Ol’ Turban Bomb is the iconic image for our time — at least amongst the growing number of Westerners who are resisting the Islamization of their countries.
Now you can own a signed and numbered copy of Mo, and at the same time help the International Free Press Society raise money. Visit the Turban Bomb page at IFPS for purchase instructions:
Remember the Danish cartoon crisis? Riots and mayhem, trade boycotts, burnt-down embassies, more than 100 killed in violent demonstrations, death threats against artists and editors. All of it the result of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten‘s decision to publish 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed on 30 September 2005.- - - - - - - - -
One cartoon in particular stood out as the focus of world-wide Islamic rage and has since acquired the status as the iconic image of our age: Kurt Westergaard’s drawing of the prophet with a bomb in his turban.
This is the picture that won Kurt Westergaard world fame but also meant that he has been forced to live under constant police protection ever since its publication. Despite contracts on his head and determined efforts by Islamists to kill him, Kurt Westergaard has never recanted and never apologized for being a free artist.
Now you can own your exclusive reproduction of this icon, which has never been offered for sale before.
In collaboration with the artist, the Free Press Society in Denmark and the International Free Press Society have printed up a limited edition of 1000 copies.
Each copy is individually numbered and signed by Kurt Westergaard.
The picture is printed in durable colors on fine paper 42 by 21.5 centimeters, suitable for framing. It will be delivered in a solid cardboard tube.
It can be yours for US $250, postage and handing included, but exclusive of customs dues or VAT where applicable.
The proceeds from this offer will go towards the International Free Press Society’s continuous campaign for free speech.
8 comments:
Forgive me for dissenting. I've been thinking a lot about this "blasphemy" angle and see it as both unproductive and morally harmful.
I don't think that Mohammad is sacred and I abhor what the Mohammadans consider blasphemy and sacrilegious and above all how they react to what they consider blasphemous and sacrilegious. But I don't abhor the very concept of sacrilege and blasphemy. Because I think some things CAN be sacrilegious and blasphemous.
In other words, even in our Daffy Duck Western ethos, everyone has a moment when at least something is taken deeply, honorably, heartfelt... sacred.
Allow an example. A premature death. A tragedy. A family is grieving. Is it right to let your dog pee on the coffin, or to crack loud and crass jokes during the eulogy?
Naturally, with man being completely atomized, such things are now almost entirely in the personal realm. I can't think of anything collective, except perhaps in primitive areas of Italy where people still know the art of getting genuinely pissed off.
Is the real issue Islamic reactions to provocation? Or is the real issue the Islamic blasphemy and sacrilege against those things that were once sacred to us, but which now, through the work of the French Enlightenment and atomized man, are objects of indifference except in the personal sphere? Our only permitted sacred is birth and death (and with abortion and euthanesia high on the charts, even they are dubious)... and then of course there is marriage (ha ha!)
We gain nothing from this taunting (as a matter of fact the ten original vignettes became 12, the last two, by far the most "vulgar" being done up by the Muslims themselves to get their uneducated mobs waving pitchforks).
Okay so we peed on their coffins and cracked jokes at their funerals... but we also taught our own children that there's nothing sacred, nothing to get hot and bothered about.
We said: "There, see how they get upset when the things they hold dearest are insulted? We're better, we don't give a dried fig about anything. And THAT'S the intelligent unprimitive way to be!"
But it's NOT the intelligent and unprimitive way to be. It's nihilism and indifference.
Certainly with more smarts and discernment and without murder or mayhem, we should be the ones waving the equivalent of pitchforks because the Mohammadans and their lackeys are offending OUR sacred!
Remember when they killed Van Gogh? A lot of "Thou shalt not murder" signs were pasted up. That's the better approach.
Not cartoons and vignettes, but crosses and constitutions and inscriptions taken from war memorials and quotations and aphorisms from great philosophers.
