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Two cartoons that illustrate the iconography of hate, and ask where the dividing line lies between the satirical and the offensive. One is from Julius Streicher's Nazi rag, Der Sturmer c1936, the other is from Charlie Hebdo. The only question left is, who has the biggest nose, the Jew or the Arab?
http://research.calvin.edu/german-pr...er/ds32-29.jpg
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/...nzgwecjmdg.png
One thing I will point out is that there is an important distinction between mocking someone's ethnic traits and satirizing a belief system, even if that doctrine is religious. Ridiculing ideas (such as the hypocrisy of threatening people for insinuating you aren't peaceful) should be fair game entirely.
But even if the cartoons are racist, that can never justify a violent response. If there are hate crime laws (personally I'm against their enactment), the authors can be taken to court. Someone can make their own cartoon. They can write an editorial stating how the cartoons go beyond some preconceived norm of decency. But people rightfully see the violence against cartoonists, even professional provocateurs, as actually threatening to one of the foundations of our civilization; the right to express oneself free of physical threat.
The point of re-printing the cartoons is not to say you would have printed them yourself had there been no threat, but that you stand in solidarity against any such threats once made.
Critique doesn't need to be disrespectful.
But if it is and it's inevitable some will be given the number of people with opinions to express, murdering the author is not the solution. Probably a good addendum to that.Quote:
Originally Posted by omnifarious
Its not supposed to get you killed either.Quote:
Originally Posted by omnifarious
The preliminary aim of satire is to make a joke of those who persist in a perceived error with the ultimate aim making it very uncool to subscribe to it. Satirizing big noses is a fail, because one cannot unsubscribe to the size of one's nose. Satire is only appropriately aimed if it's ultimate subject is an erroneous belief, an irrational fear, an unjust custom etc.
Good opinion piece
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...ocial_facebook
As we all know, Islam is a peaceful religion that we see examples of every day....:whistle:
It is curious that I posted two cartoons, one of which has since been deleted, or shall we way, censored?Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
The point I was making was that the drawings themselves perpetuate stereotypes of Jews and Arabs and that not only do I find that offensive, I also find it offensive that the implication in the cartoons -as Irvin's dirty cartoons also show- is that there is no difference between Muhammad as the founder of Islam, and the violent extremists who slaughter in his name, which puts Charlie Hebdo in the same camp as the neo-fascist movement in Britain, France and Germany which refuses to make any distinction between Islam as a theology and the perverse politics that is being used as a justification for any number of crimes.
That said, I do not recommend banning such cartoons, just as I am as appalled as everyone else at the destructive response the cartoons elicited, but I do believe that the Danish cartoons and the French ones are too close to the offensive to be 'merely satirical' and to think otherwise is naive. I wonder why it is that so many cartoons of Jesus do not present him as a Jew with thick lips, a big nose and cunning eyes, but as a European?
The Nazi cartoon with its resemblance to the Hebdo cartoon has been deleted, the cartoon of Muhammad remains -and has been added to by Irvin- and remains to foster precisely the hatred and ridicule that people want to express against Muslims, much as the Nazi's did against the Jews in the 1930s. Because a broader understanding of what Islam is, and might be, compared to what the violent extremists want is not for discussion. Is it any wonder that people with intelligence abandon HungAngels when it is so shamefully biased?
From Martin’s link
“A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique. Charlie Hebdo had been nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too—but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism. For some believers, the violence serves a will to absolute power in the name of God, which is a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as religion, religion as politics. “Allahu Akbar!” the killers shouted in the street outside Charlie Hebdo. They, at any rate, know what they’re about.”––George Packer The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders in http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...ocial_facebook .
It is often implied that Christians (for example) do not murder in the name of religion. However, they do. Just not as much as they use to and not with as little provocation as was once sufficient. In the U.S. the murder rate of obstetricians has reduced the number of family planning clinics that perform abortions to nearly zero in some States. But at least we’re not burning witches anymore, nor torturing heretics on the rack and mercifully murdering them when they say, “Uncle!” The atrocities and enhanced interrogations we now commit are in the name of politics and profit.
I do think the Packer’s article has this much right, “A religion is ... the living beliefs and practices of its adherents.” It is accordingly impossible to set aside Islam as a causative factor in the violence in Paris two days ago, or the ongoing violence in Syria, Iraq etc. But Islam does not sit within a vacuum, and that violence is a reaction not only to the satirical jabs of a few cartoonists but also the political upheaval wreaked upon the Islamic world by two centuries of exploitation by Western nations and their accompaniment of profiteers.
