Everybody Loves Ray ... Ramadan!

Since the hype over the infamous Danish cartoons has reached fever pitch, and since the uber left-wing Guardian newspaper refused to run my letter, I guess I'll wade into the cow flops ... and it's waist deep at this point.

At first, I was incensed like every other free speech lovin' Westerner for these fundamentalist nut jobs' over reaction (when haven't they over reacted?) to the cartoons that a newspaper in Denmark ran ... right before a fatwa was issued on everybody from the receptionist to the janitor.

Afterwards, I did entertain a Conspiracy Theory: what if the CIA, err some agency run by the NeoCons, deliberately manipulated an obscure newspaper in an obscure European country to run these caricatures so the ol' imams would flip out, make a scene and thus obscure any potential REAL controversies here at home like ... oh ... engaging in illegal wiretapping of the American people? But then I thought, naw, the NeoCons just aren't that smart.

There are holes so big in even moderate Moslem's arguments against running the cartoons again, I could drive a truck through them. First of all, the Holocaust was a historical fact, an event involving millions of people that happened during a world war that involved even more people, not some vague iconic figurehead of a religion. Poking fun at it is like trying to poke fun at an encyclopedia. Just watch Hogan's Heroes and spare us the painfully bad joke. And pedophilia is a crime, a felony, in the U.S. and most other Western countries. So stop beating those dead horses, they're not going to get up and run around the debate track. And please, pull out your Arabic-English dictionary and look up these words: analogy and satire.

Second, and this point was raised by freakin' Ann Coulter no less! Wasn't Mohammed's likeness portrayed in wall tapestries, ashtrays, hookahs, etc. for centuries? Here we have the prophet ascending to heaven, here we have the prophet riding his camel, etc. I believe Turkey is full of religious artwork showing the prophet doing holy, prophet-y things. So fucking what?

Thirdly, I'm 40 and I literally GREW UP watching enraged Moslems burn American and Israeli flags on TV. Every single president we've had for the last 40 years has been burned in effigy somewhere in the Middle East. And I'm not just talking about the current fucktard, I'm talking waaay back when Jimmy Carter was in Egypt practically on his hands and knees trying to get Sadat and Begin to sign that peace treaty. When you burn the flag of any country, you're insulting everyone in that country. You don't just insult Pres. Dubya when you burn the American flag, you insult all 280 million of us including liberal anti-war activists like myself. So given that, where's our apology, Islam? Huh? From now on, leave the flag burning up to the dissenters of their respective country's because what teenage Moslem boys do with flags in front of foreign photographers is now so incredibly passe and trite. Something about fundamentalist Islam seems like an eternal re-run of a really bad 70's TV show.

Another thing that's amazed me about Islam is the burning need (not a pun) to hijack every other debate for their own. Millions of Americans -- and we're a very diverse bunch -- have come together to oppose the war in Iraq and the current presidency. Yet the last anti-war/anti-Bush rally I attended was predictably overrun by a shrieking hippie lady screaming for an end to the "Zionist Israeli occupation" and a "recognition of Palestinian rights." That's just great ... and that's a rally for another day in another place. I think Israeli troops should stop "occupying" those trashy suburbs that look like Tempe, Arizona too. But I was there to wave signs and banners protesting Bush, not some other president in some country far away where I have no voting rights and I can't even apply for food stamps.

Finally, when I read in the Stranger's forum that the pernicious North African Moslem cab drivers of Seattle were diligently swiping copies of the Stranger out of newsstands, I got pissed off all over again. I've had it with these rude, backward, grasping, misogynistic, homophobic, racist fuckwits! Gawd!


-- Mz M.


This cartoon, is NOT one of the contested cartoons, and because it's satire is dead on it's clear the imams and mullahs are the butt of the joke, not some long-dead religious leader.