EU Referendum

Showing posts with label cartoons. Show all posts

Cartoons[i-Cartoons]... President Obama backing Turkey's membership of the EU will be seen as unwonted interference in European affairs. After all, whenever President Bush made statements of that kind, there was outrage in the land.

Then again, there seems to be no outrage or sneering contempt at the fact that the self-same ultra-brilliant President Obama thinks that they speak Austrian in Austria. Somebody should tell the highly internationally minded statesman that the language they speak in that country is German. [You have to scroll right down to the last question but one since most of the questions at the top were from American rather than European journalists.]

Fausta reports that there are likely to be some bad feeling in the Czech Republic though, presumably, President Klaus will not be given an iPod with President Obama's speeches.

We shall have more of what has come out of the NATO Summit and the various negotiations behind the scenes. For the moment let us just report that Turkey has dropped her objection to the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who will be the next Secretary-General of NATO. (In Denmark he will be succeeded in the prime ministerial position by the Finance Minister, Loekke Rasmussen. Makes it relatively easy for bloggers to have prime ministers of the same surname succeeding each other.)

According to the BBC in language that reminds one of teenage girls talking about pop stars, it was the "charm and intervention of President Obama" that secured Turkey's approval. However, there are persistent rumours that the first thing the new SecGen of NATO will have to apologize for those cartoons in Istanbul. The BBC story hints at it without specifying whether it was President Obama who insisted on it. There is more on that on Hot Air.

This will really help the anti-Islamist cause whether in the West or in Turkey itself. And to think that we used to think Anders Fogh Rasmussen to be one of the few honourable leaders in Western Europe.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin who is, understandably, unhappy at the idea of an apology for those cartoons, links to the Reuters story that quotes Former Prime Minister and NATO SecGen elect Rasmussen "falling short of the full apology expected by Turkey".

Actually, the story hints that the row over the cartoons was just the cover and the real meat of the argument was Turkey wanting to extract one or two other promises from President Obama.

The row over his appointment, which threatened the image of unity at NATO's 60th anniversary summit, was resolved after Obama guaranteed Turkish commanders would be present at the alliance's command and that one of Rasmussen's deputies would be a Turk.

There has always been a very practical side to Turkish politicians. One can but applaud.

Danish+cartoons[i-Danish+cartoons]So far we can find reports of these arrests on the BBC site and on Sky News. Both make the mistake of repeating that images of Mohammed are “strictly forbidden” by Islam, which is not precisely true and about which there is some discussion going on.

However, they report the news that a group of people who “were allegedly planning to kill Kurt Westergaard, a cartoonist at Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the drawings” have been arrested very early this morning in the Aarhus region after a long period of surveillance.

The BBC tells us that “three of those detained are Danes and the other two are foreigners”. Sky is more specific, explaining that three are Danish citizens.

Kurt Westergaard and his wife have been under police protection for several months.

In a statement on Jyllands-Posten's website, Mr Westergaard said: "Of course I fear for my life when the police intelligence service say that some people have concrete plans to kill me.

"But I have turned fear into anger and resentment."

The BBC's Thomas Buch-Andersen in Copenhagen says the arrests have stunned people in Denmark, where the furore over the cartoons was thought to have passed.

The last comment from the BBC chap I find hard to believe as the “furore” reappeared in news stories regularly and it was well known to all (except, perhaps, the BBC who at the time considered that the publication of cartoons was a dark blot on Danish society) that a number of people involved were still in hiding.

Furthermore, as Flemming Rose reported on his blog a week ago, the President of Iceland was interviewed by Al-Jazeera during his official visit to Qatar and asked to apologize for the Danish cartoons. Iceland, as Mr Rose points out, was part of Denmark from the fourteenth century until 1944 but has been a flourishing independent country since then.

It seems that President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson refused to apologize and pointed out some obvious political and geographic facts to his interviewer.

modog[i-modog]It has taken me a little while to work out what is happening behind the latest outburst of Islamic Rage about yet another cartoon, this time in Sweden. The best account I could find was by Paul Marshall, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute for Religious Freedom on NRO.

I don’t really like the cartoon in question. It is not funny and deliberately insulting, which the Danish ones were not. But then I do not like Salman Rushdie’s novels either. Come to think of it, I dislike Sir Salman’s political views even more and I would have disliked him getting a knighthood if it had not produced Islamic Rage. At that point I decided that there was something to be said for giving the man a handle. He is still a very poor writer in my opinion.

Anyway, here is the story of the Swedish cartoon.