Did you know the war in Afghanistan ended yesterday? We still have missiles, jets and boots on the ground there. But we did lower and retire the Green NATO flag the flew above NATO headquarters there, and raised a different green NATO flag symbolizing our new “resolute support” for Afghanistan.
Those who travel in the MiddleEast and Northern Africa (I’ve only been to Morocco) note that the representation of people and animal forms in ancient religious art is infrequent. Depictions of Allah or the Prophet are rare. One might suspect this is because the Quran proscribes against idolatry––but such proscriptions in the Old Testament have not significantly discouraged Christians from making figurative representations of God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. One can certainly display artful figures that refer to the holy pantheon without falling into idolatrous worship.
(I might mention that no one knows what any member of this pantheon actually looked like, and so it’s impossible to create an actual image of God, or Jesus or the Virgin, or Allah or Mohammad for that matter. One can only scribble a few lines that REFER to God, Jesus, the Virgin etc. Pictorial references are not images. They can only do what “words” do; i.e. they can only refer. So if a pictorial reference to Mohammad is sacrilegious, than why aren’t all other scribbles that refer to Mohammad sacrilegious?)
In any case, the proscription against idolatry in the Quran doesn’t really explain the infrequency of representational forms in Islamic art. The prohibition against such forms is found in the Islamic Hadith. The reason for the proscription is rather cryptic, but it seems that artists should not endeavor to create living forms because such is the work of Allah, not man. On the day of reckoning the creators of such representational forms will be punished. They will be told, “Give life to what you have created.” Presumably they will forfeit their eternal life and bequeath it to the forms they have drawn, sculpted and carved. Their punishment already secure, I see no reason why Allah requires his fundamentalists to go about killing cartoonists.
But what about the blasphemy? According to Fareed Zakaria ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...3d5_story.html )there is no law in the Quran against blasphemy. The proscriptions against blasphemy are (according to Fareed) mostly to be found in the Old Testament. If that’s the case Christians and Jews should also be killing folk for blasphemous satire, not just Islamic fundamentalists.
Throughout the Middle Ages the Islamic world bloomed intellectually. It produced mathematicians, astronomers, philosophers and poets that rival the best the world has ever seen. Religious art was non-representational, but representational art thrived in non-religious contexts. While Christians were committing atrocities in the name of religion, Omar Khayyam was writing poetry, solving cubic equations, drinking wine and making love to beautiful women in the warm desert dunes of Persia.
A religion is the living beliefs and practices of it’s adherents. Those adherents change with time and place. What beliefs drop away, what practices grow in importance and which are lost only later to be revived depend on hard political circumstances. Religion is one of those things that can lie dormant and then rise up and bite you in the ass just when you thought things were going well––or not so well.
but they do live in the Middle Ages, just look at the laws that they follow, flogging and stoning people who think differently than them....:geek:
is it civilized if I may ask...?
Who lives in the Middle Ages? At least metaphorically, those that flog and stone do. Also those who capture and torture their captives with water boarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and forced feeding.
Flogging and stoning are the punishments demanded by the Old Testament for offending God's Law. How does a believer decide which of God's laws to follow? How does one pick and choose?
It's not so much the ancient religious laws that matter, but which ones the adherents choose to practice or not to practice. These choices are as much conditioned by the political forces (big oil, dictators, foreign powers, western culture) exercised upon the community of believers as by the dispositions of the believers themselves.
I do think there is something about the interconnections between Islam as it is practiced today and the modern world at large that is unstable. Everyone needs to work at extricating ourselves from this delicate balance, not just Muslims. Assimilation worked in the U.S. when it was inundated by waves of Italians, Germans, Poles and Irishmen. But the U.S. population then was composed mostly of Christians of European ancestry. Assimilation of Muslim North Africans into France is much more difficult...perhaps unlikely. Learning to live multiculturally (as opposed to the strategy of assimilation) is harder to do. It's probably preferable to building a wall, though Texans don't think so.
