Blasphemy with a Danish
5 February 2006 by Ron
Following up Marcus’ Sean’s posts on the Muslims whose feelings got all hurt over some cartoons (Goddamn fuckin’ right! and Are you gonna eat that Danish?), I’ve added the cartoons to our Flickr page in an Islam Photoset.
Hardly too blaphemous on my scale.
But then, they’re protective of the Muhammed guy, and my standards of blashpemy are admittedly a bit jaded.
5 February 2006, on 9:37 am
It was my post, not Marcus’!
http://gods4suckers.net/archives/2006/02/01/goddamn-fuckin-right
All right, Ron. Way to blaspheme. Let’s hope so many people republish these that they won’t have enough suicide bombers to go around. Luckily, the GifS Headquarters in South Central L.A. and Fort Apache, The Bronx are heavily fortified and patrolled by atheist sharp-shooters (the deadliest kind).
5 February 2006, on 10:38 am
Tee hee
5 February 2006, on 11:22 am
Since the news broadcasters on tv have decided to not show the cartoons out of respect (fear?) for the religion, I really had no idea what the fuss was over! What a crock ‘o’ crap. The whole situation is absurd. So much for freedom of the press and free speech.
5 February 2006, on 11:58 am
I had seen the cartoons (because I sought them out) already… But yeah, joke ‘em if they can’t take a fuck. This just shows, as my second post said, how weak their belief system must be. If a few cartoons can shake your society to its core, you have serious fucking issues.
The mayhem continues.
Who would have thought little ol’ Denmark would be at the eye of such a storm?
I say the Western world needs to stand with our little chocolate, cheese and pastry -loving friends against these hordes of radicals.
5 February 2006, on 12:13 pm
If you have been watching the news then you know they, the muslims are burning the embassies. I saw those cartoons and really don’t thik they are funny nor do I think they are blasphemous. But then again I am an atheist.So what I am getting at is why should we in the US give any acceptance to such people who are so easily offended? And who when offended by such minor and ridiculous nonsence they have the audacity to riot and burn down those embassies.
We have freedom of speech here and in other parts of the world and we are getting a pretty clear snapshot of who is and isn’t for freedom. The nations rioting are only doing so under the pretense of blasphemy. Supposedly an apology would have been sufficient to stop the rioters. I have to say bullshit to that because they are just looking for a way to manifest their true nature of ignorant violent and primitive peoples.
Can you imagine if we had NOT been living with freedom of speech for 200 years. Just think we would be burned out o our homes and businesses for any infraction or blasphemy against xians. While I believe my rights are a 2 way street and others have their rights I do not believe they have any right to do violence or harm to me and especially when it comes to my freedom from their religion.
Also notice how they have chosen violence as a proper responce. The apologists are lining up to kiss their asses and in an attempt at placating them are trying to have the offending cartoons banished.
These are not a peace loving people nor is theirs a peace loving religion.
5 February 2006, on 1:37 pm
I wonder how many of the people torching embassies or protesting have actually seen the cartoons. My guess is that one of their leaders (the muslim equivalent of Pastor Hank) told them that the cartoons were evil and to burn shit. I’m starting to think that muslims are even bigger sheep than xians.
5 February 2006, on 1:41 pm
Since the news broadcasters on tv have decided to not show the cartoons out of respect (fear?) for the religion, I really had no idea what the fuss was over!
Yes, our media are doing a huge disservice by just mindlessly repeating the story line that these are offensive. This crisis has been whipped up out of nothing by extremist religious demagogues, and I can’t believe how many people who should know better have accepted it at face value.
5 February 2006, on 1:47 pm
Jimmer said:
We have freedom of speech here and in other parts of the world and we are getting a pretty clear snapshot of who is and isn’t for freedom.
Prezactly. And:
These are not a peace loving people nor is theirs a peace loving religion.
Well, yes, but let’s be clear. I have friends who are Arab atheists. It is not the people, it is the religion. That and repression and exploitation by their own governments, which sends them running into the arms of primative solutions like religion. We see the same thing here with the rise of the evangelical movement. So many of the people who become evangelicals are desperate and driven to it, you can’t help but see a parallel. I’m not talking about the privileged, the GWs of the world… I am talking about the vast flock of ignorami (hehe, new word??) who vote for his kind against their own interests.
The Arab world, as I have said before, has some legitimate political beefs agains the West, and against their own governments, etc. The Mulsim world is fucking it up for all of them. No way is this current insanity going to gain much sympathy from the non-Muslim world. Yeah, diplomats may be trying to placate them, but most of the rest of us are looking on with horror and disgust. You’re burning fucking embassies?? The very objects of trust and communication? The Palestinians (who I have much sympathy for) want to be recognized as a sovereign state, yet they run through the streets firing machine guns over some fucking cartoons?
This may be the breaking point, folks. My liberal politics go out the window on this one. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe free speech, the very foundation of our country, is the thing I hold most dear, and would even turn me into a hawk if necessary. I would fight our own government should it be infringed upon, much less theirs.
They are a people in need of a Ghandi. Reactionary hate speech and outright violence will get them nowhere.
5 February 2006, on 1:50 pm
“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
- Voltaire
5 February 2006, on 1:54 pm
KR and Sportin’: Yup, the people rioting have likely not even seen the cartoons, since they have less media access than we do, and their own governments would never allow a paper to reprint them. I would guess they are responding the hellfire rhetoric of their clerics alone. Meanwhile, of course our media is going along with the line that the cartoons are offensive. If not, Americans would have to condone blasphemy against Jeebus, too — and we know that ain’t happening any time soon.
5 February 2006, on 4:09 pm
These muslims are a bunch of crazed fanatical bastards. It’s like they’re waiting for an excuse to rampage like a bunch of wild animals. They’re so crazy and so fanatical that they don’t realize their actions is exactly why these cartoons were published in the first place. The rest of the world perceives muslims as crazy insane nutjob fanatics who love killing, wars, vengeance and chaos.
5 February 2006, on 4:33 pm
This is some sick shit, folks. Check this out.
Back to the peacefulness of the Superbowl.
5 February 2006, on 4:33 pm
Sorry, link to image didn’t work. Here it is:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/02/05/nflag05.jpg
5 February 2006, on 4:55 pm
Mut be a representative of “Innocent woman and children”. Teach them young before they can think for themselves. Desensitize them to murder and killing. It can all be justified in god. Life is cheap. When and where does it end?
5 February 2006, on 8:43 pm
Religion…..it’s enough to make me puke. Mind you Islam is only going though what Christianity went through for the first 1800 years of it’s so called ministry…and would do again if it wasn’t for secularism’s fight for freethought.
Hey where it Cat Stevens? What’s he got to say…?
And where the *&%$@ are all of the millions of so-called moderate Muslims? Why are they NOT SPEAKING UP and condemning their fellow believers? Because they are scared shit-less methinks…
We will see death and more destruction yet…all in the name of some underachieving prophet and mythical gawd.
6 February 2006, on 2:35 am
I wonder why the crowds of Muslims now demonstrating in the streets of many cities against some silly cartoons haven’t as yet marched in protest over the videotapes of westerners in Iraq having their throats slit by Muslim extremists. Strange that images of innocent people being bestially murdered don’t seem to bother other Muslims enough to get them to publicly protest, yet editorial drawings evoke such pandemonium. The rage, the violence, the insanity of it all. Religion truly is a curse.
6 February 2006, on 5:39 am
Check this out, folks… As usual, with a few days to allow real journalists to dig deeper (or, more appropriately, to allow editors to scramble and find connections with what is happening now to what was reported much less sensationally months ago), there is way more to this story than originally met the eye. The cartoons which have suddenly set the Muslim world ablaze were originally published in Denmark back in September!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060206/ap_on_re_mi_ea/prophet_drawings
The Middle East has for months been a powder keg of anti-Western rage over the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But some observers say the furor over the drawings may have been exploited or intensified by some Muslim countries in the region to settle scores with Western powers.
Syria and Iran face growing pressure from the Americans and the Europeans on the issues of foreign extremists infiltrating Iraq’s borders and on Tehran’s nuclear program. And Egypt, one of the first to publicly criticize the series of cartoons, has been critical of the Danish government for funding critics of human rights abuses.
“This is an organized attempt to take advantage of Muslim anger for purposes that do not serve the interests of Muslims and Lebanon, but those of others beyond the border,” Lebanese Social Affairs Minister Nayla Mouawad, a Christian, said Sunday after riots in Beirut.