Like this we're teaching people that nothing is sacred. But some things ARE sacred. They simply are, and underneath it all, even for diehard atheists. There ARE moments out of Daffy Duck mode. Out of enlightenment mode, out of indifference mode. This sacred ground is being ceded to the Muslims. Their sacred is all wrong, completely screwed up and their reaction to what they perceive as sacrilegious is even worse... but with this approach, we're giving them the whole ethical category. We're saying "it's okay to walk dogs in a cemetery"... We're saying: there's nothing sacred about our culture, our safety, our women, our schools, our rights, because the sacred doesn't exist.
loshkaFutz-
You miss the point.
The deranged is NOT sacred.
Mohammad was deranged.
Islam is deranged.
Making such intolerant, misogynistic, hateful and murderous things "sacred" is deranged.
Defending them, even obliquely, by fecklessly including them among our "sacred" dilutes ours and elevates the morbid icons of those who want us dead.
Not a wise move.
________________________________________________________
On a different note:
This article also promotes the mistaken "fact" that the 12 cartoons were of the "prophet" Mohammad (E.G.: "...decision to publish 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad").
They were not.
A few were of generic "Mohammad"-ish characters, but others were making fun of cowardly artists... which was their point of the editorial cartoons, not any intentional mocking the "sacred", in any sense.
They were also satirizing madmen who kill over iconoclastic fanaticism.
And tweaking the local Danish artists, who were too afraid even to draw simple little images of "Mohammad" for a children's book in Denmark. It is this group who were primarily being lampooned by their colleagues ...as lickspittles who were kowtowing to Islamic terroristic threats.
The 12 cartoonists were somewhat naive in thinking that their artistic and intellectual freedom of thought would naturally and instinctively be defended by the Western media, and by their fellow editorial artists.
They found out otherwise, to their distress, as 99% of the free world's media self-censored these relatively mild images, and most of their fellow "topical" cartoonists in most major newspapers (like Gary Trudeau, etc. ), castigated the Danish artists "for stirring up 'religious' disturbances" and for being "insensitive" and "bigoted" (as lushakFutz also mistakenly continues to misconstrue the original and essential thrust of the cartoons: a refusal to be intimidated by theocratic maniacs..... not to "insult religion" or "devalue the sacred").
The reporters of this new spate of article on the cartoons need to go back and actually look at the images ...before they prattle erroneously about their content or meaning.
Such slipshod and inept reporting is how people get killed ~as the mythic "Gitmo Koran flushing" incident caused deaths worldwide... and then turned out never to have happened.
You cannot bring back the murdered with an "oops!".
Ioshkafutz will find that when he gives in to one item sacred to this particular "other", those sacreds that Westerners must recognize multiply like rabbits and preclude ice cream swirls, piggy banks, sneakers and soccer balls embellished with Arabic flags, national symbols containing crosses, Teddy bears named Mohammed, eating lunch during Muslim fasting, proper hygiene for operating rooms, clearly identifiable pictures on passports and drivers' licences etc. ad infinitum in a never-ending wave that swamps Western culture's keystone of individual freedom, especially free speech.
Meanwhile, there is no reciprocity whatsoever. Non-Muslim places of worship are routinely desecrated or destroyed. Where Muslims dominate or attain critical mass, they do not respect even infidel life. Bibles are routinely confiscated while Korans must be handled with white gloves by "dirty" Westerners who must provide incarcerated terrorists with these manuals of inspiration.
Since Muslims have been known to attack others during Ramadan and are themselves the biggest killers of Muslims around the world as well as mosque exploders with presumably all the Korans therein, it seems ridiculous to accord their sacreds more respect than they do themselves.
These are people who will use any excuse to demonstrate and spread mayhem. There is no satisfying them. Only a fool would try. To avoid offending Muslims, we would have to remake ourselves in their image, complete with sharia law. Let them return to the 57 such countries already in existence or shut their traps and remove their religion from our sight into their places of worship as a private ritual that makes no demands on a western public.
