International Draw A Picture of Mohammed Day
Yes, that's today. And no, I'm not going to be posting a picture of Mohammed, you'll be likely to see that in all kinds of other places, most of them in horrifically bad taste.
For those of you who haven't heard of it, the story is this: someone on Facebook decided that May 20th should be "Draw Mohammed Day". Pakistan (the entire country) censored Facebook because of it. Facebook's owners, in a massive show of moral spinelessness, banned the page for the group. This in turn created an even bigger clusterfuck of people supporting the Draw Mohammed Day event, Muslim extremists publicly issuing death threats to people in those groups, and lots of idiots making comments without the wherewithal to know what they're talking about on both sides.
I'm going to talk about the idiocy of the whole situation. On the one hand, you have an event like this acting as a thin mask for groups of extremist racists, fanatical Christians (who would impose their own equally arbitrary religious rules if they just could, and I think hate the Muslim fanatics mostly out of jealousy that they don't have that sort of power themselves), and all-around ignorant dumbfucks who don't actually know anything about Islam.
Well, I actually do know a lot about Islam, and I can say with certainty that on the other hand you have a group of equally ignorant fanatics, who believe they're practicing Islam in its most traditional form when in fact they're practicing it in one of its newest and most aberrant forms (wahabism), coupled with a vast majority of cowards who are too afraid to stand up and say that their co-religionists are wrong.
This is a "complex issue", in other words, only inasmuch as both sides are utterly full of fucking retards.
Let me say first that Mohammed wouldn't have given a fuck about someone making a drawing of him. That wasn't the real point about the question of images; but even if you assume it was, it would not be an injunction that could possibly apply to anyone who wasn't Muslim. Within Islam also, in more educated times, there were tons of images of the Prophet.
But even if you do believe it, sincerely that drawing anything at all that has a living form is an offense against God, even then, where the fuck do you get off threatening and killing others for it? Judgment belongs to Allah, not to you, motherfucker!
Second, there's no question that there are certain principles on which a modern civilized society is founded. Freedom of speech and religion are core to these principles; that is, you cannot impose a religious rule on those who do not follow that religion. And particularly when the rule has to do with speech. Not to mention, beyond that, the notion that blasphemy and heresy are not valid capital crimes. All of these things were, and in precious few places are, values that were once held just as truly in Muslim societies as in our own. Islam was way ahead of the game compared to Christianity when it came to religious tolerance and free expression for much of the shared history of those two religions. The turning point came in the 18th Century, where Christian civilization experienced the Enlightenment which led it to become the vanguard of human rights, and where Islam experienced a social collapse which lead to the rise of the utterly NEW and totally UNORTHODOX movement known as Wahabism, heralding slowly-dawning new dark age for the Muslim world that they have yet to lift themselves out of (and thus far, its not looking good).
The guys who are issuing death threats over the cartoons (not to mention the guys who've actually killed people)? Wahabis.
And Wahabism is no more the "true and original Islam" than the Jim Jones cult was true and original Christianity. It is a sect that is utterly the product of the 18th and 19th century muslim world, along with Christian influences and Western interventionism (Wahabism is based on ideas, like the kind of sola scriptura literalism, that are totally alien to islam but extremely common to Christianity, and this is no coincidence, since Wahabism was guided and encouraged in its infancy by colonial western powers in their efforts to destabilize the region and delegitimize the more thoughtful or spiritual movements in Islam which they found dangerous to their colonialist ambitions.
So in short, Wahabism is a cancer, its responsible for all of this nonsense, its not representative of true Islam, and its certainly not a deserving spokesman for the religion as a whole.
But if that's the case, why has it been allowed to be the spokesman? I've heard a lot of people saying "those are only a few extremists who issue the death threats, you can't tar all the Muslim people with the same brush".
Actually, I can. I can and I will, until such time as the rest of the Muslim people stop being such fucking wimps, and start standing up to the Wahabis.
The Wahabis are allowed to act as the visible, hateful face of Islam because:
a) they threaten and bully everyone, and people in the Muslim world are as scared of being blown up or murdered as people in the Western world are.
b) they claim to be the oldest and truest form of Islam, which is a crock of shit lie, but they're just as skilled as some of the evangelical christians are at making the claim, which is to say that an ignorant person can be convinced to believe them; so many Muslims who are actually practicing a tolerant kind of Islam feel this doubt that maybe the Wahabis are the really intense guys who are doing things the old and original way, and thus can't be criticized. That's not true. Wahabism bears the least resemblance to original Islam out of just about any of its various forms, its a crock of shit.
c) Like many people in the west, Muslims have fallen for this "clash of civilizations" bullshit that some people have a vested interest in promoting. You know, the idea that the Western Civilization and the Muslim Civilization are incompatible and doomed to conflict? And of course that means that if you're a Muslim, you are stuck supporting the other Muslims regardless of how much of a gang of utterly inbred retarded motherfuckers they are, because its "us Muslims vs. them Christians". Only this isn't true either, or at least it shouldn't be. The real struggle is not the "Clash of Civilizations", its "Civilization vs. Barbarism". In the west, we have our Barbarians, and they are the ones we must fight against. In the Muslim world, the Wahabis are your barbarians, who have far more in common with our barbarians than they have with you; and we have far more in common with you than either of us have with the barbarians.
I don't think its in good taste to draw an offensive picture of Mohammed. I do, however, think its of much worse taste to threaten to burn someone alive for drawing a picture. That's much MORE offensive to me, as a civilized person, than the mocking image was in the first place. And if you moderate Muslims do not want to be tarred with the brush of being murderers and ignorant vicious clods, then you should stop letting the murderers and clods be the ones who claim to speak for you. If you do not condemn the fanatics in Islam, the murdering clods, the inbred retards, the vicious utterly unislamic wahabi fundamentalists, then your silence implies agreement with their position, and the west will continue to lump you in with them.
And I wouldn't give a shit, but that's not good for me either. Civilization vs. Barbarism, remember? It affects me, here, if my barbarians can keep using your silence as a weapon in their armoury.
RPGPundit
(May 20, 2010)