Sunday, February 05, 2006
MEDIA TOLD
Australians have received their orders:
A senior Islamic cleric has called on Australia’s media not to publish the cartoons which have sparked riots across the Muslim world.
Sheik Fehmi El-Imam, the general secretary of the Board of Imams of Victoria, warned reprinting the cartoons here could “disturb people who can do things that we don’t want them to do”.
Oh, I doubt it. Cartoons mocking various religions have been previously published in Australia thousands of times, and nobody went nuts. Why would things be different now?
"In some parts of the world there is rioting against the Danish and the Dutch, we don’t want that in Australia,” the sheik said today.
No, we don’t. So behave yourselves.
"Unfortunately, New Zealand has (published the cartoons) ... I’m trying to avoid, to put far away, any possibility of disturbing the peace in Australia."
Odd that this concern over maintaining the peace doesn’t limit Muslim commentary on other religions or communities. The Islamic Bookstore in Lakemba, for example, sells vicious anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as various anti-Christian titles (Crucifixion – or Cruci-FICTION?). Sheik Khalid Yasin, a regular guest lecturer in Australia, declared that “there’s no such thing as a Muslim having a non-Muslim friend” and denounced modern clothes as the work of “faggots, homosexuals and lesbians”; Christians, he said, deliberately infected Africans with AIDS. Yasin wouldn’t merely draw cartoons of homosexuals—he’d have them put to death in accordance with Koranic law. One Imam told Australian students that Jews put poison in bananas. Local Iraqis voting in their country’s elections were shot at and otherwise intimidated by Islamic extremists whose banners announced: “You vote, you die.” These friends of free speech were also observed photographing those who dared to vote. Sheikh Feiz Muhammad told a supportive Bankstown crowd last year that women deserve to be raped if they wore “satanical” garments, including anything “strapless, backless, [or] sleeveless”, and also “mini-skirts [and] tight jeans.”
All of this is far more hateful and moronic than those twelve Danish cartoons, not one of which depicts the Prophet eating babies, poisoning fruit, or infecting Africans with AIDS. Far from being against hate-speech, many Muslim spokesmen seem to be aggressively for it; until, of course, someone contemplates publishing harmless drawings of an old beardy guy. At that point Sheik Fehmi El-Imam warns that we risk “disturbing the peace”.
Warning politely declined, Sheik:
UPDATE. Michelle Malkin maintains a list of MoToon posters (add the WogBlogger). And The Age—sensitive as ever—runs a picture gallery of reactions to the cartoons ... but won’t run the cartoons themselves.