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13th Century Persian depiction of Mohammed, artist unknown, via Mohammed Image Archive
I noted the other day that Internet jihadists were leaving death threat comments on the Facebook page of the “Draw Mohammed Day” organizer. Now, the Internet jihadi sympathizers are crowing this morning on Twitter about Facebook taking the DMD page down. As I write, the page appears to be back up. Who knows for how long. [Update 10:21pm: See Allahpundit for the latest shenanigans.]
If you’ve been reading this blog regularly for years, you know that dhimmitude at social networking and Web2.0 sites is nothing new. Nor is dhimmitude in the MSM or in higher education or in Washington. It’s the Achilles’ heel of Western civilization.
In honor of Draw Mohammed Day today, I’m reprinting below the post I published on January 1, 2006 during the original Mohammed Cartoon conflagration and the post I wrote at the end of 2006 on the deceit behind the manufactured Mo outrage. We’ve been here before. It’s about much more than free speech. The Muslim cartoon jihadists know it. As Zombie writes in a trenchant essay today: “Which side in this conflict gets to determine what counts as “disrespectful” (a contemporary euphemism for “blasphemous”)? In the jihadists’ view, any depiction of Mohammed — even a positive or honorific depiction — is deemed blasphemous. It’s our religion, they say, so we get to say what’s offensive. Yet if we grant them this inch, they’ll take another inch (it’s also disrespectful to write Mohammed’s name without a worshipful “PBUH” after it), and another inch (it’s disrespectful to criticize Islam in any way), and before long it’s the whole mile, and we once again will be living in an intellectual Middle Ages in which religious tyrants dictate our every thought and action.”
And as Oriana Fallaci warned before her death: “The hate for the West swells like a fire fed by the wind. The clash between us and them is not a military one. It is a cultural one, a religious one, and the worst is still to come.”
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Flashback…
SUPPORT DENMARK: WHY THE FORBIDDEN CARTOONS MATTER
MichelleMalkin.com
January 30, 2006
Last October, I blogged about a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, and its cartoonists being threatened by Muslim extremists for publishing cartoons about the prophet Muhammad deemed offensive by Islamist p.c. bulllies. See here and here.
For the past four months, The Brussels Journal has relentlessly covered the ensuing uproar from the Muslim world and the battle over the newspaper’s freedom to publish provocative speech.
Things came to a head over the past week. In Gaza City, Palestinian gunmen took over an EU office to protest the cartoons:
Masked gunmen today took over an office used by the European Union to protest the publication of cartoons deemed insulting to Islam. About five gunmen stormed the building, closing the office down, while 10 other armed men stood watch outside. One of the militants said they were protesting the drawings, one of which depicted Islam’s Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb.
Danish flags are being burned. Danish workers have reportedly been beaten. The country now faces an international boycott from Muslim nations.
While the intrepid newspaper has not apologized for printing the cartoons, it has issued a statement acknowledging that the cartoons “offended many Muslims, which we would like to apologize for.” Paul Belien at The Brussels Journal singles out the courage of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who has refused to capitulate to the bullies:
He is one of the very few European politicians with guts. If anyone deserves a prize for his valiant defence of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, it is certainly Mr Rasmussen. He did not give in to pressure from Muslim fanatics, nor from the appeasers at the UN, the European Commission and the Council of Europe. In the past weeks Denmark has shown that all is not yet lost in Europe. If something is rotten now it is not in Denmark.
Here, for posterity and in solidarity with the paper’s free speech rights, are the 12 forbidden cartoons:
In response to the notion that the West (or Islam) has ever followed the prohibition against depicting Mohammed, Zombie has created the “Mohammed Image Archive,” which contains dozens of Mohammed images from throughout history. A must-read.
Zombie e-mails:
I think it’s important that the West stands up on this issue: if we cave into Muslim demands for self-censorship, our freedom of speech will be taken away forever.
Exactly right. And for those who think this isn’t affecting us, open your eyes:
Local Radio Skit Sparks Muslim Controversy (KFI radio host Bill Handel is fighting back.)
Criticizing Islam on the airwaves
CAIR’s war on conservative talk radio
Brian Maloney: Islamists 1, Talk Radio, 0
LGF: CAIR goes ballistic over B.C., Dr. Laura
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There is now a Buy Danish campaign in response to Saudi Muslims boycotting Denmark’s products.
Butter cookies, here we come!
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What did Bill Clinton have to say about the cartoon controversy? You won’t be surprised.
More at LGF.
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Feedback:
Reader David S…
By threatening to kill those who insult them, the terrorists are
demonstrating the vicious reality behind the caricature of Mohammad
wearing a bomb-shaped turban better than any cartoonist ever could.
Reader Mike W…
Buy Legos. Lots and lots of Legos. Especially the Mindstorm programmable robotics kits. Danish company and non-fattening.
Reader Fritz R…
The utter hypocrisy is that Muslim countries regularly lampoon Christians and Jews in their comics while demanding the west refrain from any criticism of Islam.
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Feb. 8, 2006 update:
All posts to date:
The Muhammed Cartoons blogburst under attack
The Murder of Father Santoro
We are in this together
American newspapers, will you please stand up?