Let's tell them that they will surely agree with our new policy as it matches that of all Muslim countries which is adapt or get out. You are not on the desert requiring foot washing five times a day. Work the hours, handle the pork and alcohol, show your face, refrain from thinking of women as "uncovered meat" and raping them, do not expect co workers to fast along with you etc. GET OUT OF OUR FACE.
They use our weapon to fight us : "islamophobia, kalashnikovs, internet, cell phones etc.
Imagine we fight them with their weapons:
We establish an Western ulema to decide what is holy. We issue few fatwas and declare whole of the West a holy land under protection of Western waqf.
Our fatwa about Mohammad and company - these or not only holy, these are antiholy, unholy. A blasphemy against Free Man, Holy Spirit, God-who-gives-and-protects-life. Never kills.
Our lands cannot be desacrated by a fiendish bloodthirsty whimsical godling with no honour or dignity.
Sorry.
Make it aristophanic and rabelaisian. And drive them mad with our concept of holines which includes an Eternal Laughter.
In fact the "holy" thing is the only matter which makes the islam speer sharp. Remove it and you have a dumb wooden stick.
Our holy angels want us to laugh about everything which does not deserve their angelic attention.
It is a heavy pleasant test.
This Universe was created as a MegaLaughter by a God who was laughing for too long about Himself only. Than he decided: "I need a laughing company, good people who laugh about themselves and with me together. I allow them even to laugh about Me, if they prove to be like Me - Eternally Laughing and Good."
It is haram not to laugh at least half a day. Those who do not laugh, do not love and go straight to their private hell even with their bodies kept alive. The hell are all the places not filled with this God.
The muslim lives already in a hell. He is a walking hell alive.
Our angels work day and night to fill our minds with education, philosophy and our spaces with art.
They work very hard to fill our ears with celestial holy music. Our music is a covenant established between celestial spheres and us.
If we do not play music, the whole universe comes to collapse.
You see, they cannot hit us - since they are unable to hit our angels. So we remain safe. We refer to the angels, we have as little responsibility as they have refering to their quran.
Adopting this somewhat childish discourse we can arrest them and weaken them. Islam is crazy, I do not believe we can fight them with non crazy means only. And we cannot use only defensive methods.
That we might do for ages.
As some comedians say "it is about language".
Profitsbeard and laine have covered all of the important turf here and covered it well.
Pandering to fanatical mass murderers has no upside.
Even the most oblique assertion that there is anything sacred about Islam constitutes a moral and spiritual blunder of monstrous proportions. It is allowing the camel's nose into the tent all the while knowing it soon will be become nothing more than a camelidae litterbox.
I think I've been misunderstood (so what else is new?).
I am not proposing to give in to Islamic sacredness. Quite the contrary. I am upholding the sacredness of our own ethos including the customs it has generated as opposed to Enlightenment indifference.
Instead of the emphasis on taunting, the emphasis should be on simply affirming, (reminding) positively what we are all about. (What we were once all about)... an issue far greater than freedom of speech - or else we should ask the Good Baron to change the fine pic at the top of his Blog and the caption below it:
"At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war."
If it's a very old war, what the hell were they fighting about back then? Ideology? Freedom of speech? The right to mock? Or rock-bed virtues that were not today's egalitarianism or supposed freedoms, but sanity, courage, forgiveness, chivalry, purpose (anti-fatalism), reason and on and on... right on down to our foodstuffs, stories, songs, wines and beers. (Which BTW are intimately connected to what was once sacred to us).
I say treat those things as sacred or at least sacrosanct... and then let them whine. To me the Muslims who in their mosques preach terrorism offend the sacred. They and our politicians (our state, our law) need to be reminded that some things are holy and non-negotiable.
I accept that the Muslims believe that their nonsense is holy, but I suggest reminding them in a firm and strong way that to us most of it is either downright sacriligious or far inferior because our "sense" (our sacred) is holier... and that we are attached to pork, wine, song, dance, just as strongly as we are to the COMPLETE PROHIBITION of freedom of speech when it comes to preaching terrorism.
