Holy War 2006: My View on the Mohammod cartoons
by Joseph Jordan

The West has sparked outrage amongst Muslim people all over the world. Riots have killed and injured numerous people in Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and other nations, as well as sparked boycotts and 1 million dollar bounties for those involved in this provocation. So what could possibly have provoked such anger?

In September 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published various caricatures of the Prophet Mohammod, depicting Mohammod as a terrorist. In the Islamic faith, any depiction of the Prophet Mohammod is blasphemy whether good or bad, but this was not an innocent mistake, it was a downright provocation. The writers and cartoonists behind this knew full well that the blasphemous cartoons would provoke people of the Islamic faith, which was the intent of publishing the tasteless cartoons.

In a world that responds to provocation with action, where modern bourgeois values like love for money, “free speech” and “securalism” are none-existent and instead values such as love for God, honor, and loyalty dominate, this was literally running with scissors for the West. The initial response by Muslim’s was to boycott Danish products, but the modern Western press in all of its arrogance decided to republish the cartoons in defiance. Papers such as Le Soir and Le Monde in France, Die Welt in Germany, and El Pais in Spain, all published the articles under the guise of “press solidarity”, in order to support the European Union’s right to insult and spit on any God, religious figure, or spiritual belief.

There are many people who are praising these newspapers for their defense of an abstract concept : “freedom of speech”. When it comes to freedom of speech, the west does know boundaries, however. David Irving, a British historian, has been rotting away in an Austrian prison for the last 3 months, waiting for trial on February 20th for a speech he made over 15 years ago in Austria. In Germany, Austria, Canada, and countless other Western countries, the thought crime of questioning the Holocaust is punished by fines and over-the-top prison sentences where college graduates are placed next to pedophiles and murderers for 2, 3, or even 5 years.

The West is not any more morally “superior” to these Muslim rioters either. The hypocrisy of western government’s such as Germany is shown in the comments of Interior Minister Wolfgang Shauble’s on the subject: "Here, in Europe, governments have nothing to say about which publisher publishes what." The amusing thing is, this very German government (along with the rest of the west) was foaming at the mouth and calling for drastic measures against the Iranian people, when President Ahmadnejad made comments daring to question the Holocaust and the basis for Israel’s existence.

Don’t think America is much better than their European counterparts either. We have our own little speech taboos, such as insulting the Jewish faith or saying deragatory comments about gays. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League do not go out and riot, but they are well known for harassing people exercising their first amendment rights. Hillary Clinton, who defended an insulting and blasphemous “art” exhibit in Brooklyn (and ignored the Catholic diocese’s demands to respect the communities religious sensibilities), where the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ were portrayed in pornographic fashions and filled with insulting language, was the first one to call for “military action” against Iran when it made its infamous comments against Israel.

It appears to me that the people who published these insulting and provacative cartoons of the Prophet Mohammod are not even “xenophobic conservatives”, rather they are liberal self-proclaimed champions of “tolerance and free speech”. Free speech and tolerance for who, is my question.

We should take lessons from the Muslim’s and stand up for our faith’s, whether Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Sikh, Tao, or anything else. Living in this modern world where spirituality is looked down upon, a mere belief in something spiritual or metaphysical is a revolutionary act! By being inactive, we are just fulfilling Middle Eastern stereotypes of us being spiritless decadent aristocrats who are scared to fight for our beliefs. Perhaps it is true?

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