Of toons and dogs and active resistance.
It looks to me like governments all over the civilized world are scrambling for new legislation to deal with ancient problems. That France for example, wants to protect the freedom and rights of women, by making certain choices of clothing illegal, when they could as easily use existing laws to make Burkas and so on inconvenient beyond any reasonable utility.
In other words, stop making exceptions in law for those who want to destroy us and our freedoms, and the problem solves itself.
In that spirit, our freedom of expression has been under direct attack for sometime now. It would be easy to start the clock at the Danish cartoon crisis which may or may not be the case, but without question, the Danish cartoon riots did mark the point at which basically any Muslim or for that matter, mid-level bureaucrat could make a complaint about a soft ice-cream-cone logo and have major corporations scramble to change it or pull it from the shelves lest it offend a volatile Muslim.
So how do we stop this sprint to hand our freedoms to the most barbaric man in the room?
Easy.
Each time a threat or indeed a real act of violence is committed to force us all to sharia standards of freedom we go the other way. Too many targets and it becomes a failed effort. I say we all draw Mohamed. We make a T shirt with a blasphemy for Islam on it.
More than once I have seen university students with T shirts sporting captions such as…
“Jesus. He did it for the chicks”
It takes about as much courage to do that as it would to eat a ham sandwich in front of Mahatma Gandhi on the 40th day of a fast and do about as much good. But if enough of us showed the same willingness to fight this irrational religious authority as we do attacking the Church on the matter of Galileo and the Solar system model, we could put this problem to bed in a weekend. It is our rapid and easy submission that fuels these attacks much more than any edict within Islam itself.
In that spirit, the IFPS is bringing another limited edition Mohamed Cartoon print. This time, from the Swedish artist, Lars Vilks, who generated a nice string of fatwa’s and death threats for putting a head representing Mohamed, on a dogs body. Here is a link to a moedoggie archive:
These limited edition prints have just been made available now, and as the Kurt Westergaard, ‘Bomb-Turban’ one sold so quickly, and rumour has it, are now showing some signs of appreciation already, I would suggest you get a copy of the Vilks-toon now while there is still a supply. For your own enjoyment and potential investment, but also because in so doing, we show that each threat against freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and what I consider perhaps the most important, freedom to criticize and indeed even mock, irrational religious authority, will only serve to generate more images, more derision, and less authority for those who would set limits for us on thought, speech and expression.
James Cohen for IFPS
To order your own copy of the Vilks toon, please email trykkefrihed@trykkefrihed.dk and an invoice will be sent to you in Danish currency with instructions on how to pay.
Comments
By j.p.christiansen on May 12th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Call For Resistance.
You are a member of a free society,
having inherited freedom of expression,
freedom of thought, and freedom of word,
and yet you sit back with a bemused smile
on your surprised, peaceful face,
when a fellow citizen-artist-lecturer
presents his case of why you are free,
and what it means to be so,
when he is suddenly interrupted to silence,
and physically attacked by ‘certain others’
from a culture unappreciative of freedom…
‘certain others’ living at your society’s largesse…
‘certain others’ you met with open arms
and a welcome to your land of refuge
from political and religious tyranny…
‘certain others’ who now pay you back
with psychological and physical intimidation,
and even attacks on your fellow citizens.
You sit in your chair, paralyzed,
and hypnotized at the strange proceedings
taking place in front of your eyes,
and you do nothing to defend your rights…
you do nothing to defend his right to express!
He draws a cartoon of a deranged ‘prophet’-
he speaks of sanctioned pedophilia-
he shows a picture of woman, enslaved-
he caricaturizes the inanities of Islam,
all to enlighten you and to warn you,
that unless you stand up to defend the freedom
for which our precious, secularized Western democracies
have sacrificed lives down through centuries,
you will be lulled to sleep and surrender.
It is the duty of freedom-loving citizens
to be aware of those ‘certain others’
who plant themselves in an audience
only to wait for the moment of attack,
and you must be aware of the possibility
that you may be called upon defend
that which your fellow freedom-loving
citizen-artist-lecturer present to you,
and this means that if you attend
such a lecture on freedom,
that you must be ready to physically
defend his personal safety and integrity,
and thereby make a statement of your own
commitment to our principles of freedom.
Are you ready to make that statement,
and when the trouble starts in front of you,
are you ready to commit yourself?
If those ‘certain others’ see violence
as a way to force their religious dogma
on you and your society,
are you ready to meet force with force,
and are you ready to stand up for freedom?
You may say that it is the job of the police
to protect and serve and prosecute,
but the police won’t always be present
when those ‘certain others’ decide to attack,
and so it is incumbent upon you to be the
defender, the server, the prosecutor,
and make the sacrifice for your children.
If you remain silent and un-protective
of those who dare speak the case for freedom,
your children will ask: “And what did you do?”
By Ronald Anti-Reagan on May 16th, 2010 at 9:54 pm
JP right
But ‘poem’ not quite
It is just stacked high prose
And we know that everybody knows
If it do not rhyme
It not worth a dime
Yes, JP words are true
Moslem bad for me and you
P.S. All religion harsh, not suway-ve (suave)
It not smooth like Burma Shave
By j.p.christiansen on May 17th, 2010 at 12:30 am
Ronald,
what is Burma Shave?
By j.p.christiansen on May 17th, 2010 at 12:45 am
Ronald;
by the way,
“stacked high prose” is a good phrase.
What country are you writing from?
Trackbacks