Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Modoggies: A Tuesday Smorgasbord

Since I’m fond of using Scandinavian diacritical markings, I should have said “Smörgåsbord”. Ah, well…

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First, from Today’s Zaman, we learn that Turkish cartoonists are unhappy about the Modoggies :

Turkish cartoonists condemn insulting sketch in Sweden

Metin Peker, chairman of the Association of Turkish Cartoonists, speaking to Today’s Zaman condemned the cartoon published by Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda depicting Prophet Muhammad as a dog, saying it has nothing to do with freedom of expression but is obviously the product of the ill intention.

Caricature is the art of satire and humor and should never be used for insult or oppression. Such cartoons are not acceptable. Certainly they do not help the peace and mutual understanding of different cultures and do not contribute to world peace, which we are genuinely in need of. It is clear that such works are simply the products of an ill intention aiming to provoke Muslims and instigate a clash of civilizations.

Peker suggests these cartoons come at a delicate time for Muslims as Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, is approaching. This is proof that it is provocation, according to Peker.

If humor “should never be used for insult or oppression”, does that mean that Turkish cartoonists never publish any of those Jews-as-pigs-and-cannibals cartoons? I guess they leave all that to the Arabs.

“This is proof that it is provocation…” Yes, another thinly-veiled threat.

The second story is from Turkish Press:
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Turkish Political Party Protests Caricature Of Prophet Mohammed In A Swedish Paper

Turkey’s Felicity Party members gathered at the entrance of Swedish Embassy in Ankara on Tuesday and chanted slogans against Sweden to protest a caricature of Prophet Mohammed that was published in a Swedish paper.

Spokesman of protestors said that they organized this demonstration to condemn Sweden for remaining silent against attacks against Prophet Mohammed and asked the embassy to take immediate action.

The group gave a book —the story of Prophet Mohammed’s life— to Swedish Ambassador to Turkey Christer Asp. Swedish Ambassador told the group that he esteems the book, noting that different religions should respect each other and live together in harmony.

I don’t know anything about the Felicity Party, except that they’re not AKP, the party currently rules

The third article is from the Kuwait News Agency:

MWL strongly condemns Prophet-insulting Swedish cartoons

The Muslim World League (MWL) strongly condemned Tuesday the publishing of blasphemous cartoons of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) by a Swedish artist in the Nerikes Allehanda newspaper.

MWL’s Secretary General Abdullah Al-Turki said in a statement that such cartoons harmed relations between the different nations and religions, adding that they reflected the hate that the artist had for Muslims.

Al-Turki demanded that Swedish authorities punish the artist along with the newspaper that published his drawings, and to prevent other media channels from publishing similar cartoons.

Once again: The Swedish government must punish these blasphemers! That’s the way we do it here; why can’t you?

Moreover, he called on Muslims and Islamic organizations to exercise self-restraint and to maintain rationality when dealing with this issue, noting that the MWL was keen on highlighting the positive image of Islam.

Ah, that elusive “positive image of Islam”… Just when they’ve got their image all fixed up, the sensationalist infidel media have the nerve to publish some trumped-up story about beheadings in Thailand, or Hamas targeting babies, or something similar! It’s all part of the Zionist conspiracy.

I’m used to the OIC, but I don’t know much about the MWL. Here’s their English-language homepage.

And finally, a new twist to the story. Nerikes Allehanda is going to launch a counter-propaganda offensive in Arabic. The more I learn about this gutsy little paper and its editor, Lars Ströman, the more I like them.

Here’s the article, from EUX.TV:

Swedish newspaper to publish Arabic translation of editorial

A Swedish newspaper that has been criticized for printing a caricature of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed depicted as a dog said Tuesday it would print an accompanying editorial in Arabic.

“The reason is that we feel people should be able to see what we have written,” columnist Lars Ströman of the Swedish regional newspaper Nerikes Allehanda said.

Ströman’s editorial on freedom of speech and religion was published August 19 along with the caricature, and the paper has earlier published an English translation under the headline “The Right to Ridicule a Religion”.

