by Mike Baron - Art Spiegelman has the cover story in the June Harper’s “Drawing Blood—Outrageous cartoons and the art of outrage.” The occasion for this think piece was the publication in Denmark last year of several cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed.
As everyone knows the cartoons detonated worldwide riots by upset Muslims who killed, burned, and maimed to show their displeasure at the mocking of their prophet. Most of the rioters—numbering in the hundreds of thousands—had never seen the cartoons but were conditioned by their culture and imams to take to the streets at the drop of a turban screaming for the blood of an infidel.
You’d think that Spiegelman, both of whose parents were concentration camp survivors and who won the Pulitzer for his brilliant Holocaust memorial Maus, would have a better understanding of the threat that faces civilization. But his essay is oddly detached, brimming with moral equivalency as if he can’t quite bring himself to condemn a philosophy that does not attempt to hide its animus for the West, and Jews in particular.
Writing about the cartoons Spiegelman says, “They polarized the West into viewing Muslims as the unassimilable Other; for True Believers, the insults were irrefutable proof of Muslim victimization and served as recruiting posters for the Holy War.”
Spiegelman lives in Manhattan and works for the New Yorker, which provides a clue to his multiculti leanings. Obviously, he does not believe that Muslims are the unassimilable Other despite the overwhelming evidence of what is happening to his beloved Europe. Sun Tzu counseled, “Know thy enemy,” but whole classes of endangered species, specifically our Euro-leaning liberal elite, continue to view Islam through the prism of diversity where no culture can be recognized superior to any other. Friday night Seder is the same as some spiritual leader performing a clitorectomy on a teen-age girl with a sharpened rock.
Aussiegirl, writing in Ultima Thule (http://aussiethule.blogspot.com/2006/05/western-and-muslim-concepts-of-honor.html#comments
(Only in the United States do Muslims have a real chance at assimilation but we need to work that street from both sides and not just pray it happens. One need only look at the recent illegal immigrant riots to realize the threat unassimilated cultures pose to our way of life. By “our way of life” I do not mean white privilege, but those goals and rights laid out in the Constitution.)
Spiegelman can’t wait to display his bonafides. “It isn’t a question of adding insult to an open wound like the far right thugs of the British National Party did in February by distributing 500,000 leaflets of the emblematic hotheaded Prophet to sow more xenophobic discord.” He never uses such loaded words in referring to Islam, whose most prominent leader, Irans’ Ahmadinejad has repeatedly stated his goal to wipe Israel off the map. Now there’s talk Iran will require Jews and Christians to wear identifying badges. Many world leaders, Jewish and otherwise, liken the current situation to Europe in 1938. It is about to explode.
At least Spiegelman is upfront about where he’s coming from. “As a secular Jewish cartoonist living in New York City, I start out with four strikes against me, but I really don’t want any irate Muslims declaring holy war on me. (Although I’m not at all religious, I am a devout coward.)” (Emphasis Spiegelman’s) This is perhaps the most honest statement in the essay, and could just as well serve as the motto of the New York Times.
To his credit, Spiegelman insists that the cartoons be seen, which shows more courage than the NYT could muster. But then he vitiates their impact by conducting a spurious history of the editorial cartoon without examining the context of the Danish cartoons. Although he touches on Iran’s official reaction to Denmark’s cartoons—a worldwide contest to depict Jews in the most vile possible light (Denmark is not a Jewish country, none of the cartoonists were Jews,) he never comments on the tsunami of hateful sewage that daily pours from the Arab media in the form of cartoons, popular songs, comic books, and movies. Throughout the Middle East, a state-sponsored Jew-hating forty-one hour epic A Knight Without a Horse, based on the proven Czarist forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been a huge hit. Spiegelman fails to understand the nature of the enemy.
Islam is the religion that cannot live with anything else. It is intolerance enshrined, and thus the enemy of everything the secular Jew holds dear. Spiegelman can’t tell the difference between civilization and its enemies. He is clueless. He writes, “In fact, the most baffling aspect of this whole affair is why all the violent demonstrations focused on the dopey cartoons rather than on truly horrifying torture photos seen regularly on Al Jazeera, on European television, everywhere but in the mainstream media of the United States.” I assume he is referring to alleged photos of Western jailers abusing Islamic captives, and not the numerous tapes circulating of the torture and beheading of infidels, such as Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was a practicing Jew.
No, Art. The most baffling aspect of this affair has been the Western media’s cowardice, its abdication of its duty to free speech in the face of Arab pressure. Islam is censoring the Western media. As numerous others have pointed out, Islam uses intimidation to get what it wants. It kills people for insults, real or perceived. I have yet to see Jews or Christians, even the vile fundamentalist Christians, rioting, burning, and killing to object to the tidal wave of anti-Jewish and Christian sentiment typefied by The Da Vinci Code. Sure, our own culture is shit. Not worth defending. So it’s okay to mock. But Islam—ahhhh, Islam! Can’t mock them because they might come to your house and cut off your head.
Spiegelman points out that in order to illustrate the reason the Times chose not to run the Muhammad cartoons, they ran a picture of Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary, the one festooned with elephant dung. “One can only assume that the painting was chosen over any of the more immediately germane cartoons because thin-skinned Christians are more likely to blow up abortion clinics than newspaper offices.” Get it? The Christians are just as likely to riot as the Muslims! How many abortion clinic bombings have there been in the past five years? How many terrorist attacks on innocent civilians in the name of Islam? And when the hated administration gets its hands on someone like Eric Rudolph, abortion clinic bomber, they lock him up for life.
I sense ambivalence in Spiegelman’s writing. He knows deep in his Jewish bones the real threat Islam poses but doesn’t want to alienate his Upper Westside buddies. The same ambivalence undercut his In the Shadow of No Towers, a confused meditation on 9/11. Can’t quite bring himself to identify, much less condemn the bad guys. Finally, Spiegelman contributes his own entry in Iran’s Jew-hating cartoon contest. Spiegelman’s entry shows striped Jews lined up outside a crematorium next to a pile of dessicated corpses, being herded by club-wielding Nazis. One Jew is laughing his head off. The caption: “Ha! Ha! Ha! What’s really hilarious is that none of this is actually happening!” Pull your head out of the sand, Art.
Visit Mike Baron's website at www.bloodyredbaron.com