Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here to see last week's results.

Winner
“Ha! That’s brilliant! Of course we’ll run it - thanks for submitting! Do you have any others?” —Deborah

Finalists
"Not another Muhammad cartoon!" —Mike Mariano

"He will die of hunger, either from lack of food or lack of mouth. Either way: funny!" —Arthur

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #116" »

8:31 AM :: Comments (157)

A story in my local newspaper about a mosque a few blocks away from me has gotten some attention from the Islamophobic wingnuts. Apparently some of my neighbors are "irked" (or, as the nutjobs have it, tormented) by the call to prayer that is broadcast five times a day.

Personally, I like hearing it. It's at least as aesthetically pleasing as (and less frequent than) the bells on the Catholic church, and a lot better than the air raid siren that goes off every Friday to remind Orthodox Jews that Shabbat is approaching (as if they didn't know). More importantly, that's the kind of neighborhood I want to live in: one in which a diversity of cultures make their presence known. Knowing that some of my neighbors are taking time out of their day to pray (or are preparing to light candles) helps me feel connected to them. That's part of what makes it a neighborhood. It's not at all surprising to me that the people complaining about this issue hail from North Dakota, Indonesia, Australia and, um, East Squatanpoo.

Some of the people up in arms about this are the same ones who complain about Nativity scenes on public property, which is at least somewhat consistent (though the call is broadcast from private property) but many others are the same ones who become outraged about the War on Christmas — although I guess that's consistent in its own way. That latter group also links this to the encroachment of Islamist values on Western democratic ones. During the Muhammad cartoon controversy I wrote extensively about how I think this is a real phenomenon and one that must be resisted, but in this case it simply doesn't apply. There's a fundamental difference between religious believers wanting to express themselves and religious believers wanting to limit the expression of others. For years my neighborhood church had a huge sign that said, "Abortion stops a human heart," and while I often fantasized about getting a can of spray paint and adding, "Or your money back," [hat tip: Beth Sherman] it never seriously occurred to me that the church should be forced to remove its message — which was far less central to its mission than Muslim call to prayer.

I find it hard to believe that anyone who is bothered by this is reacting simply to the volume of the recording, rather than its message. It's less loud than car alarms and not much louder than those 25-cent kiddie rides that they have in front of some stores. It also lasts for under a minute. [Update: New York City "defines offensive sounds as noises made between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. that are seven decibels above the surrounding sound of an area. Between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m., the threshold would rise to 10 decibels above the ambient noise of an area — noise that is, say, louder than the din on an elevated subway platform or substantially louder than the sounds heard at any normal Manhattan intersection." There is no way the Adhan (which broadcasts only during the day) is that loud. If it repeated incessently, other regulations would cover it, which is why Bloomberg caused a mini scandal a few years back by attempting (unsuccessfully) to silence ice cream trucks. I was all for that, but most of the city -- Adhan opponents presumably among them -- lambasted the mayor for Hating Children].

But then, the mild complaints in the article of people who actually live here are nothing compared to the vitriol of those who have never been to Brooklyn, and probably never met a Muslim, in their lives. That's all anyone needs to know.

3:43 PM :: Comments (15)

I have to admit that each time I posted about the cartoon jihad I'd get an uneasy sensation about the fact that I was more or less agreeing with Michelle Malkin about something for the first time since, well, ever. Well now I've found a way to draw a bright clear line. You see, while Michelle loves her some "Islam is a religion peace — not!" posts, I tend to think Islamofascism is mostly about fascism, not Islam. And as I've tried to point out, the fanatics who rioted over the cartoons were driven as much by politics as faith.

Last week, Michelle posted about 15 Nigerian Christians who were killed — in her har-har emphasis — "in the name of the prophet Mohammed." Then she went on to list other instances in which Nigerian Muslims killed Christians, because, you know, that's what those people do.

Yet strangely, Michelle, who has posted about every news story related to the Muhammad cartoons so far, has not yet had anything to say about today's news out of Nigeria's ongoing riots, "in which Christian mobs wielding machetes, clubs and knives set upon their Muslim neighbors." At the burned central mosque, "someone wrote in chalk on a charred wall, 'Jesus is Lord.' The message went on to warn that 'from today' there would be no more Muhammad." If that graffiti had been the same thing from a Muslim perspective, it would have made for the perfect darkly ironic Malkin headline. Well, maybe she'll get around to using it later. She won't just ignore this story, will she?

My point, of course, is nothing so simplistic as, "See, Christianists can be just as bad as Islamists," but to note, as the Times story makes clear, that places like Nigeria and the Middle East come loaded with complex backstories of ethnic and politicial tensions, and that pretexts for violence are often just that — pretexts.

Update: I still agree with Marlette. Except about the overall value of editorial cartoons in general.

Update: While we're talking about things Michelle won't post, Sullivan has a photo from the pro-Denmark rally of a woman holding a sign with a quote from Mencken: "The most curious social convention is that religious opinions should be respected." Maybe she can photoshop it so that instead of "religious" it just says "Muslim." That would work, right?

1:05 PM :: Comments (4)

The AP story on the sentencing of David Irving ends with a bit of whiplash: "Mr. Irving's trial came during a period of intense debate in Europe over freedom of expression, after European newspapers printed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that set off deadly protests worldwide."