Origins of a fake Muhammed cartoon
The Danish cartoonists respond
So, will our Supreme Court be next?
Pakistani doctors: No more European medicine
Chechnya joins the Cartoon Jihad
“With our blood we will redeem the prophet”
Video: Cartoon Jihad debate on Fox News
What does the American left have to say?
Another day, another embassy torched
Video: And then they came for the embassies
The Muhammad Cartoons blogburst
The State Dept takes sides in the cartoon wars
Followers of the Religion of Peace
The “International Day of Anger”
The cowardly American media (video added)
In search of a brave American newspaper (updated)
First, they came for the cartoonists
Support Denmark: Why the forbidden cartoons matter
The cartoons Islamists don’t want you to see
***
Flashback…
2006: The year of perpetual outrage
MichelleMalkin.com
December 20, 2006
It began with the Danish cartoons. It ended with the flying imams. 2006 was a banner year for the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. Twelve turbulent months of fist-waving, embassy-burning, fatwa-issuing mayhem, intimidation, and murder resounded with the ululations of the aggrieved. All this in the name of defending Islam from “insult.” Let’s review.
In late January, masked Palestinian gunmen took over a European Union office in Gaza City to protest the publication of a dozen cartoons about Islam, Mohammed, and self-censorship in the Danish newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten. They stormed the building, burned Danish flags, and spearheaded an international boycott of Denmark products across the Muslim world.
The rage was manufactured pretext. The cartoons had been published four months earlier with little fanfare. It wasn’t until a delegation of instigating Danish imams toured Egypt with the cartoons—plus a few inflammatory fake ones including an old image of a French hog-calling contest participant deceptively portrayed as “anti-Muslim”—that the fire started burning. Think the mainstream media will remember that? Not likely. They fell for the ruse and were slow to acknowledge it after American bloggers and Danish television exposed the scheme.
What was really behind Cartoon Rage? Muslim bullies were attempting to pressure Denmark over the International Atomic Energy Agency’s decision to report Iran to the UN Security Council for continuing with its nuclear research program. The chairmanship of the council was passing to Denmark at the time.
Alas, Western journalists, analysts, and apologists were too clouded by their cowardice and conciliation to see through the smoke. More than 800 were injured in the ensuing riots and 130 people paid with their lives. The innocents included Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro, who was shot to death in Turkey on Feb. 5 by a teenage boy enraged by the illustrations. The Muslim gunman shouted “Allahu Akbar!” as he murdered Father Santoro while the priest knelt praying in his church. Several brave moderate Muslim editors who stood up to the madness were jailed, fined, and convicted of crimes related to insulting Islam. The Danish cartoonists remain in hiding.
The world soon tired of Cartoon Rage, but the “peaceful” Muslim ragers were just warming up. They found excuses large and small to riot and threaten Western infidels.
In India, they protested the magazine publication of a picture of playing card showing an image of Mecca and also burned Valentine’s Day cards. An insult to Islam, they screamed. In Spain, they protested a Madrid store for selling a postcard with a mosque on it with the words “We slept here.” An insult to Islam, they protested.
In Pakistan, they burned down a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, a Pizza Hut, and toppled Ronald McDonald. In Jakarta, they smashed the offices of Playboy magazine. You know why.
In June, the trial against lioness journalist Oriana Fallaci for insulting Islam commenced in Bergamo, Italy. She had been charged by professional Muslim rager Adel Smith of the Muslim Union of Italy of “vilipendio”—vilifying Islam—in her post-9/11 books slamming jihad. A judge had refused to throw out the case. She faced a pile of death threats and accusations of “Islamophobia” for speaking truth to Islamo-power.
Fallaci’s death from cancer during the fifth anniversary week of the September 11 terrorist attacks preempted the trial in Italy, but her passing did nothing to preempt the eternal rage of the perpetually outraged. The day she died, the grievance-mongers were shaking their fists and calling for the head of Pope Benedict XVI for his speech that made reference to a 14th century conversation touching on holy war and jihad.
For engaging in open, honest intellectual and spiritual debate, he was condemned, lit afire in effigy, and targeted anew. The ragers bombed Christian churches in Gaza City and Nablus.
They murdered Italian Sister Leonella Sgorbati, an elderly Catholic nun shot in the back by a Somalian jihadist stoked by Pope Rage. “Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim,” a Somalia cleric had declared. The Vatican made nice with Muslim leaders.
New outrages are always in bloom. In late September, it was a Berlin production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” that featured the decapitated head of Mohammed. A week later, it was a banyan tree attacked by Indonesian Muslims who wanted to disprove its mystical powers. A few days after that, it was former British foreign secretary Jack Straw, who had the audacity to make the very obvious observation that full Muslim veils impede communications between women and Westerners. Offensive! Disturbing! An insult to Islam!
Not to be outdone, a delegation of extortionist imams boarded a U.S. Airways flight in Minneapolis in November and tried to manufacture an international human-rights incident.
They clamored for a boycott and threatened to sue.
The good news: The fire did not catch here this time. The bad news: As Oriana Fallaci warned before her death: “The hate for the West swells like a fire fed by the wind. The clash between us and them is not a military one. It is a cultural one, a religious one, and the worst is still to come.”
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