Danish Cartoon Creates Stir

So, I haven’t posted anything here for a couple of days – it’s been a flurry of activity here at the office, and I haven’t even had time to think about it.

So here goes: I was driving to work this morning and heard a story about a newspaper in Denmark that published a cartoon depicting Islamic religious symbols, in particular, Mohammed with a “missile” turban along with something else, I can’t remember exactly. The Islamic world got their collective shorts in a twist, and called for the newspaper to sanction its cartoonist, editorial board, and anyone else that might have seen the cartoon before it was published. Several Muslim leaders in the Iraqi Shiite community gathered a few homemade Danish flags, and took pictures of themselves stomping on the flags and waving their fists.

I wonder if Denmark has any convenient “twin towers”. Or maybe the folks at Tivoli Gardens should be on the lookout for a few months. Oddly, radical Islamic factions are free to try to rule the world through violence and intimidation, but when they get lampooned, well, something needs to be done about THAT…

In an interesting show of solidarity, French, German, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, and other Scandinavian newspapers ran the cartoon in support of the Danish cartoonist. However, after violent protests in Gaza and other places, a French editor has been fired for running the cartoon. There are more than 1 million Muslims in France, and they have vowed to begin litigation against the French paper. It was the French Foreign Ministry that got involved and called for the dismissal of the editor in an attempt to keep the peace and appease the Muslim community there.

The pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq al-Awsat stated, “If the Danish cartoon had been about a Jewish rabbi, it would never have been published.” I’m not aware of any Jewish Rabbi’s running planes into buildings or taking over countries at the point of a gun, or under threat of utter destruction.

But then again – using glasses of a different color, one could make the same arguments about the “occupation” of the US Military forces in some of these Muslim countries.

More hard issues.