France Was Right (!): Suck It Up, Mohammad

It's easy to pick on the French. For a country that claims to be a European power and an modern industrialized nation, they sure do get their asses kicked on the military and economic battlefield on a non-stop basis. Don't get me wrong: the one time I went to France, (admittedly just Paris), I loved it. Loved the way they live, loved the people, and -- do I need to say it? -- I loved the food.

But I hate French politics. I hate that they've let unions get so incredibly powerful and their hypocrical foreign policy. But this time, they -- along with just about every other Western European country -- have it right.

The firestorm basically involved a Dutch newspaper that in September published a series of satirical editorial cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed. I haven't seen them, but evidently one of them has the Prophet wearing a head wrap that's really a bomb, and one of them has the holy one telling Allah that, "We're starting to run low on virgins in Paradise [for suicide bombers]." Depictions of Mohammed are generally considered in very bad taste in the Islamic religion, and making a joke out of him is evidently taboo. Fair enough.

As detailed by the Christian Science Monitor and the BBC, the cartoons led to widespread demand from Islamic groups -- governmental and non-governmental, militant and non-militant -- that the Dutch government apologize and shut down the paper. Of course, the Dutch government's explanation that they don't run the newspaper and therefore cannot shut it down or penalize it for published content has been ignored, and as a result, Dutch interests in the Middle East, along with the paper's business offices, have been under threat: bomb threats, etc. etc.

The furor had died down until a number of major European papers in France, Germany and Spain decided to make a statement in support of their journalistic brethren by republishing the cartoons. The point, of course, is that in a free society, everyone and everything is fair game for criticism, lampooning and satire. Germany's Die Welt newspaper even went so far as to point out that Muslim demands for "respect" of their religious beliefs are extremely hypocritical given the fact that no-one in the Muslim world seemed to mind when a Syrian TV program that recently published a cartoon that depicted a rabbi engaging in cannibalism. Die Welt also pointed out that respecting the beliefs of Muslims does not mean one has to obey its edicts. For instance, though I have respect for the former greatness of Islamic civilization and many of its tenets, there ain't no way I'm ever giving up the consumption of pork products. To quote Die Welt, we all have the right to blaspheme.

So to God, Buddha, Shiva, Yaweh, and Mohammad: Fuck you, and the donkeys you just rim-jobbed too.