*~@):~{>
Muhammad in Smiley's.....Why poke the stick in the eye? Why pull the tail of the tiger, a very cranky one at that? If you just heard about this "draw Muhammad day" on the BBC, you'd think it was just a bunch of wankers deliberately out to insult one of the world's great religions. You'd wonder what's the point. You'd be wrong.
Numbers of reasons that I want to come back to (I'm piling up a lot of homework here), when back from Koh Samui.
Numbers of reasons include:
that the initial cartoons were only an issue when a bunch of Islamist Imams went around beating up the story and adding into the portfolio some cartoons of their own invention which were even more upsetting to Muslims that the ones the Danes drew. So, in a sense, if we give in to calls not to draw Mohammad, we're giving in to the Islamist -- not the moderate Islam -- agenda.
There's the fact that the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the peak body for 56 Islamic countries has hopped on its high horse in the wake of the Danish cartoons and is waging a battle to restrict what anyone says about Islam, even about its manifest violent nature.
There's the fact that it's Muslims telling non-Muslims what the must and must not do, and that's not really on, is it? Is it?
There's the fact that each encroachment -- and there are many in the west -- helps the project of creeping Sharia, of stealth jihad. Each act minor in itself, but a cumulative effect of bringing Islam and Islamist values to the west and these are anti-freedom, anti-women, anti human rights especially of gays, anti-free speech and generally a pretty baleful set of "values".
There's a fair bit about this in the blogosphere and one amusing site which has "draw nice pictures of Muhammad". That's at the People's Cube.
