Free South Park Prophet Now!

Thanks, Joe. Kudzu was a great comic strip. I’d bet God / Allah (they are the same) would need a sense of humor to put up with us. Besides, if He indeed created the universe with its millions of galaxies, what the hell does one cartoon matter?
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OT, Joe, but I hope you and Amy do an upcoming The Call™ for Adam. Also, thanks for removing some of the offending QH / Obamawhatever comments at your last post. However, can the IT folks reset comments so that the removed ones’ locations stay in place – with a “comment deleted” inserted – and the valid (or at least less offensive) sub-comments stay where they are too? That thread is now hard to follow, but those remarks deserved to go away. Thanks.

Ross Douthat’s column would have been even more important if it were true. While I agree that there should be no limit on who we are allowed to ridicule, to suggest that Islam is unique in that regard is just flat out wrong. Just today CNN was airing a segment on the apologies being issued to the Vatican by the British government for joking about the Pope.

Douthat is right that this censorship is bad. (It is also extremely silly, as the “threat,” such as it was, came from a tiny group somewhere in NYC).
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Douthat is wrong that Islam get special rules, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out today (won’t include link b/c it sends me into moderation, you can find him at Salon):

Sarah Palin recently defended the Rev. Franklin Graham’s statement that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion.” That barely caused a ripple of controversy. Imagine if a leading political figure had said anything remotely similar about Christianity or Judaism. … Ross Douthat previously cited with approval Jonah Goldberg’s explicit advocacy of right-wing censorship (h/t sysprog). When Douthat starts speaking out against censorship of ideas he hates, rather than when it comes from the religions he dislikes, he’ll have credibility as what he pretends today to be: a crusader for free expression. Until then, it’s clear that he’s interested in little else other than wrapping himself in the banner of free expression as a means of advancing his sectarian conflicts.

“I believe in a God of Laughter.”
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So…the caption to this picture should be: “Pull my finger.”..?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel

I think there’s something to be said for the expression, “God is a comedian, playing for an audience too afraid to laugh”.

I’m going to try the Greenwald link that Elvis said put him into moderation because I agree with the whole column.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/26/douthat

Is it a question of free speech or of good judgement or of how offensive is too offensive, even for South Park?

Actually, I haven’t watched the cartoon and I’m confident that there are noisy muslims who would get their backs up over it even if it were nothing.

But as a matter of general principal, I first point out that the *government* did not censor the cartoon, so it’s not a first ammendment issue, and …

I secondly point out that muslims are not exactly as “empowered” in this society as christians are, and the difference between making fun of Christianity and making of fun of Islam may be something like the difference between using the word “honky” and using the a certain ethnic slur against african-americans that would surely get my post censored

At Tuned In, Poniewozik highlights Jon Stewart’s take on the issue.

http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2010/04/23/the-daily-show-defends-south-park/#comments

But I seriously doubt that they’re apologizing for the same reason that Comedy Central knuckled under. Say what you want about the Vatican/Catholic Church (and, lately, just about everyone has), no one is really worried that Benedict is going to issue a fatwa or that a bunch of extremist nuns are going to strap explosives to their bodies and blow up whoever has offended them.
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There’s a difference between politicians deciding, “Oh, maybe that was a bit impolitic, maybe we should apologize,” and network executives whimpering, “OMG, they’re gonna kill us! They’re gonna kill us!”
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There’s nothing wrong with apologizing. The problem comes when we’re too afraid to say anything worth apologizing for.

The day I want to hear what Ross Douchehat has to say…

And I’ll 2nd or 3rd GG’s column. In response to some of his comments, he added this update, which is the most interesting angle IMO:

“Several people are insisting that the problem of violence and threats by Muslims is far greater than, and thus not comparable to, those posed by Christians and Jews. This is just the same form of triabalistic, my-side-is-always-better blindness afflicting Douthat. Who could possibly look at the U.S. and conclude that brutal, inhumane, politically-motivated, designed-to-intimidate violence is a particular problem among Muslims, or that Muslims receive special, unfairly favorable treatment as a result of their intimidation? Do you mean except for the tens of thousands of Muslims whom the U.S. has imprisoned without charges for years, and the hundreds of thousands our wars and invasions and bombings have killed this decade alone, and the ones from around the world subjected to racial and ethnic profiling, and the ones we’ve tortured and shot up at checkpoints and are targeting for state-sponsored assassination?”

The Danish cartoon controversy, South Park etc. generate wonderful opportunities for the western world to excuse their rapacious, murderous history in West Asia.

From the article:

It looks like Ross Douthat picked the wrong month to try to pretend that threat-induced censorship is a uniquely Islamic practice.

Yup.