Call THAT a cartoon!!

The ‘outrage’ at the Islamic cartoons is not all one-way. Without too much of a Google-sort of search, I managed to find this,

In September of last year, a Danish writer bemoaned the fact that he couldn’t get anyone to illustrate a book he had written about the prophet Mohammed. The reason for this of course is because in the Muslim faith, pictorial representations of the prophet are strictly forbidden. This means that although you are more than welcome to picture Mohammed pleasuring a pot-bellied pig in your mind's eye - if that’s what floats your blasphemous boat - you could never actually draw a picture of it, or at least not without incurring a fair bit of wrath.

It then goes on a bit and then says this,

There is of course, luscious ripe irony at work here. A cartoonist draws a picture of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in
his turban, the implication being that Islam, far from a religion of tolerance and peace, is actually a religion of violence and
murder. Many Muslims are offended by this, and so, by way of response, threaten to murder the cartoonists responsible. You
have to smile. ‘How dare you call us murdering bastards?! We ’ll kill you! We’ll kill the lot of you!’

Before a final sally.

In a rather sweet coincidence, this was also the week that the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill was defeated in the British
parliament. This means that when the much-diluted bill eventually becomes law, we will still be legally allowed to say or write that which is critical, abusive or insulting to religion and the religious. However, depending on how this cartoon controversy pans out, we may not dare.

We’ll probably just leave it to Nick Griffin.

All of this is a fair way out of the mainstream comment that one gets back via the ‘meedja’ but I suggest it strikes a note in the pubs and clubs – and not only in the working mens’ bars. I’ve included it here as it chimes with my feelings but expresses it in a way that is much better than I would produce. So, as the aim of communication is to communicate (shades of long-passed lectures), I nicked it!