I say that despite all appearances, Islam is not deranged but quite rational. Rationally evil, but rational. Nothing deranged in the sense of "toys in the attic" lasts 1400 years, weathering absolutely everything that history has slung its way. They have a goal and every single aspect of Islam is rationally poised to reach it. A teenage suicide bomber might be irrational, but suicide bombing is not. The boy is timed, primed and targeted for a purpose, by someone over him who otherwise would have not had a chance against overweening powers. The rest of the world's religions are in different ways blessedly irrational (mystical), Islam has a worldly purpose and plays our Enligtenment weaknesses like a fiddle.
There are other considerations. For example who is the real interlocutor? Them, the Muslims? Forget about it. It's a waste of time. Our own mostly benighted people, and the fools that govern us are the only ones we may ever hope to reach. They won't be reached by insulting the sacred. Because underneath it all, everybody has a sense of the sacred... and so they are torn.
In today's world it is easy to arrest someone for being offensive. But if instead of a placard with a Mo-bomb, there was one with a choice bit from our constitution... getting arrested, insulted, called a Fascist and beaten up would be quite a different matter. It would be incontrovertible truth that what we live by has become a dead letter. That we are arrested for citing our own constitution. This would pave the way to a necessary refounding.
The Westerners need to decide what's sacred to them. Mohammad is the top dog in that religion. Insulting the top dog could be a tactical error. It goes under the heading of "religion" and religion goes under the heading of briths, funerals, marriages... important passages. And thanks to the enlightenment it goes under the heading of the "private sphere." That is why some construe it as a gratuitous personal insult to each single member of that religion. Better to fight for a piggy bank and a pork chop, a Christmas Carol a brewery, a swimming pool... and work up towards Mohammad, than to hammer at the top while everything below is emptied.
It is useless to fight Mohammad if you're too proud to defend a pork chop or a manniquin in the window. Unless you understand the full import of the caption under the Good Baron's picture at the top of the blog, you don't have the picture.
The enlightenment has disembodied that picture. A country can lose its very soul, be knocked off the very kilter of its continuum under enlightenment "rights."
I understand Profitsbeard's anger. But he cites little instances, Newsweek articles... I cite the emptying out of Turkey, all of North Africa. I can also cite Fjordman's brilliant essays about why science flourished here and not elsewhere. The same goes for humor, entertainment, fashion, and everything under the sun.
It is easy to win an argument against "theocratic maniacs"... but they have their mirror image: the atheist rationalists, the libertarians. So on the one side we have honor killings and chadors and on the other Gay Parades with Virgin Mary dildos. They have everything sacred and we have nothing sacred. We have monomania.
This struggle is not about teeing off the idiots in the asylum, but about the asylum-keepers having lost sight of sanity.
If you want to drop an alkaseltzer tablet into a barrel of amoeba and watch them get riled up, go ahead. I understand what's a play. I can get worked up in a lather about how they're supposedly crazy (they're NOT).
Freedom of speech is not going to save the west. Nothing "enlightenment" will. The sacredness of our homes, our culture, our history, our customs will, if people wake up to them.
Nothing about Islam is sacred... but isn't it odd that they are the only ones defending sacredness? Along with the food in schools and prisons, they now have got that in their bag too.
I think we should have as a goal the intentional provocation of Muslims so that they will act against us en masse before they have the numbers, via immigration and high birth rates, to merely take over without a fight. I think we ought to be doing much more to antagonize them.
Post a Comment
All comments are subject to pre-approval by blog admins.
Gates of Vienna's rules about comments require that they be civil, temperate, on-topic, and show decorum. For more information, click here.
Users are asked to limit each comment to about 500 words. If you need to say more, leave a link to your own blog.
Also: long or off-topic comments may be posted on news feed threads.
To add a link in a comment, use this format:
<a href="http://mywebsite.com">My Title</a>
Please do not paste long URLs!
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.