Islam is a cult
This is not a contest, so one bad act does not offset another. But there are hateful cartoons of Jews made in the Middle East on a weekly basis. In Iraq, the Shiite regime made a cartoon of satan having sex with a Jewish woman to spawn ISIS that was disseminated in their mainstream media, perhaps to riotous laughter. I happen to see these every week. Iran had a Holocaust cartoon contest to test the west' free speech standards. No deaths. Articles written. But no deaths.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
I tried to say in the other thread during the Gaza campaign that I was concerned that nine synagogues had been lit on fire by molotov cocktails presumably by disgruntled Muslim youths. The cartoon murderer here ended up killing three or four hostages at the end of his reign of terror at a Kosher market (probably just because he wanted to kill people near salted meats). On the list of grievances, I think people being raped and murdered and houses of worship being firebombed merits more concern than mean-spirited cartoons. And such cartoons don't merit concern only in proportion to how many people get killed in response to them. Yes, I don't like cartoons of people with large noses. A letter to the editor would have been a very nice gesture by the murderers.
I doubt anyone cares too much about my personal positions. But I am against the enactment of hate speech laws, not hate crime laws. I do believe in enhanced punishments for assaults based on race, sexual orientation, and religion. I just think punishing hateful speech is a bad idea....since it can be effectively countered through more speech.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
I'm disappointed that I didn't get to see the censored cartoon.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
But the censorship doesn't surprise me. As you note, there is some real bias here in the management of this site, and it begins and ends with the almighty $.
Jewish people don't have absolute control over what is posted on this board. I would have had no problem with a Der Sturmer cartoon being posted although it's irrelevant.Quote:
Originally Posted by Odelay
The problem is that even if the cartoons were bad, they don't justify violence. It doesn't justify all of the violence against cartoonists or grocery shoppers.
What a phony, disingenuous comment about being disappointed not to see the Der Sturmer cartoon. You can find them all over the web. You're certainly not going to get attacked for looking at them.
I'm tempted to post a Der Sturmer cartoon as well as a couple dozen cartoons from the Middle Eastern press depicting Jews. Yes, protecting the almighty dollar:loser:
The problem with the argument that Muslims are being treated like Jews of the 1930s is that it is actually Jewish people in France who have been subjected to record setting violence this year. Were you gentlemen to pay attention, you’d have known that there has been an explosion of hate crimes in France. A woman being raped in front of her husband while the robbers mocked them for being Jewish. Now four people murdered in a Kosher market that nobody no matter how gullible could believe was random. Synagogues set ablaze. People using a gesture called a quenelle that looks like a reverse hitler salute which those who perform it claim is an anti-establishment gesture, but which is oddly always performed in front of synagogues and Jewish gravesites. People who are frightened to appear in public with yarmulkes. Jews are 1% of the population but are victims in 40% of the hate crimes in France.
Now, the kicker to all of this is that the attackers in an overwhelming majority of these cases are Muslim, who claim they are attacking the Jews based on religious and political grievances. So, I fail to see how the treatment of Muslims in France is approaching the treatment of Jews in the 1930s. I do see how anti-semitism in France is so out of control that Jewish people are leaving the country en masse based on targeted harassment, the perpetrators in a large majority of cases Muslim youths.
I have no doubt that Muslims are occasionally the butt of racist cartoons. I do expect that the hateful cartoons published about Jews in the Middle East are at least comparable. Isn't the main problem here the violent response? You don't need to go all the way back to Der Sturmer if you want to find hateful cartoons about Jewish people. Why should an insulting cartoon result in mass murder?
A sick, twisted, openly misogynistic death cult.Quote:
Originally Posted by cameron47
In France, both communities are under attack, and as for the analogy with the 1930s, Yuengling's post no 26 says it all, with a nostalgia for the Third Reich and the belief that maybe Hitler was right after all drawing a line under my involvement in this. My parent's generation, the one that fought for freedom is dying out, but it seems another generation is planning to re-open Auschwitz, but not as a museum. Enough!Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
You might be misinterpreting my disappointment. I would have wanted to see the 'toon within the context of Stavros' point. I know the internet is loaded with anti-semitic cartoons, but I am not interested in them outside of a larger point being made.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
Your later point seems to indicate that you disagree with my point about why the 'toon was censored from this site. Can I assume that your counterpoint is that it was removed because the owners/managers are sensitive to inflammatory anti-semitic content? If so, what do you think about some of the inflammatory content that the owners/managers let slide?
I agree about Yuengling's post. I reported it because it has no place in the discussion. I have no idea whether others did too. I did not report or complain about the Der Sturmer cartoon because I never saw it but would not have given that you were using it for a comparison.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Moderating I'm sure is an art and not a science. They got rid of Yuengling's post because it's just a bunch of fascist vomit, but we're not always going to agree. Actually I remember I exchanged a dozen posts with a poster named Benedict something in a thread called Israel Gone Fascist started by Odelay...I didn't report anything the guy said and management decided on their own they did not like the anti-semitism.
