name of the film if I can find them.
Ibn Warraq makes good points -- thanks for directing this to our attention.
Jason, I have just posted a short essay on Islam on my blog; it raises the issue we argued sometime back about whether Islam is inherently evil, and puts in in context of this cartoon issue; your reactions would be interesting.
And I may be on my way to getting tarred with the "bigot" label by some readers of Tom Palmer's blog...oh well, so be it.
Check out the sensitivity of muslim cartoons.
http://amboytimes.blogspot.com/2006/02/sensitive-cartoons-of-islam.html
Jason
The problem we are facing is the
comedic view of Muslims as oppressed people. Thirteen hundred years of Islamic history makes this
a joke. I get it Western Slavery and colonialism is evil but don't you dare draw the obvious coralary.
Someone should seriously write a Black Book of Islam.
In a related story, thousands of angry Christian fundamentalists from the Bible Belt converged on New York City this morning to torch the offices of Harvey Comics, long-time publisher of the comic-book "Hot Stuff, the Good Little Devil." Spokesperson for the group, Jim Bob Turnipseed of Ringworm, GA, defended the violence, claiming that the very idea of "a good little devil" is, in Mr. Turnipseed's words, "an abomination unto the Lord and deserves Old Testament justice. We're not too crazy about Wendy the Witch, either." The officers and staff of Harvery Comics escaped stoning via a fire exit, but the rioters did behead a cardboard image of Casper the Friendly Ghost, claiming that the beloved little specter "promotes New Age Spiritualism."
The "Muslim" cartoons cited by Kevin are interesting, but they are not Muslim cartoons. They are Palestinian political cartoons, and do not really have theological overtones.
It is a big mistake to look at everything that comes from Muslim regions as being representative of Islam, because there are other forces at work in these regions -- e.g. communism & socialism, & various other political doctrines. In the Palestinian case, Fatah is a secular movement that is more inspired by socialist ideas than by Islam. So too were Iraq's Baathists.
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