wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

On Demand

Program Schedule

Topics

The Scrapbook

Photos and Miscellany from The Brian Lehrer Show

« Photo File: Chris Patten | Main | Jyllands-Post »

the Sketch heard 'round the world

February 07, 2006

Subject: Muslims are under attack

The Western Media is uniformly focusing the democratic right to speak, write or draw an opinion. However, no one is addressing the issue of racism, and religious bigotry that these hideous cartoons convey. Would similar cartoons about Jews or Blacks be published in the West?

Today, in the West, we have open season on Muslims.
Islamic cultural history is deemed backwards, vengeful and violent. A foreign western army is occupying Iraq. Through out the world Muslim persons and countries are under siege. It is only human that the reaction is such by the besieged.
-TS

Subject: Philosophical versus Physical


I would like to know why the dialogue in the media regarding these cartoons has not focused on the violence associated with the protests. Why is there so little criticism of this violence? Even the governments of Denmark and Norway were quicker to criticize governments for not protecting their embassies than to criticize the violent protestors. Protest is crucial to democracy but violent protest is entirely unacceptable.
-SC

Subject: Bias bubbles to the surface

The Danish cartoons got it correct. The face of Islam to the world is the terrorist.

Other than Turkey, there is no predominantly Muslim country in which Non-Muslim's flourish. Muslim country's provide only one good to the world, Oil. They are not producers of culture, value added ideas, contributions to medical advancements, scientific insights or the arts. Your bias says to ignore all that and treat Muslims as if their sole human contribution to the world is destruction. I agree that there is no inherent reason that Muslims specialize in destruction. Their past societies have been open, advanced in science, mathematics, medicine and literature. Hiding the truth about today's Muslims does nothing of value.
-DR

Subject: Humor has a role!

All cartoons are not created equal. One of them was absolutely brilliant. I was at a dinner party the other night with two ex-music school parents (we meet in caves) and I described it to them: A group of charred, smoking figures on a cloud approach a man wearing a turban at heaven's gate. He flails his hands furiously in the air shouting "Stop, stop, we've run out of virgins!"

They doubled over with laughter. Why? Because this cartoon does what all good comedy does: first of all, it's wickedly funny, and it also says something terribly sad about the world and the human condition. It's not mocking a religious figure at all - it's lampooning those lunatics who actually believe that, if they blow themselves and scores of innocent bystanders to pieces, they will be greeted I heaven by a bevy of seventy virgins. That's delusional. That's psychotic. (Plus it sounds like an afterlife filled with an awful lot of begging.) Since when do we grant this status as a legitimate world view? The cartoon is just acknowledging that these people have wasted their and their victims' lives for nothing at all - a fantasy. One can say that the Catholic belief in transubstantiation is a fantasy, but blood hasn't been spilled over it in quite a long time.

Lopping off the heads of infidels is all well and good, but one has to retain one's sense of humor.
-JM

Posted by leboheme at 01:45 PM