I've written before that this is a bad parallel for a couple of reasons. Holocaust denial is inherently racist, whereas cartoons about Muhammad, while they can be Islamophobic (more on that buzzword later), can also be legitimate critiques of religious and social structures (not to mention entirely uncritical of anything). As an aside, Flemming Rose is surely being a tad disingenuous in his recent WaPo OpEd when he insists that he solicited the cartoons for purely high-minded reasons, but he's right about much else, including his gloss on what it means to "respect" religious believers: "When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy." The folks who argue that the cartoons should be forbidden because they offend all Muslims also have to deal with the problem of the 11 Islamic journalists currently facing prosecution for publishing the cartoons — some in order to condemn them. Media outlets that have steadfastly refused to run the cartoons even as elements of a news story (as opposed to as editorial cartoons) should also consider the implications of a moderate Egyptian quoted in the story linked above: "With the Islamization of the society, the list of taboos has been increasing daily. You should not write about religion. You should not write about politics or women. Then what is left?"

As another aside (yes, this is still the aside; be patient), Rose also gave a new spin on the meaning of the turban-bomb cartoon, something about oranges. Is his mytho-ironic interpretation correct, or is the cartoon really saying, as every other media outlet at least implies, that Islam is a violent religion? Washington Post readers are forced to guess, as the paper won't show them the cartoon so they can decide for themselves? (It does no good, philosophically, to say they can find the picture on the Internets. People can find 90% of the news stories and photos in today's Post on other online sources, but the paper doesn't stop publishing 90% of its content on those grounds.) Meanwhile, renegade art critic Edward Rothstein breaks the New York Times taboo of refusing to even describe most of the cartoons (while insisting that the reason it won't publish the images is that it could describe them if it wanted to) in a gleefully non-sequitorial coda to a review of a book about religion and biology. His take is a clear indictment of the Times' All The News That's Halal policy.

Continue reading "Don't worry, four days from now I'll blog about port security and in a week, the civil war in Iraq" »

10:30 AM :: Comments (3)

In the discussion following my recent post on the Cartoon Wars I mentioned my belief that 90 percent of editorial cartoonists are unforgivable hacks. Rare indeed is the editorial cartoon that makes me laugh, much less Think. Maybe it's the form. Any joke that requires big labels to explain itself is pretty much doomed from the start. It's become de rigeur when either attacking the Danish cartoons or defending them in principle to add that as cartoons they are insipid, unfunny, and thuddingly obvious. Well, what editorial cartoons aren't?

Daryl Cagle has a 20-page collection of editorial cartoonists' response to the cartoon wars. I found two (reprinted here) that I liked. One (from Mexico) is incisive in its simplicity, the other funny for daring, as none of the others do, to actually risk a little blasphemy. Very little, to be sure, but remember, we're living through a moment in which the ombudsman for the Chicago Tribune can defend the paper's decision not to run the Muhammad cartoons by saying that it also wouldn't quote somebody saying Jesus Christ as an interjection. The other hundred or so cartoons tread the familiar A-B emotional and satirical terrain of all editorial cartoons, and only a small handful actually risk a depiction of Muhammad. As with any topic, certain ideas are repeated over and over again. Fucking hacks. (OK, maybe there are more good ones that I missed. I didn't force myself to look at all 20 pages. I'll take some risks for my blogging, but I do have a family to think of).

I don't know how many of these will run in US papers. But if any do, it will be that much harder for the media to use quality as one of its excuses not to reprint the Danish cartoons.

6:31 PM :: Comments (15)

Back in college I edited a stoopid underground magazine. Twice we published cartoons featuring Jesus — once in a fake ad for Jesus on Ice and once in a fake ad for the Cruciphone, a telephone shaped like Christ on the cross. (Sophomoric? Hey, we were sophomores.) Now obviously they weren't anti-Christian cartoons, they were jokes about religion and consumerism and the tension between the sacred and the profane. But could they have offended Christians? Almost certainly. There was no big conservative Christian contigency at Oberlin back then, but had there been, we probably would have gotten the same outraged response we got when we made jokes that offended every other cultural or ethnic group on campus. (Good times, good times.)

So clearly I'm not of the school that avoiding offense should be one's primary concern when publishing a newspaper. That said, I think reasonable people can disagree over whether those crazy Danes should have published the notorious Muhammad cartoons, just because they had the right to.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no valid argument for American media outlets not printing the cartoons now as part of their coverage of the ensuing riots. For several reasons, this cowardly abdication of journalism is not, as the Times claims, "a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words."

First, even if the original publication was arguably gratuitous, the republication in the context of news coverage would be highly germane. Knowing exactly what got people so worked up is essential information. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the Times ran photos of Piss Christ and Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin during those controversies; I'm absolutely sure that the paper has (rightly) reprinted antisemitic cartoons that have appeared in Islamic publications in the context of news stories.

Second, the cartoons are not so easily described — not that the Times has made any attempt to try. In 10 articles on the subject, the Times has described, sort of, exactly three of the 12 cartoons, and emphasized, repeatedly, exactly one. Dispensing first with the two cartoons that were mentioned only once, the paper noted that not all of the cartoons were inherently offensive: "One depicted a Danish anti-immigration politician in a police lineup, and another lampooned [Danish editor] Mr. Rose as an agent provocateur." This doesn't even include several others that depict Muhammad neutrally, a religious taboo, but not a mockery of Islam. Despite that, most of the Times' other reports have lumped all 12 cartoons together as "satirizing Muhammad." [Update: Oops. Missed a few stories. Here's one that describes three more toons, bringing the total to six out of 12.]

The one cartoon that has gotten all the attention is typically described as a picture of Muhammad "wearing a turban shaped like a bomb." But even that is far less helpful than seeing the cartoon would be. As Choire Sicha notes in his passionate essay, that description only raises questions: "Does the image... mean that all Muslims are terrorists? Is it a commentary on the tragedy that Muhammad’s religion has given rise to Wahhabism? Or is it a reference to a racist Western conflation of Arabs and terrorists?" (Admittedly, he also notes that it's hard to tell from the cartoon itself, but, hey, that's information too.)

Continue reading "At last they came for Mutts, but by then there was no one left to stand up" »

3:27 PM :: Comments (20)