But Syria blamed Denmark, criticizing the Scandinavian nation for refusing to apologize after the caricatures were first published in September in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
6 February 2006, on 9:59 am
“It’s like they’re waiting for an excuse to rampage like a bunch of wild animals.”
The reality of the situation is that these are an oppressed people. They are angry and they are unable to lash out against their real oppressors, their various “governments”. They are a witness to what happens when men are mere puppets of modern monarchies such as we were liberated from hundreds of years ago, of autocracies that have clerics in their pockets ready to feed the mobs explanations of western oppression, imperialism, and infidel crusades against Islam. Their apologists, revering the mobs, ignore that such spontaneous outbursts of vulgarity are real proof of closed and unfree societies. They warn us about such powerful mobs that hate us so. Personally I find the quiet wake of the USS Ronald Reagan or a wing of B-2s scary — not 100,000 people screaming on cue in Cairo.
These angry mob scenes were quite absent in American boulevards on September 12th. Is that because we are free? The continually disturbing rhetoric and visual images are the wages of the complete absence of truly liberal and free societies in the Arab world, where parliaments are functionaries, courts dependent, presidents not really elected, and the media free only to slander and libel Israel and the west. So we are witnessing the same rhetoric, the same mistruths, the same distortions that characterized all the Communist states of the Cold War — when, once upon a time, another 500 million poor souls likewise had little access to freedom or human dignity and likewise did not deserve their so often murderous governments.
6 February 2006, on 10:06 am
“The reality of the situation is that these are an oppressed people. They are angry and they are unable to lash out against their real oppressors, their various “governments”. ”
Bingo. And religion becomes both the reason and the excuse to lash out at outsiders who won’t (or rather can’t) put them in a dirty jail cell for twenty years on a whim. Oppressed people are always religious people - when you can’t get justice in this life you look for it in the next - nevermind that it’s only cold comfort. And gov’ts use religion to stoke those fires of animosity. The Muslim world against Israel is the perfect example of that.
6 February 2006, on 2:23 pm
While it’s true these people are oppressed, this is their own fault for following the edicts of a primitive backward-assed anti-science nutjob religion which preaches violence, sexism and hatred. While governments do you use religion as a tool to cause trouble that certainly doesn’t excuse the actions of these crazed lunatics - screaming and carrying on, torching stuff, destroying property, trampling people and looking for hostages to take. These violent actions only show that the cartoons are accurately portraying muslims as a bunch of crazy warmongering fanatics who live and die by the sword. Going on a crazy rampage over pictures of someone who lived thousands of years ago (assuming he existed at all) is absolutely insane.
6 February 2006, on 2:36 pm
I never said it excuses their behavior. However, I think it’s unfair to say “it’s their own fault”. Given that these countries don’t allow dissenting views, coupled with intense indoctrination and the not exactly stellar educational system - I very much doubt anything other than Islam is ever discussed in a non-derogatory manner.
I agree though that it is complete and utter lunacy.
6 February 2006, on 2:55 pm
Sometimes religion really flourishes after liberties are granted, as is the case in China, where attempts were made to stamp it out. Now that the general trend in China is less totalitarian, and more human rights are gained, people are increasingly more religious.
http://cbbc.org/china_guide/religion.html
www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln270/Waldron-revivals.htm
6 February 2006, on 3:02 pm
http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln270/Waldron-revivals.htm
6 February 2006, on 3:18 pm
Dan -
All that shows is that formerly oppressed people are religious. If this “less totalitarian” thing survives, check back in 10 years and see what happens to those numbers.
Plus, we are just kids, really. The moment you tell someone they ABSOLUTELY CANNOT do something (in this case, that thing is religion) then that’s what they want to do. We’ve seen that with theists before. The moment they think you’re attacking their beliefs the more entreanched in them they become.
I don’t think this data proves what you want it to. Which, I assume, is that religion is not just the opiate of the masses.
6 February 2006, on 3:55 pm
Nicely said, Dan, about the oppression in the Middle East (and yes, America does behave imperially there, of course, and doesn’t do a good job of holding some of their worst leaders — Saudi Arabia, hint, hint — accountable).
And yes on both counts Lyah: 1) We can’t say it is entirely the fault of poor, deprived, indoctrinated, uneducated people that they turn to the demon-haunted world for salvation and direction in life. And 2), spot on about religion and oppression. Same thing happened in Russia when the ban on religion was lifted. Same thing happened when Napoleon re-opened the churches (against his own personal beliefs) after the French Revolution had shut them down for a time.
It takes a period of stability, freedom and some prosperity, it seems, for a large section of a society to start turning to more natural ways of interpreting the world.
6 February 2006, on 4:17 pm
You do have a point about their government and culture indoctrinating them but these people are behaving like wild rabid animals and people are dying all over some cartoons. With behavior like that someone should dump millions of the cartoons on their countries with a message that more will come until they stop their insane violence.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/02/06/international/i063431S47.DTL
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/02/06/somalia.protest.ap/
6 February 2006, on 6:07 pm
Here’s a litte cartoon for ya’ll:
http://www.bayarearidersforum.com/forums/images/threads/000/151/812/2273438-1139157056059.gif
7 February 2006, on 1:52 pm
Another update on this bullshit.
7 February 2006, on 4:54 pm
I was just gonna post that same Hitchens piece. This paragraphi is great:
Islam makes very large claims for itself. In its art, there is a prejudice against representing the human form at all. The prohibition on picturing the prophet—who was only another male mammal—is apparently absolute. So is the prohibition on pork or alcohol or, in some Muslim societies, music or dancing. Very well then, let a good Muslim abstain rigorously from all these. But if he claims the right to make me abstain as well, he offers the clearest possible warning and proof of an aggressive intent. This current uneasy coexistence is only an interlude, he seems to say. For the moment, all I can do is claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism. But in the future, you will do what I say and you will do it on pain of death.
7 February 2006, on 10:32 pm
Lya
Your absolutely right. It does not prove anything more than perhaps formerly oppressed people are often religious. And we also see that oppressed people are religious. This brings us to un-oppressed people. The US, Australia, and Canada have remarkably stable religious service attendance rates, and a new phenomenon is spreading among the unchurched offspring in many un-religious families. This is a swelling trend where young adults without any religious affiliations grow to have a strong sense of spirituality and a “strong belief in God, Heaven and other supernatural phenomenon”.
http://gunston.doit.gmu.edu/liannacc/ERel/S2-Archives/Iannaccone%20-%20Looking%20Backward.pdf
What is really odd about this, it is extremely pervasive in such “secular” nations as Scandinavia, England and Germany. It seems organized religion is increasingly shunned in these nations, yet “spirituality” is on the rise.
These are considered free and open societies, liberal and far from oppressed. These are not indoctrinated individuals, nor is there any pressure on them to develop spiritual tendencies. Is this the future?
I’m sort of just thinking out loud here, in case you haven’t noticed.
8 February 2006, on 10:56 am
Dan: Well, we have already seen much of what you have described here in pagan California. I just wish people could love life for its natural wonders and not always put a layer of make-believe bullshit (from astrology to karma) over it to give it meaning.
8 February 2006, on 1:55 pm
This is a swelling trend where young adults without any religious affiliations grow to have a strong sense of spirituality and a “strong belief in God, Heaven and other supernatural phenomenon”.
Which is perfect proof that man invented gawd, because somehow man can’t live without the concept of meaning and structure to the universe.
8 February 2006, on 2:52 pm
” somehow man can’t live without the concept of meaning and structure to the universe.”
Exactly. My entire point in much of what I tried to get across when I first came to this blog. Not proof of God, just proof of mankind’s dependence on gods. Understanding theism begins there.
8 February 2006, on 10:55 pm
“…just proof of mankind’s dependence on gods”
Correction - proof of weak-minded people’s dependence on gods.
9 February 2006, on 8:08 am
fuck people who ve drawn this
9 February 2006, on 8:42 am
@t@,
And fuck religious zealots who believe they’re religion applies to everyone. Hooray Denmark! Hooray free speech! Fuck you for trying to tell me how I should live my life or how I should speak! Watch this:
Mohammad likes to eat bacon and ham sandwiches while he spanks his monkey over gay porn and fingers his daughter while goofing around with his ten-year old sons cock and then tells everyone that if allah’s extension can’t be reached, to call el-manat, el-uzza, and el-lat and ask their advice since they are equal to him.
Oops.
24 June 2006, on 4:11 pm
[...] “What kind of a god is it that’s upset by a cartoon in Danish?” - Salman Rushdie [...]