Since nobody reads me either, we can just go on talking to each other. I hope so. A while ago the composer David Rakowski set some poems of mine to music & we joked that by combining the audience of contemporary poetry with the audience for contemporary music we had effectively eliminated any possibility of having an audience at all. Sometimes that’s how I feel about blogging. Eventually, though, the songs got performed & recorded & there may even be a CD one of these days. So, you never know. Keep blogging. I’ll keep reading you.

Last word: I’ll mention Irshad Manji once more, and would ask anyone who reads this to explore her site. And if you’re so inclined, take a listen to her MP3 message, where she argues that to promote tolerance, the Muslim community has to confront intolerance. From the MP3: “There’s a toxic alchemy of duplicity and complacency among Muslims today, including those of us [Muslims] in the West. The way to promote tolerance is to actively tackle the intolerance that’s percolating in our own ranks.” You can’t have it all ways — attack lame cartoons in the west, torch foreign embassies, and teach the destruction of Israel and hatred of Jews to the young people in your madrassahs, while simultaneously thumping the Koran as a gospel of peace and tolerance. “Toxic alchemy of duplicity and complacency,” no kidding.

What’s not to get emotional about, Joe? This is like watching cannibalism.

I’m extremely depressed by all this, and by some of the blogs I’ve read, including Shelley’s. I guess I should be glad that no one reads mine, because that way I can just try to let this die a quiet death and tink happy tawts instead, take my dog for a walk and enjoy the sun that finally came out, help my kids with their work, try to figure out how to get a job/ make some money, and stop blogging. It’s certainly an utterly useless activity, sort of like folding the napkins at the cannibals feast, when fundamentalist imams in madrassahs keep preaching the “secret protocols of zion” and similar garbage as “fact” while the west continues to accord them freedom of speech as it self-censors itself into the soup du jour. Pass the fork, I think it’s done…

Yule, thanks for this post. My reaction was more emotional than informational.

What’s so depressing, if you think about it in the paranoid way I’m suggesting, is that the publication of the cartoons by a Danish paper of rightwing persuasion starts to make sense, too. You get the rightwingers upping the ante so that — as the fight escalates into the “popular” discourse — it becomes more and more “inevitable” that governments need to “step in” to “protect” their citizens.

Of course I’m of the perhaps unsavoury opinion that the citizens in question are a bunch of dumb-shits. What I mean is that the issue of the cartoons has devolved into a fight between stupid people, the ones with double-digit IQs. Whether it’s the lumpenfundamentalists of the islamofascist bent or the morons in the west who are mouthing mealysyllabic pieties about how we shouldn’t “offend” anyone… You only have to read the Guardian’s blog (someone named Bell, I believe) and check the comments to despair entirely of all humankind. You can read the westerners, in defence of fundamentalists’ outrage, arguing that the cartoons in question are comparable to Nazi Third Reich anti-semitic propaganda cartoons, for example, and you have to ask yourself: have we collectively no sense at all? They’re totally incomparable on several fronts (something I might write something longer about sometime). Or you read the same westerners arguing that the prophet’s supporters have a right to be offended — yet these offended ones base their offendedness on the “fact” that the prophet is personally offended (and how would they know this?), and that he (this guy who founded a supposedly peaceful religion, right?) would be totally d’accord with riots and assaults on other people in his name. Hello?

It’s like a giant slug-fest between the terminally retarded, for chrissakes!

For a completely different reaction to “offensive” cartooning, sparked by a Tom Toles cartoon and the US military reaction to it, see this Washington Post article:

In a protest with an unusual number of high-level signatures, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and each of its five members have fired off a letter assailing a Washington Post cartoon as “beyond tasteless.”

The cartoon in question shows a quadruple amputee in an army hospital bed, with “Dr. Rumsfeld” attending. He tells the patient, “I’m listing your condition as battle-hardened.”
The Post’s editorial page editor said:

Fred Hiatt, The Post’s editorial page editor, said he doesn’t “censor Tom” and that “a cartoonist works best if he or she doesn’t feel there’s someone breathing over their shoulder. He’s an independent actor, like our columnists.” Hiatt said he makes comments on drafts of cartoons but that Toles is free to ignore them.

Tom Toles, the artist who created the cartoon, noted:

“It is the nature of cartooning that someone can read an analogy a cartoon uses to mean things other than what was intended,” Toles said. “The only way to avoid that problem is to draw cartoons that have no impact.”

That’s an intelligent comment.

So much other stuff is bullshit. If a person is using their brain, I don’t care what their religion is. I admit that stupid people drive me up the wall, though.

Here, I’ve referred to her before, but I’ll close with a review about Irshad Manji, the wonderful lipstick lesbian and muslim refusenik (she is a believing, practicing Muslim):

…Manji has become a key Muslim voice on the world stage, striving to explore a culture and civilization whose inward collapse has given rise to a militant creed at war with the modern world. Along with her book, commentaries appearing in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, the National Post, The Globe and Mail and elsewhere have left fundamentalist Muslims furious.

Manji’s book is partly polemics and partly a frank effort to describe the Muslim faith she was born into. Having journeyed through the culture shaped by that faith, she has acquired insights into the Islamic world that only an insider could possess. She knows instinctively and by experience the plight of Muslim women within a traditional culture that often tends toward misogyny. As someone who came of age in Canada — her parents were compelled to migrate from Uganda, then under the control of notorious despot Idi Amin — Manji is very much the face of the new Canada as well.

(…)

A public intellectual, in my view, is one who walks into the sound and fury of contemporary discord, stakes out his or her turf, and engages opponents by putting forward informed and well-reasoned arguments. It requires stamina, a love of learning, a gift for elegant writing, wit, intelligence and, above all, courage.

Manji has ably demonstrated those attributes. But it is her courage, in particular, that distinguishes her from her peers. [More...]

More like this, please…