Everyone Draw Mohammed (may Allah honor him and grant him peace) day

[yagathai]

So recently it was apparently Everyone Draw Mohammed Day, wherein people were encouraged to draw the Prophet of Islam. This was in direct reaction to some high-profile and recent terroristic threats made by certain Muslim extremists towards (primarily Western) artists, threatening violence in reaction to depictions of Mohammed which are forbidden according to strict religious codes.

tithenai and I had some words over the 'holiday', because she believes that it's wrong to offend an oppressed minority for the sake of satisfying some jingoistic urge to "put Muslims in their place".

This strikes me as a terribly defensive and reactionary view, and that is certainly not my motivation. However, honestly, even if it does offend the world's Muslim population, on a personal level I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, mockery is always a valid response to threats of unreasonable violence -- it may even be the best response. If people that hew to a frankly absurd tenet are offended because of a reaction to violence perpetrated other people that hew to that same tenet, I have not one iota of pity for them. Underclass or overclass, victims or perpetrators, violent desert barbarians or ancient and maligned culture -- I don't care.

To put it another way, is it OK to blame vegetarians if, say, a militant ecoterrorist group kills a security guard in an attempt to liberate a factory farm? Absolutely not. But you'd better believe that I'll be participating in "Eat A Rare, Juicy Steak Day" that week to show the murdering assholes that their abhorrent tactics haven't cowed me, but rather energized their oppositions. If that offends all the non-violent vegetarians, tough titty.

In other words, it's OK if it offends the emperor's tailors to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Pointing out the Emperor's nudity is a good in and of itself, but if one of the tailors has been threatening to hurt me if I pointed out his flimflammery, so much the better. A statement of defiance and scorn towards that violent tailor is an additional good, and if the rest of the tailors get hurt feelings that's too bad. No matter what the tailors' circumstances, the Emperor is still completely goddamn naked.

Comments

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

The Zarathustrans don't have much in the way of temporal power, but otherwise, for this purpose... yes. I think you can lump all of them together as a generally oppressive, generally inimical force that seeks to impose its morality on others.

[saltedpin.livejournal.com]

I lol'd.

[saltedpin.livejournal.com]

I agree with you from the outside looking in, but the problem is that the various adherents don't. And this is where the problems start.

[lostreality.livejournal.com]

I'm with you yagathai, I think this is partially motivated by anti-islamic sentiment from some, but this is much more a reaction to the south park fiasco in which we experienced actual censorship in this country on the basis of the religious views and threats of another group- this was an assertion of one of the basic rights of this country in response to that censorship.

Draw mohammed day was also super popular in the atheist blogger crowds, and that crowd at least is not very anti-muslims in particular, we're just against any religions dictating any policy. :) And while personally I don't need to go around drawing pictures of mohammed, and some of those pictures were indeed very offensive, I may not agree with a word you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it...

[saladinahmed.livejournal.com]

"Queer isn't a choice, like vegetarian or Muslim. Queer isn't an on-its-face ridiculous restriction on behavior. Drawing a picture of Mohammed doesn't actually cause anyone any harm, which is very different than assaulting a homosexual."

Actually, you're wrong. To take the easiest claim first, any grown person knows that words and images can cause harm. Calling someone a nigger causes harm. Publicly shitting on their most dearly-held beliefs (esp. in the context of a culture that makes shitting on such beliefs a national passtime) hurts people.

More complicatedly, to be 'queer' (when 'queer = what westerners mean when they say the word queer') IS a choice. All over the world there are people who prefer having sex with people of the same gender. That's probably biology at work. But to say that they're 'queer' in the US-ian sense is about as accurate as saying that every woman worldwide who asserts her needs and desires aggressively is 'feminist' -- that is to say it's not accurate at all. Though I realize it's a lamentable tragedy for white taxonimists-of-humans everywhere, the labels the progressive US/western european communities have come up with in the past few decades don't obtain all over the word so neatly as some folks would like.

Similarly your notion of 'choice' as far as being a Muslim goes seems to depend on a notion that the middle-class US-ian experience of growing up with a set of beliefs, then going to college and taking World Religions or Philosophy 101 and Questioning It All is universal. It's not. Most Muslims in the world are so CULTURALLY emeshed in their local form of Islam that they can't possibly pick and choose doctrine ala American-style buffet religion.

The funny thing is, you acknowledge that this lack of choice imposed by culture is inevitable -- but it's only ok for US-ians:

"I live on this side of the cultural divide...I stick up for people scribbling stick figures...People are frustrated and scared, and while certainly I think the "Muslim threat" has been far overblown, it doesn't mean that people don't have some right to be frustrated and afraid, regardless of how real the threat is...They're going to lash out"

I live in the west, too. I was born and grew up in freaking michigan! The idea that that means that you inevitably must wed yourself to racist idiot shitbags is preposterous -- and is disproved by the fact that lots of westerners are saying that this 'holiday' is hatemongering nonsense. But even more dangerous is the idea that people "have some right" to be "frustrated and afraid" and "lash out" REGARDLESS OF HOW REAL THE THREAT IS.
I mean, doesn't that sound insane to you? Western europeans for centuries PERCEIVED a threat in from Jews. So were pogroms and shtetls and genocoide ok? Or only, say, throwing pig's blood on people's doors, since that's a 'symbolic' act? That's some sad, baa-sheep thinking, esp. form someone who's patting himself on the back for being such an iconoclast.

[saladinahmed.livejournal.com]

Your metaphor is so inaccurate on so many points as to be useless.

A) Jews aren't the primary targets of brutal military assaults and occupation by the world's most powerful armies. Muslims are. Except by a vocal antisemetic minority Jews are not discussed in the west as if they are The Big Scary Problem Of the 21st Century. Muslims are.

B) 'Eat a bacon cheesburger day' is not equivalent to what we're talking about here. Throwing pig's blood on people's doors or going into a hasid neighborhood and making holocaust jokes over a loudspeaker is more like it.

C) If you went to my next-door Hasid neighborhood of williamsburg and did one of the above things, I guarantee you AT LEAST one of those dudes would threaten to kill you. And you'd at least get your nose broken. Those dudes don't play. But if that happened it would be taken as an isolated incident, instead of representative of their entire religion. Which brings us back to (A)

Re: Unsurprisingly, I completely disagree with you.

[dje2004.livejournal.com]

I can think of plenty of cases where shitting on someone's beliefs is totally justifiable. Are we supposed to treat the beliefs of holocaust deniers, anti-vaccinationers, HIV-deniers, creationists, racists, or the members of the Westboro Baptist church with respect?

[dje2004.livejournal.com]

I remember having the same argument with Sarah, more or less, when the Danish cartoon controversy hit the media.

I'm with you as well.

[dje2004.livejournal.com]

Wait, so you're saying that if muslims had killed more westerners, and westerners had killed less muslims, then you wouldn't have a problem with this?

Or are you saying that since we've killed so many muslims, we shouldn't make a stink when muslims kill or threaten to kill some of us?

Re: Unsurprisingly, I completely disagree with you.

[babyraven.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between a discussion where you rationally discuss why someone's point of view does not make sense, versus actively shitting on it.

Example: kosher laws are outdated, and in some senses utterly nonsensical. For example, if the law is based on "don't drown a calf in its mother's milk," why would chicken, which is not mammal and therefore could never produce milk, count as "meat?" Pointing this out is totally fine. However, using that as an excuse to trick a black hat into eating pork? NOT COOL.

My POV is: feel free to criticize; just don't cross the line into "asshole" while doing it.

[babyraven.livejournal.com]

So, all those people who used to express their anti-black by drawing pickaninny pictures and put on minstrel shows portraying blacks as fools and genetically lesser creatures -- were they just blowing off steam too?

Intolerance -- in any form -- is unacceptable.

