This article is a must read.

http://alphabetcity.blogspot.com/2006/02/mohammed-cartoons-in-egyptian.html

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Mohammed Cartoons In Egyptian Newspaper

The Arab Street is rioting, burning embassies and calling for beheadings and assasinations because it is outraged that Western secular liberalism is insensitive to an Islamic religious tradition: The sacrilege of depicting the Prophet Muhammed in an image.

Damn you and your valued press freedoms, they say, your free speech rights. You have doubly blasphemed our beloved Prophet (PBUH) by physically representing him in a cartoon and by characterizing him as a terrorist when you placed a bomb where his blessed turban should be.

Well, where was the Muslim outrage, the mass fury, when Adel Hamouda's independent Egyptian newspaper, Al Fagr, published the cartoons four months ago? Why was Jyllands Posten's Fleming Rose and not Al-Fagr's Hamouda condemned by a President in Tehran, a cleric in a mosque or a Muslim in the street?

Because of the jihadist "revenge fantasy."

Nibras Kazimi explains:

"There is a dark spiritual effervescence that sputters out periodically from the Middle East in fits of mayhem stemming from a revenge fantasy that has been festering for 300 years. It gets couched in convenient "us" versus "them" diatribes to explain away failure, whereby the eternal enemy is the Christian West - besting the Muslim East for several centuries on the battlefield and in all walks of life, and actively subjugating it.

"But is it logical that a cartoonist would be able to shake Islam to its foundations? Why would a great faith be so quick to anger when provoked by so insignificant a stimulus? There is no logic to it. If Arabs were thinking logically, then they would have deduced that their boycott of Danish goods is ridiculous given that Denmark probably exports more stuff that the whole club of Arab countries combined, if one discounts fossil fuels. But Denmark is part of the West, and its flag a representation of the crucifix. Torching its embassies and canceling trade contracts provide an opportunity to show some flex yet in the Muslim spiritual muscle.

"Furthermore, radicalism is being actively bankrolled, and its message disseminated, by advancing technology. Today, with chat rooms and text messaging, mobs can be coordinated and incited to riot after watching inflammatory images on Saudi-owned satellite channels. Hamas and Hezbollah, flush with Iranian petrodollars, can build clinics and schools, while American and European taxpayer money arriving as aid disappears into corrupt pockets. Secular democrats counseling moderation and taking a hard look at the wretched state of affairs - the potholes in the streets and potbellies behind idle desks - are drowned out by cries of jihad propagated in part by autocratic regimes that put this battlecry to use in distracting the masses from their real problems."

The two Egyptian bloggers at Egyptian Sandmonkey and Freedom for Egyptians cannot be credited enough for introducing the Al Fagr factor into the cartoon war.

More here on Al Fagr's Adel Hamouda and Egypt's "new, emerging political climate that is the direct result of increasing domestic calls for democracy, change and reform." Blame it on Bush.
Posted 5:49 PM by Robert