Friday, February 17, 2006

Priorities

I am the last person to criticize Muslims for being pissed about the Mohammad cartoons, but this is getting ridiculous:

A Pakistani Muslim cleric and his followers have offered a $1m bounty to anyone who kills the Danish cartoonists who drew caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed .


Ok let's ignore the fact that murder for hire is wrong, we can all hopefully agree on that.

Pakistan is a poor country - instead of spending a million dollars to kill people who are guilty of, at worst, being assholes, try spending that money to feed, educate and heal the people, that as a cleric, I hope he feels some responsibility for.

"If the West can place a bounty on Osama bin Laden and Zawahri we can also announce reward for killing the man who has caused this sacrilege of the holy Prophet," he said.


Yeah, killing thousands of people and drawing cartoons - about the same.

The people that drew and published the offensive cartoons were dumb, racist idiots. They have to live with their petty hatred and fears. But besides the fact that people like this cleric turn them into victimized heroes, they also continue to stigmatize themselves and justify the very reason the cartoons were offensive to non-Muslims. That is, I don't think non-Muslims could care less about whether or not Mohammad was depicted (I certainly don't), I was just offended by the negative generalization of a race or a religion, in this case in the form of the bomb/turban.

Besides the defamation to your own character and people, not only are stunts like this taking valuable resources away from actually doing something useful, it just helps increase the poverty because what western or asian business would want to do business in a place like this?

Given the Musharraf government's crackdown on radicalism, this would be a splendid opportunity to show the clerics that making international death threats is not acceptable behavior.

Do you want your country to be perceived like this or like this. Decide yourselves - don't let Danish cartoonists decide for you.

2 comments:

Rayhana said...

there is a reason why the muslims are outraged. and depicting the prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) with bombs as a turban is only one of them. it shows ignorance. and mere stupidity. not freedom.

i agree with you, that would be OTT.
big time.

it saddens me to read things of this sort.

however, the reactions of some people, as well as the 'selected' news of the reactions of some people that we see on tv - are really not what Islam teaches.

there are many, many muslims who are upset and outraged - but do not react in the ways we see on tv and read in the papers..

CNK said...

Lisa, I agree, western media only really shows Arabs/Muslims/non-white europeans when they are either 1. blowing something up or 2. dying in some sort of natural disaster.

They will never report on 1. legitimate grievances 2. appropriate and responsible resolution of the greivances or 3. them dying as a result of our bombs/D.U./sanctions.

Chomsky covers our media's advsersity to national self-criticsm in most of his writings.