If you want to have a rational discussion of why you think Islamic fundamentalism is a problem, be my guest. But that's not what these people are doing. They are cruelly, pointlessly, and self-importantly mocking someone else's beliefs. See my kosher analogy in an above comment.

[saladinahmed.livejournal.com]

I'm saying that it's annoying listening to people who don't know a damn thing about REALLY living in fear* but who enjoy a bloated consumer lifestyle whine about how horribly their freedom of expression is supposedly threatened by the impoverished people** whose real fear (of stravation-sanctions, of predator drones, of depleted uranium bombs, of random recist detentions and torture) sustains that bloated lifestyle. Clear enough?

*Before anyone brings up 9/11: I was actually living in Manhattan and thought my friends were dead, and spent that day watching the smoke rise and the fighter planes roar overhead, so please, to those who just watched it on TV, I don't want to hear about how I'm downplaying this.

**Yeah, yeah, I know: "Bin Laden is a rich boy. The Saudis have oil money." But the essential economic relationship of the US and western europe to the muslim world is still parasitic. I'm talking forest, not trees.

[ornythopter.livejournal.com]

So the contradictory commands "Murder the Infidel" and "Love thy Neighbor" somehow have the same generally oppressive, generally inimical value for society?

[saladinahmed.livejournal.com]

Right. Because there's nothing in the qu'ran about loving your neighbors. And nothing in the Bible about violence. That must be why Christian regimes have so much lower of a body count over the centuries than Muslim ones...

[ornythopter.livejournal.com]

zing for extra irony!

So if a particular group of Christians advocates violence and another particular group of Christians advocates compassion, their actions must still have the same moral value, right?

So, can we agree that it's NOT okay to shit on all of Islam, but it IS okay to shit on the specific belief that "murder is justified if a person draws a particular cartoon?"

Surprisingly, I do somewhat agree with you, Mike.

[glamour-junkie.livejournal.com]

I'm betting you're right in that a lot of the people in the Draw-Mohammed crowd (I hadn't even heard of this thing, honestly, until this post... but I was disgusted when I heard about the South Park threats) aren't anti-Muslim, being as a lot of Atheists or Agnostics aren't particularly hateful toward any one religion, they're against the harmful tenets of all religions. What I DO think the Draw-Mohammed people all share is the anger toward intimidation.

What we're talking about here, really, isn't "white America" shitting on the Muslim community for shitting's sake. It's not "cram pork down someone's throat laughing all the way". It's not anti-Muslims vs. Muslims.

What it is, at least mostly, is a small group of people fighting back against threats of violence and intimidation from another small group of people.

Intolerance is bad, sure enough. But NO - absolutely NO fucking religion - has the right to invoke threats (or acts) of violence and retribution against others just because they don't share and honor their beliefs and reverences.

Have I been on the receiving end of any form of discrimination or threats for what I have done or what I have believed (or not believed) in my life? Bet your ass I have. I have had death threats scrawled on walls for me to see, calling me out by name.
(Whether or not a prev. poster above knows what I've been through or not, I don't fucking care. I respectfully disagree with a lot of what they've said, and their tone of superiority here. Speaking for everyone and what they do or do not know about is just as ignorant.)

I, as an individual and a human, have learned to respond civilly and, at the end of the day, to respond in a non-violent way and/or move on. I'm not about to bash in the noses (or brains) of those who believe I'm in the wrong. Because THAT'S what not OK, no matter what. I'm going to use my voice and my vote to try to make positive change, not my fists.

The people who decided to participate in Draw-Mohammed day used their voices, too. They used a non-violent protest (religiously abrasive and misguided, sure, but non-violent) to respond to those few using violent fear tactics. The drawings are for those few, not the rest of the Muslim community. The "holocaust jokes over a loudspeaker" analogy is just absurd - are we really going to compare genocide and an offensive image of someone's deity?

