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

[saladinahmed.livejournal.com]

Except that viewing the Muhammad cartoons and the response to them in a vaccum is silly and useless.

Despite a few isolated incidents to the contrary, and despite a horseshit campaign of fear mongering against the 'muslim threat,' the facts on the ground -- the NUMBERS -- are clear: The 'western world' hasn't been suffering mass violence at the hands of Muslims. Exactly the opposite is true. And therefore viewing the Muhammad cartoons as anything other than a scummy, self-important insult added to a hundreds-of-thousands-of-dead-people injury is dishonest. One western cartoonist or filmmaker getting stabbed or burned out of his house is a tragedy. But hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and Afghans is just business as usual. This has been the state of affairs since long before Bush II and it hasn't changed with Obama. Half a million muslim kids died from US sanctions on Iraq in the 90s. Do you know any of their names? No. But you know Salman Rushdie's.

This isn't 'eat a bloody steak' day. It's more like 'spit on a queer' day. Watching all these twits patting themselves on the back for their bravery in kicking people when they're down is pathetic.

[dear-amaranth.livejournal.com]

Very well said.

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

Your rhetoric aside: 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.

I live on this side of the cultural divide. Were I to live on the other side, I could see myself being motivated to, say, burn an American flag on the 4th of July. But I'm not. I'm on this side, and so instead I stick up for people scribbling stick figures (though on a personal note I don't really have a problem with flag burning either).

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, regardless of who threw the first punch. They're going to lash out, and I think that drawing stick figures is a pretty benign way to do it.

Am I defending US policy in the Middle East? Certainly not. I'm not supporting violence or direct action against any Muslim. Am I supporting disrespecting a (especially ridiculous) religious tenet? With a work of defiance through art? As a response to violent assault both real and percieved? Hell yes. I supported Piss Christ*, and so I'll sure as hell support this.

*Personally I think I have more to fear from fundamentalist Christians than Muslims, but that's beside the point.

[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.

[arya.livejournal.com]

This isn't 'eat a bloody steak' day. It's more like 'spit on a queer' day.

Seriously?

Because if a bunch of Christians were to decide that Good Friday is also going to be "Eat a bacon cheeseburger day" I don't think you'd find a single Jew threatening to kill anyone over it.

[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)

[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?

[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.

[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.