Tuesday, February 07, 2006
CARTOON LATEST
Mo-toon mortality now stands at nine following the shooting deaths of four Afghan protesters. In other developments:
Copies of a British student paper which reproduced one cartoon were hastily shredded and the editor suspended from a student union. A French court however refused to order the confiscation of a magazine which planned to print the images ...
Further protests erupted overnight in Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen, Djibouti, Gaza and Azerbaijan. At least 10,000 marched in the Bangladeshi capital and tens of thousands turned out in Niger’s capital Niamey to vent their anger. State assembly members in Muslim Kano, northern Nigeria, burned Danish flags.
It isn’t just Danish flags being attacked:
Gangs of pro-Muslim computer hackers have unleashed a withering cyber attack on Danish and Western websites in the past week, escalating their defacement barrage to coincide with dozens of violent street-level demonstrations across the Arab world in protest at the publication of a cartoon depiction of the Prophet Mohammed.
Nearly 600 Danish sites have fallen to cyber Muslims in the past week.
UPDATE. “A Muslim’s faith is above Western values.”
UPDATE II. It’s a walk out at the New York Press:
The editorial staff of the alternative weekly New York Press walked out today, en masse, after the paper’s publishers backed down from printing the Danish cartoons that have become the center of a global free-speech fight.
UPDATE III. If you’ve arrived at this site seeking the sacreligious cartoons of legend, click here.
UPDATE IV. Leftoid columnist Antonia Zerbisias talks sense:
As many editors have explained, merely describing the cartoons is sufficient for making the point.
I hope that’s the real reason for their reticence. I would hate to think that newspapers are backing away to avoid angry protests, to prevent ad boycotts, out of political correctness or a sense that some communities should get special treatment or, most of all, because they fear violent reprisals.
If you’re in the news business, sometimes you just have to take major risks in order to defend freedom of the press.
So you’d expect her to support bloggers who’ve published the images. Not so:
The right-wing blogosphere has been staging its own “blogburst”: the act of reproducing the offending depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Follow their politics and you’ll understand why they’re on this particular blogwagon: they hate Muslims.
Damian Penny has more on this ridiculous woman.
UPDATE V. Iraqi Muslim Zeyad:
I only saw these images of Muslim protestors in London today. For the life of me, I cannot understand how the British police let those demonstrators get away with it. The protestors are blasting free speech in Europe, yet they are using that same free speech to call for murder and bloodshed. I would strongly support deporting those people back to the miserable societies they originally came from.
Via Instapundit; hit that link.
UPDATE VI. Andrew Sullivan:
If Chinese radicals were ransacking Western embassies because of a cartoon, and were backed by the Chinese government, we would be outraged, demanding apologies, severing relations, and so on. But when Muslims do it, backed by Islamist governments, we are supposed to take it on the chin, to “respect” their religious traditions, issue mealy-mouthed statements, etc. In many ways, this is the real offense: treating Muslims as if their violation of global norms, and thralldom to medieval conceptions of politics and religion, were somehow acceptable. They are not acceptable.
UPDATE VII. Hail the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin and Queensland premier Peter Beattie:
“I strongly support their right to publish these cartoons,” Mr Beattie said.
We’ve now got two senior Laborites, both from Queensland, who support publication. Labor leader Kim Beazley, who opposes publication, is meanwhile remaining useless in Canberra.
UPDATE VIII. Hail the Blog Herald, too.