Swedish artist Lars Vilks was invited by an art school to participate in an exhibit with the theme, of all things, of dogs. Vilks, something of a provocateur (his website has a cartoon of a Jew’s head on a pig’s body), submitted cartoons including one with Mohammed’s head on a dog’s body (it’s connected to the contemporary Swedish craze for “roundabout dogs,” but that’s another story). Before the exhibit opened, his drawings were removed by the organizers, citing possible security threats. Another gallery followed suit, claiming similar worries.

This provoked much discussion in the Swedish media. Although several other newspapers had already published the cartoons, it was only when Nerikes Allehanda, a regional paper in Orebro, published one of them on August 18 that the fur began to fly. Like the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Mohammed published in September 2005, the cartoon was used to accompany and illustrate an article discussing self-censorship, threats, and freedom of religion.

It seems that the Swedish Muslims merely demonstrated peacefully outside the newspaper offices but, needless to say, world-wide Rage took off. Well, nearly.

Mr Marshall’s account of the Danish Cartoon Rage is slightly wrong. He says:

With the Danish cartoons it took four months before several Muslim governments, at the behest of an Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting in Mecca, launched protests, boycotts, and threats, resulting in dozens of murders, especially of Christians. This time they took only nine days.

He appears to ignore the sinister role of the Abu Laban and other Danish imams who traveled through several Islamic countries, stirring up trouble, using cartoons they had concocted themselves and pretending these were the originals.

For all of that, Mr Marshall’s main point is correct. What we are witnessing is retrograde Muslim states attempting to enforce their own strict censorship rules on other countries.

First off we had Iran, a country we all look up to for its many virtues – freedom, economic well-being and the general happiness of the populace – which protested to Gunilla von Bahr, the Swedish chargé d’affaires. Just to show that this is all about hurt feelings, President Ahmadinejad informed the world that this was another provocation by the Zionists who have infiltrated the world.

Pakistan has also protested and sorrowfully told Lennart Holst, the Swedish chargé that they had “expected greater sensitivity on the part of the Swedish government”. The Swedish embassy apologized for any hurt feelings but explained that there was nothing they could do about a newspaper and freedom of speech was protected by the Swedish constitution. These are not points that have ever appealed much to the average Islamic government. There is always something they can do with a newspaper.

What Mr Marshall says next can be seen as extremely sinister but for the fact that nobody pays a blind bit of attention to what the UN decides:

The reasons for these actions can be found in Pakistan’s further statements. The foreign ministry announced that it would consult with the OIC “to determine the future course of action against the repetition of such provocative publications,” and through the United Nations would “find ways of addressing the recurring defamation of Islam and its sacred personalities.”

Undoubtedly the subject will come up at the next anti-racism conference, even now being organized by the UN committee, chaired by Libya with Iran playing a leading part.

Somehow, I suspect that these problems will not be discussed by the UN Human Rights Commission:

Egypt has been unusually active in the last few weeks in quashing all dissidence and dissidents in the name of Islam. State Security has intensified its interrogation of Quranist Muslims, whose view of Islam is open to democracy and religious freedom, on the grounds that they have insulted Islam. On August 8, it also picked up Adel Fawzy Faltas and Peter Ezzat, who work for the Canada-based Middle East Christian Association. They were arrested on the grounds that, in seeking to defend the human rights of Egyptian Christians, and human rights in general, they too had “insulted Islam”.

Nerikes Allehanda, the newspaper in question, is being insouciant, with the editor explaining that he does not care much about what foreign governments say or not say about his publication, being more interested in the local community.

Gates of Vienna gives a useful background to all those dog cartoons.

Mind you, as Rage goes, this is nothing. Are they all on holiday?

Danish+cartoons[i-Danish+cartoons]
As we have pointed out before, it is not the Continental countries that were found wanting in the War of the Danish Cartoons, but Britain. To be quite precise, the British media, not a single one of whom dared to reprint the cartoons, bleating idiotically about not wanting to upset people. Especially people who might come after you, one suspects. The Guardian and the Independent have had no problems about printing anti-Semitic cartoons of the kind that could have come out of Der Stürmer.

One of the magazines that did do the right thing was the French Charlie Hebdo, now sued by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organizations for inciting racial hatred.

It is not that they want censorship, they whine, but they do not think cartoons that make fun of Islam should be published.

A televised debate between Charlie Hebdo publisher Val and Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Paris Grand Mosque, broke up acrimoniously on Tuesday after they squabbled over the limits of free speech.

"If we can't criticise religion anymore, there will be no women's rights, no birth control and no gay rights," Val said in the raucous TV debate.

Boubakeur said the controversial cartoon showing Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban was not simply satire, but an insult against all Muslims by suggesting they were all terrorists.

"We don't want censorship, we don't want the sacred to be protected by blasphemy laws or medieval jurisdiction," he said.