But I think you're wrong if you think the anger about the Mohamed cartoons is because it's a caricature of Middle Eastern ethnic features. The anger is based on dogma, the proscription against depicting the Prophet. That's the reason the violence has been so out of control. It is pure, unbridled religious fundamentalism. I have no intent to provoke or upset Muslims. But every group is going to have some people who say obnoxious things to them or about them.
I think I've clearly expressed that Muslims have not been especially targeted by cartoonists. But cartoonists have been especially targeted by extremist Muslims.
They let slide anti-semitic content as well. You never seem to object to it when it's there, but I can find it for you. I imagine they did not want third reich cartoons posted here. There is a particular stigma associated with them, because a genocide was committed right on the back of that. I disagree with the decision but I can understand why they'd be hesitant about allowing any Holocaust-era propaganda to be posted on their site.Quote:
Originally Posted by Odelay
They do the best they can. They seem to be very quick to remove anything associated with the Third Reich I've noticed. You act as though there's not a ton of anti-semitic content still on the site. I used the report button for the first time ever a week or two ago because I would generally prefer to debate with such people.Quote:
Originally Posted by Odelay
There are also a number of racist comments towards African-Americans. I've found myself arguing with these individuals (until a couple weeks ago my view was I'd prefer to just debate them; but sometimes they take a thread on a tangent). It's the internet, there are going to be nasty things said. I'd prefer generally not to see things removed unless they are disruptive but everyone will have a different opinion about it.
But yes, I disagree with your point about them being especially sensitive over anti-semitic content. Just as I disagreed with your argument in the thread about reporting on Israel that the violence spawned from the protests was not worrisome because it's not yet as bad as internment camps. Just as I disagreed with a bunch of other stuff you've said.
Interesting article that relates to the present discussion here: http://qz.com/324435/muslims-and-jew...or-each-other/
it does seem to me though that while both groups are targeted in France...acts of violence between the two minority groups themselves, mostly (or entirely) seem to go one way.
Violence is easier than sorting out how people with differing beliefs can live with each other––or is it?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-...to-the-attacks
It's a good cartoon... I actually disagree with a lot of his panels here...but he gets his point across in a terrific way.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
That looks like Robert Crumb's work ,he lives in rural France.
It does indeed.Quote:
Originally Posted by sukumvit boy
Now that you mention it, I remember reading that somewhere. Hmmm...but if it him, why sign it J. Sacco? New nom de plume or worried for his safety?Quote:
Originally Posted by sukumvit boy
Speaking of Crumb...he did an interview on the subject for the NY Observer (dated 1/10)...here it is:
http://observer.com/2015/01/legendar...acre-in-paris/
in it he mentions he did a cartoon for Liberation ..a french paper...as of my post, I don't think it's out yet, but here is an updated page from that paper that has some brilliant cartoons on the subject:
http://www.liberation.fr/societe/201...harlie_1176825
Thanks for the links, Fred. I love Crumb (he's the sanest person in his family...ever see the film "Crumb"?). Currently working through or other link with the help of Google Translate.
Why yes I have, just now...after I read your post, I looked it up on Netflix and they didn't have it so I rented it on Amazon (stupidly paying the extra buck to unnecessarily rent it in HD)...Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Very interesting portrait of a somewhat socially immature but brilliant illustrator. His whole family is nuts (well, we don't get to meet his two sisters who declined to be interviewed, to my disappointment...so I don't know about their mental health)...but he is, in fact, the sanest of three brothers.
I didn't watch the movie when it first came out because, even though I knew who he was, I never got into his art/Comix at the time because I couldn't really relate to them.
But he is exceptionally gifted artistically...as were his brothers and, from what I could see in the film, his son from a previous marriage.
He's a genius in what he does...but in watching this I realize, in combination with some experience with mental illness in my own family, what a tenuous grasp we sometimes have in keeping enough of just the right mental balance to be able to exist in society...or the 'outside world'.
It's a film well worth watching.
lol...sorry for the interlude, now back to the thread.
Got it. Thanks for the explanation. For the record, I read almost all of your posts because you make well reasoned arguments, even when I might disagree with them. I'm not sure my arguments always have as sound a reason behind them. I try.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
It doesn't read to me that J. Sacco is taking credit of the cartoon. He seems to be posting it, and most likely on behalf of Crumb. I too saw Crumb the documentary years ago. Quite interesting and funny.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish