Iconoclasm
What doesn’t make Muslims laugh.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Exodus – Chapter 20, Verse 4 [KJV]
What you have to understand is that Muslims really believe this.
MSNBC has Why Muslims are mad over prophet cartoons written by a Cairo correspondent, and the BBC has Q&A: Depicting the Prophet Muhammad, a more formal explanation.
While European newspapers are rushing to show solidarity on the free speech front, it was difficult to find the offending cartoons on the ‘Net. Fortunately, Jeff at Speedkill was able to track them down in English.
In the BBC article, Muslims urge new cartoon protests, there is a timeline of major events:
30 Sept: Danish paper publishes cartoons
20 Oct: Muslim ambassadors complain to Danish PM
10 Jan: 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
Many people dismiss this as peculiar to Islam, but Christianity has been over this ground more than once. Idolatry is a charge often used by some fundamentalist Christians to describe Catholics.
The Danes had every right to publish the cartoons, just like they have the right to deny the Holocaust took place, that Hitler should have won World War II, that the Soviet system was good for Eastern Europe, that slavery was good for American blacks. Of course, no one would protest those things, right?
The only thing those cartoonists had to do was not explicitly label the individual depicted as Muhammad. Everyone would have gotten the point, but all of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world wouldn’t have a religious obligation to be angry at Denmark. The Islamic fundamentalists have been handed a golden opportunity to promote hate against the West and every Westerner is now in danger in Islamic countries.
I congratulate the Danish cartoonists. The US needed a clueless cabal of neonitwits, the expenditure of billions of dollars, and the invasion of an Islamic country to create this kind of hatred.
