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]

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.