Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Cartoons of Mohammed Were Published As a Stunt Intended to Provoke

The cartoons "ran in a newspaper that is repeatedly described as right-leaning, with ties to neocons. ... Most telling may be the cartoon in which a figure stands in front of a blackboard with Arabic writing, translated in the caption: “Jyllands-Posten’s journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.” In another, a Western man in a turban — most likely the cartoonist — holds up a crude stick figure drawing, as an orange with the label “P.R. stunt” lands on his head. ... the meaning of both these cartoons is clear — this was a deliberately provocative stunt, and the newspaper knew it." - Tom Tomorrow See archive of this article here

Would this newspaper be this disrespectful to Christians as it had been to Muslims? What we do know is that this same newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, refused to print satirical cartoons depicting Jesus Christ giving the reason that they would "cause an outrage":

"On Saturday, Politiken printed a series of caricatures of Jesus on its editorial page. Next to them, the paper reprinted an e-mail exchange from April 2003 in which a leading Jyllands-Posten editor rejected publication of satirical cartoons depicting Jesus Christ. His reasoning? "I don't think the readers of Jyllands-Posten would be pleased with the drawings. I think they would cause an outrage. That's why I won't use them."" - Jyllands-Posten Rejected Jesus Satire - linked on http://thismodernworld.com/2679
http://web.archive.org

""Agents of certain persuasion" are behind the egregious affront to Islam in order to provoke Muslims, Professor Mikael Rothstein of the University of Copenhagen told the BBC. The key "agent" is Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of JP (Jyllands-Posten), who commissioned cartoonists to produce the blasphemous images and then published them in Denmark's leading morning paper last September." - EUROPEAN MEDIA PROVOKES MUSLIMS TO INFLAME ZIONIST "CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS"

"Was the reaction overwrought? Absolutely. Was it predictable? Absolutely. Was it an intentional scheme to provoke Arab anger, and thereby engender Western disgust with the Muslim world? The involvement of Pipes and Rose argues that that is exactly what happened.
Cartoons and Provocation

Archive of article
Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper. In all of the Lexis-Nexis database of stories from the American media on the Mohammed cartoons, there is absolutely no mention of the fact that Rose is a close confederate of arch-Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Indeed, there is almost no context at all about Rose’s newspaper. Only a brief mention in the Washington Post gave a hint at a fact desperately needed to understand the situation. The Post described the affair as “a calculated insult … by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem.”

How bad is Pipes? He wants the utter military obliteration of the Palestinians; indeed, from the Muslim world ... Pipes’ frequent outbursts of racism – designed to toss gasoline on the neo-cons’ lust for a wholesale conflict of cultures – earned him a Bush nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank. Rose came to America to commune with Pipes in 2004, and it was after that meeting the cartoon gambit materialized." - More cartoon context

See archive of the article here

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