The Hell With 'Em

I've been watching the whole Muslim cartoon thing with a mix of amusement, dismay, and more recently, horror. I've kept quiet until now about it, but reading that a cleric has now issued a $1 million for the death of the cartoonist (even though they were drawn by 12 different cartoonists). Link via Andrew Sullivan.

So here's my take.

This is complete and utter bullshit.

First of all, let's hit the irony. The cartoons satirized the view of many Westerners that Muslims are violent - and how does the Muslim community respond? With violence.

Second, they call blasphemy. OK, but cartoons in Muslim countries like Iran that are far more blashpemous to Jews and Christians than these are.

Third, as others have noted, there's nothing that says others have to conform to your specific religious taboos. I eat pork, and Jews are not upset. I eat beef, and Hindus are not upset. Why is this any different?

That being said, I realize this is quite a complicated issue. I've been reading No god but God by Reza Aslan, which has given me a fairly different perspective on what's going on in the Muslim world at the moment. Aslan postulates that Islam is going through a "reformation" much in the same way the Christian church did in the early Renaissance, and we're really only seeing a small part of the internal religious strife in the Muslim world (the London bus bombings, for example, were very explicitly in Muslim neighborhoods, on busses that Muslims most often use).

That being said, I really don't know what to make of all this. It's one of those things that makes me throw up my hands and say, "what the fuck? The Hell with 'em."