The caricature is not published on the newspaper’s website.

The Arabic translation was slated to be published Thursday, he said, adding that a Somali language version was also under consideration owing to the large community hailing from Somalia in Örebro, western Sweden, where the paper is published.

Ströman said he had not experienced any direct threats as a result of his column, adding that he could not recall having written anything that had generated the same “stir” during his 30 years as a journalist.

The twists and turns of fate produce very strange results. Who would have thought that Jyllands-Posten, and now Lars Vilks and Nerikes Allehanda, would be spearheading the Counterjihad in northern Europe?


For previous posts on Lars Vilks and the Roundabout Dogs, see the Modoggie Archives.

5 comments:

carpenter said...

NA's translation of the editorial in question is available online. How will the 439 000 billions of Arabic-speaking Muslims react to Lars Ströman's statements?
1, He defends Jyllands-posten for publishing the cartoons in '05 and
2, he says it should be permitted to ridicule religions, and thus also Islam.
Will they let him do that unpunished?

ziontruth said...

You hear that loud sound? No, it's not dogs (Mo-headed or otherwise) barking. It's the sound of a medieval religion being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Back in the Jyllands-Posten days (wow, I sound like I'm recalling memories of the Boer War or sumpin'...), Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv had a cartoon on the Motoons Affair, depicting an alien delivering a history class, the screen showing our planet. The alien says to his class, with a laughing expression on his face, "And then a global cartoon war broke out and their planet was destroyed!" A memorable cartoon; I scanned it right away. News of the "Cartoon Death Toll" were also jarring.

Spank and spank and spank! Spank 'til the kid gets it and grows up. Spare the rod and spoil the child, be a dhimmi and feed the jihad. That's the way the world goes.

Yorkshireminer said...

I think the cartoons are insulting to Dogs. I certainly wouldn't show these to a Doberman pincher, he might go mad and bite a muslim, we wouldn't want that would we?

Papa Whiskey said...

Lars Strohman’s editorial has good points, but its assertion that the Danish Muhammad caricatures were “rotten” and similar to “anti-Semitic drawings done by pro-Nazi drawers in the 1930s and 1940s” is sheer nonsense. The best known of them – the one depicting a scowling Muhammad with a black turban from which a lit fuse extends – lampoons perfectly the hostility and violence of an increasing number of contemporary adherents to his creed; while the most cogent – a drawing of “the prophet” being done at dead of night by a sweating, fearful artist – sends up the pusillanimity Muslims’ short-fused nature instills in so many. The rest vary in quality from cryptic to silly, but none are remotely similar to what ran in Julius Streicher’s notorious “Der Sturmer.”

Strohman’s “pro-Nazi” analogy is all the more preposterous in view of Lars Vilks’s drawing of a “judensau”(Jewish sow), which revives a German anti-Semitic motif dating back to medieval times. Though he inked it on a dare from Svenska Dagsbladet staffer Ingmarie Froman, Vilks has cited it in response to Muslim outrage at his Muhammad drawings, apparently to show how even-handed he supposedly is. This does him scant credit.

The Graduate said...

Satirist, Art Speigleman, in his commentary on the Danish cartoons, When the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad were reprinted in a U.S. magazine with commentary Art Spiegelman, he thought that a “fatwa bomb meter” to rate their offensiveness was a good idea. I suppose it's time to bring out the old "fatwa bomb meter".

The commedian Jackie Mason summed it up best "Nobody has ever died from a cartoon. If the worst thing the Nazis ever did had been to draw cartoons of death camps instead of putting Jews in them, six million Jews would be alive today. When was the last time any country decided to kill a Muslim anywhere in the world because they felt insulted? But the Muslims have created a new international law called the "insult law." This means they have the right to kill you whenever they please, and you have no right to do anything about it. If a Muslim were walking down a street in Israel with a picture of an insulting cartoon in hand, no Israeli would threaten his life. They would be too busy celebrating the fact that it was a cartoon and not a bomb."
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0206/mason021406.php3