Beloved "resistance" leader, fundamentalist "Khomeini Shia" cleric, the one who sanctions the butchery of Lebanese citizens because the killers support his militant honor, the esteemed by many but this blogger, the one and only wannabe deputy of the occulted Imam, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of God’s alleged party in Lebanon, has upped the ante against cartoons published in a country, which, had he not espoused an all-out Jihad, would have topped his immigration list.
Denmark, with all the cows and the milk and the sacred freedom to utter nonsense and print garbage, is now a threat to Muslims everywhere. A few badly drawn cartoons, offensive yes, but harmful no, sparked a flurry of condemnation unrivalled in the Islamic world. And Hizbullah’s contribution to this debate: murder them all.
If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so... I am sure there are millions of Muslims who are ready to give their lives to defend our prophet's honour and we have to be ready to do anything for that.
So counter the stereotype of a murderous and jihad-obessessed prophet with a call for Jihad and murder. And top it off by attacking freedom of expression in a foreign country.
We do not understand the rationale of the Danish authorities who refuse to apologize under the pretext of freedom of expression.
And who needs freedom of expression when you can have freedom of murder?
Who tells them that this freedom is absolute? OK, if someone decided to blow himself up himself somewhere in Norway or Denmark, then he is also free to do so.
Yes, of course Nasrallah does not understand freedom of expression and confuses it with the freedom to kill, for he inhabits a totally different intellectual universe. Did the Danish paper intend this for readers in countries where Islam is a dominant faith? I think not. Did the cartoonist intend to offend Islam? Of course he did. Could he have gotten away with a cartoon doubting the Holocaust or attacking the Jewish faith? Probably not. But Orientalism and prejudice aside, who is Nasrallah to sanction the murder of Danish, French and Norwegian citizens, who live under different laws? And where is it but in the laws of religious dictatorships that governments feel responsible for the artistic actions of its citizens? For only in oppressive countries such as Nasrallah's beloved Iran and Saudi Arabia, can governments can try people for drawing lines and contours.
One should thank the Danish artists for unwittingly thwarting the attempts by Islamic religious zealots to render Islam aniconic, where all representations of living beings are prohibited, albeit the ones that glorify the leader. But perhaps their greater contribution was in not understanding that Islam prohibits the depiction of prophets and other religious figures. Correction: Sunni Arab Islam, for Persian art has plenty of miniatures depicting the prophet and his cousin, Ali. Islam might not have religious icons, but with so many leaders, Imams and religious figures immortalized in pictures and drawings, I no longer understand why it is a sin to give religious figures a human face. If that is not the idol worship that allegedly is the basis for banning pictures, I don't know what is. I bet you Muslim artists will do a better job at depicting the prophet. But that is not the problem today.
The problem lies with the people who preach and pretend to defend Islam. It’s people like Nasrallah, and ideologies like Wahabism, that have made Islam the easy victim of bad foreign art. Some in our region think that the problems in Islam started when “Muslims” could not agree on who should succeed the prophet. Yet very few, except a few luminaries in the west who enjoy the freedom to critically study the origin and development of religions, know that Islam is as much man-made as Christianity and Judaism. The religion developed in the Middle East, not Saudi Arabia as tradition claims. It was influenced and shaped by non-Muslims and Muslims alike. Hundreds of years of intellectual oppression hid the important fact that many of the traditions, including the ones cited in banning figural representation, were written to construct a religion that suited the temporal authorities. What we have today is no different. There is no attempt whatsoever to encourage Ijtihad or scholarship in the religion. We have a few old traditions rehashed and sometimes redacted to suit extremist and reactionary forces within the countries that sponsor them. And the poor people take it and don’t question any of it. Orientalism and ignorance are fought with more ignorance, fundamentalism and orientalism-in-reverse.
And the result?
Yesterday it was a call to massacre innocents, Muslims and Christians, to "defend" Islam. Today, it’s the same call albeit to terrorize the citizens of other nations, who have arguably supported the “Arab cause” more than most so-called Muslims. And it’s all done in the name of a construct that is being marketed as more than a religion, but that is being denied the opportunity to adapt and evolve. Result: more oppression and a death force that touches us all.