I myself don't feel the need to draw a picture either, but I have a human fucking right to do so. If someone threatens me with violence and retribution for it, I'm going to respond the only way I, as a non-violent person, know how - use my voice. I agree it might be misguided and counter-productive, but it's the only way some people feel like they can respond legally to people that have gone beyond "asshole" and right into "villains" by threatening their legal and moral freedoms. They might be becoming assholes themselves by taking it in this direction, but it's a direct and proportional response to those fearmongers. Draw-Mohammed day is a RESPONSE to threats, not anti-Muslim behavior inherently. My hope is that most people can rise above BOTH sides of this bullshit.


(And I was so calm when I started off this response. Sheesh.)

EDIT: After reading a little more about it, I feel like the anger about this is largely due to misunderstanding. The two sides are fighting from viewpoints WORLDS apart, and aren't even really fighting the same battle.
It's crazy. The DM people are fighting against censorship and a culture of fear, which is valid, and the anti DM people are fighting this because of the racism they believe is there. How frustrating.

[dje2004.livejournal.com]

This only holds up if you assume that drawing a picture of Mohammed as a way of saying that you value freedom of speech and that you refuse to be cowed by extremists is equivalent to mocking and insulting Islam. I don't.

This also assumes that if you don't follow the strictures of another religion, you're insulting that religion.

[dje2004.livejournal.com]

Well, I find it annoying listening to people who live in this country - and thus enjoy the freedoms of speech and expression which that entails - threaten other people for exercising those rights, because they believe that their "right" not to be offended trumps the right of free speech.

Now, you want to talk about the injustices and atrocities we've committed against impoverished peoples elsewhere, that's fine. I just don't buy that the fact that we've done terrible things excuses other people from doing the same, and that we can't say anything about it.

Re: Unsurprisingly, I completely disagree with you.

[dje2004.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing how tricking an orthodox jew into eating pork is the same as drawing a picture of Mohammed as a means of standing up for free expression. If this had sprung up out of nothing, I'd agree that the people behind it were just being assholes for the sake of being assholes, but this arose in response to a specific incident.

Also, I'm aware that a lot of people jumping on this are islamaphobes and racists, and that some of the pictures are deliberately meant to insult (though the founder of the page specifically asked that the page not be used as an excuse for hate speech). Just because the page is attracting a lot of assholes, doesn't mean that agreeing with the idea behind it makes you one.

Re: Unsurprisingly, I completely disagree with you.

[babyraven.livejournal.com]

Granted, but answer me this, Dave -- exactly what GOOD does this do? Will the minds of any of the people who were opposing the free expression be changed by this?

No. If anything, they'll hate us more. And maybe, so will many other Muslims who were previously neutral. So in the end, it's at best a petty little dart thrown that will hit Muslims of ALL stripe -- oppressive or no -- by mocking one of their beliefs. At worst, we actually recruit for the extremists by giving them fodder to sell to the younger generation about how much we hate their way of life.

At heart, all I'm saying is that if you want to stand up for something, do it! But do it with justice and make it productive, rather than resorting to pointless mockery that injures more than it heals.

Re: Unsurprisingly, I completely disagree with you.

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

You don't stand up to a bully to change the bully's mind.

Re: Surprisingly, I do somewhat agree with you, Mike.

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

Wait, why do you agree with me "surprisingly"?

Re: Surprisingly, I do somewhat agree with you, Mike.

[glamour-junkie.livejournal.com]

Oh, not so much because it's you.
It's because I feel like my general stance is "try not to offend people", especially when it comes to my, or their, beliefs. I usually just respectfully "agree to disagree", and go on my merry way. I wouldn't normally empathize with a group of people putting offensive shit out into the world. I do this time, because I believe the deeper need people fulfill in participating in this is the fight to protect their own freedoms and not fall down the slippery slope into censorship because of intimidation from a small group of bullies.

Re: Unsurprisingly, I completely disagree with you.

[babyraven.livejournal.com]

You make fun of them, and lots of innocent people not even involved instead? And that works?

Bullshit.

Re: Unsurprisingly, I completely disagree with you.

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

Bullies hate being laughed at. Hate it hate it hate it.