Followup on the Iranian cartoon contest

Orac,

I'm commenting here because I realize that my comments in the previous thread were unnecessarily rude and uncalled for, and I feel like an apology. I'm sorry. I typically find your commentary insightful and entertaining and I don't mean to personally insult you.

Sorry, it should be "I feel like I owe you an apology above." Could be misinterpreted.

Obviously I havent been following the news. Where were the riots with people burning embassies and killing people because of the anti Semitic cartoons? In fact I sort of don't understand the two comparing the outrage about the reaction to the two cartoon exhibits. Not!

The first two cartoons in the "double standard" section seem to suggest that Islam/Muhammed is of the same nature as the Holocaust. Somehow, I suspect that's not what they hoped to imply.

World History 101:

When Christians kill Muslims (Sabra & Chatilla, Iraq), the Jews are to blame.

When Muslims kill Christians (9/11 etc.), the Jews are to blame.

When Hindus and Muslims kill each other (Kashmir, Gujarat)
nobody cares.

Go on, call me a cynic.

I need to say one thing about the original cartoon controversy -- and in saying it, I am not excusing the rioting and boycotts against Denmark, but making it just slightly more understandable.
You are right, orac, in saying that the Jyllands-Posten cartoons were noticeable mostly for banality and lack of humor -- though I did get a smile out of the 'we're running out of virgins' one. But many of the people in the Middle East -- who weren't subscribers to the magazine -- were shown a portfolio of the cartoons, put together by a radical imam, which included three forgeries, three cartoons that were never in Jyllands-Posten, and which were far more offensive to the beliefs of Muslims. One was, supposedly, a picture of Mohammed with a pig's snout -- in fact, it was a picture of a weird French entertainer and had nothing to do with Islam -- one showed Mohammed having sex with a dog, and one which called him a pedophile. How much of the rioting came from people who thought that these were authentic is impossible to know, as impossible as imagining how this imam could have squared it with his conscience to show and promulgate these images. But it is a footnote that got missed in the chaos and which does make the events a little less totally irrational.

That's absolutely true, Prup, but in my opinion it makes a point about the free exchange of information here in the West. When we saw the faked, offensive cartoons, we knew they were crap, because we're not restricted to getting our news only from one source that has a vested interest in controlling what information we receive. (There's an argument in there about Fox News, probably, but my point is that even then we can just change the channel.) Part of the problem then is poverty. Not everyone in the Middle East can afford televisions or computers with internet access. But the fact is that their governments and the radical imams don't care about increasing their people's access to free information, because that would only loosen their control.

This post isn't really a slur against the Mid East, though. It's just about the difference between a free society and an unfree one. Or, as in the title of Orac's previous post, freedom versus theocracy.

Certainly there are those in the West who wish things could be run a little more like Ahmadinejad and the other dictators in the region do. And I think they're just as evil and destructive as their counterparts in the Middle East.

Black Cap, you might want to put that apology in the original thread as well.