Boubakeur said last week he wanted to show that reprinting the cartoons was a provocation equal to acts of anti-Semitism or Holocaust denial, which are both banned under French law.

Um, well, of course, anti-Semitic attacks have gone up in France (and in Britain) in the last few years and many of them originate with the Muslim community. Those attacks are not simply words or cartoons but actual physical acts against people, schools, cemeteries and synagogues.

To repeat for the benefit of those of our readers who do not bother with most of what we write: this blog does not believe Holocaust denial should be illegal in any country.

It seems that the case may well be one of the seminal ones in French legal history, though in a different way from the Al-Dura one, which we wrote about here and here.

Politicians, intellectuals, secular Muslims and left-wing pressure groups have lined up behind Charlie Hebdo, arguing that Muslim groups have no right to call for limits on free speech.

"I just cannot imagine the consequences not only for France but for Denmark and Europe if they lose the case," Fleming Rose, the Danish editor who first published the cartoons, told a news conference with Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val.

The left-wing newspaper, Libération has reprinted the cartoons, saying quite firmly that it is not words or pictures that kill but bombs. True enough and time it was said forcefully. Are we going to see a similar outburst of bravery in our media or will it all be left to the blogs again?

COMMENT THREAD

Abu+Laban[i-Abu+Laban]Who dies, I hear readers asking themselves. Ahmed Abu Laban, the Danish imam who engineered all those cartoon riots. His death has been reported on Al-Jazeera.

Let me recapitulate very briefly. Ahmed Abu Laban who had fled from Egypt and found sanctuary in Denmark then proceeded to spend his time there attempting to introduce notions of sharia law in various parts of that country. When the Mohammed cartoons first appeared in Jyllands-Post in September 2005, Laban tried to stir up trouble in Denmark.

Jyllands-Post[i-Jyllands-Post]When this did not work out he, and some colleagues, went on a trip round some Middle Eastern countries (though not Egypt, which would not let him in) and showed the rather mild cartoons to all and sundry.

Among the original 12 drawings he had slipped three others that were considerably more offensive. One of them showed Mohammed with a pig’s snout. This was a lightly doctored picture of somebody winning the annual pig-squeaking competition in France.

Eventually, Laban admitted that he had falsified the evidence on Danish TV but pretended that he had received these pictures and messages in the post. The missives were never produced.

Pig_person[i-Pig_person]One way or another Laban achieved his aim: there were riots in various parts of the world and the Danish cartoonists and journalists went into hiding. The Danish government, despite pressure exerted by the UN and the EU, refused to close down the newspaper or apologize for freedom of the press.

Most European countries had one or two brave publications that put out the cartoons and they were published even in Egypt and Yemen, with unhappy results for the editors. The one country, shamefully, where no MSM outlet dared to reproduce the cartoons was the United Kingdom. This is something we shall not live down in a hurry.

Ahmed Abu Laban was next noted in Lebanon during the Israeli-Hezbollah war last summer, when westerners were being evacuated from Beirut. It turned out that he had been given Danish citizenship and, therefore, he was rescued by the Danish embassy.

Curiously enough, this man who held Muslim thought and culture so dear to him turned to the, undoubtedly first-class, Danish medical facilities during his last illness.

Michelle Malkin and Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs analyze AP's obituary piece, which has some curious omissions.

COMMENT THREAD

Javed[i-Javed]It was February last when the Metropolitan Police escorted some low-life Muslim scum through the streets of London, allowing them to carry inflammatory placards and chant violent messages.

It took until November to get the first one, Mizanur Rahman, through the courts, with a guilty verdict and, two months later, they've finally got another.

This is Umran Javed, 27, (pictured above) who had shouted "Bomb, bomb USA" and "Jihad is the path to Allah" as he led a 300-strong crowd in chants during the demonstration.

cartoons+placards[i-cartoons+placards]He was also a prominent figure in the rally outside the Danish embassy, leading chants there. But he claimed in court that his chants were "sayings and soundbites" without any intention at all. On the other hand, David Perry, for the prosecution, said that, "if you shout out, 'Bomb, bomb Denmark; bomb, bomb USA', there is no doubt about what you intend your audience to understand."

Javed has now been remanded in custody to be sentenced in April after an Old Bailey jury found him guilty by a majority verdict of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred.

There was, we are told, uproar in court as the verdict was delivered with one man led from the public gallery by security guards after shouting: "Allahu Akbar [God is great], I curse the judge, the court, the jury, all of you." Other friends and supporters of Javed also shouted insults.

We await news of their fate, and of the hundreds more demonstrators who took part in the chanting and carried banners last February. It is good to see two of them in the dock but, nearly a year later, that is not anything like good enough.

COMMENT THREAD