No to Threats and Intimidation!!

Submitted by Aidan Maconachy (Canada), Feb 2, 2006 at 20:26

This act of firing the editor of Soir for publishing the Muhammad cartoons is a total cop out on the part of this French publisher (however I heard a rumor that he actually an Egyptian).

I am frankly outraged - not by the cartoons which are mild by any standard - but by the refusal of these publications to defend free expression. I guarantee you that if scandalous drawings of Christ had been circulating in the media and Soir had managed to get hold of them, they would have been trumpeting them on the front page.

What kind of double standard is this - that it is okay to attack and ridicule the symbols of Christianity, and even its founder, but Muhammad is given a "special exception licence"?

The fact that film maker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the street for attempting to address truths about the treatment of Islamic women, and that Salman Rushdie had a Fatwah placed on him for the crime of writing a novel with references to Muhammad ... should surely embolden european editors to take a stand on this issues in order to uphold our rights. The message from this surrender is - "threaten and intimidate us enough and we will aplogize and comply".

Recently Madame Tussaud's museum in London staged a Christmas display featuring a wax dummy of the soccer star David Beckham as Jesus and his wife Posh Spice as Mary. See what would happen if they had done the same with Muhammad and one of his wives.

These capitulations on an issue that is legal and a matter of artistic freedom - is basically saying that there is now a two-tiered level of respect for religion in europe. On tier one are the icons and sacred personalities of Islam who are out of bounds to satirists, cartoonists and even stand-up comediens. But second tiered Christianity is fair game - open to shots from any direction and any which way - even though there are millions of Christians around the world who equally incensed and "wounded" by such assaults on their faith.

The editors who pulled these cartoons are cowards and hypocrites. I might understand it if the cartoons were scatalogical, pornographic or gross in some patently obvious way. But they are well drawn, subtle and quite clever in their execution.

Recently in England a Muslim worker in Dudley Council succeeded in getting a ban placed on pigs in the office - I mean pig dolls, pig pictures of coffe mugs etc because he claimed they offended Islam.

It seems the dhimmification of europe is well under way.

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