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February 08, 2006
cartoons and violence
steve bell/Guardian
As the world burns from the Muslim outrage over the racist Danish and their infuriating depictions of Mohammad, a darker conspiracy begins to emerge.
Keen to "globalize" the crisis to pressure the Danish government, Mr. Abu-Laban and his colleagues decided to send delegations to the Middle East. They prepared a dossier to distribute during the travels. The document, which exceeded 30 pages, featured copies of the published cartoons and Arabic media reports about the controversy. It also contained a group of highly offensive pictures that had never been published by the newspaper, including a photograph of a man dressed as a pig, with the caption: "this is the real picture of Muhammad." (from today's WSJ)
Now, last week on BoingBoing, there was a post that included a link to the 12 offensive cartoons, and a link to a gallery that included the picture described above AND the other two super-offensive images that make up the 15. (here is another mirror link to that gallery)
Again, the media has done a giant disservice to this story - most of the mainstream media coverage doesn't even mention the other images and thus it was tempting to write them off as more right wing propoganda - even my Danish fren Pejk (who explained his country's right wing stupidity to me last Saturday night in Red Hook) wasn't aware of these images.
I hope this blows over without any cartoonists being harmed (although some of the Danish ones are bad enough to justify a good scare for their authors)
update: Justin just sent me a link to this BBC article that also examines these other 3 images
Posted by bw at February 8, 2006 09:40 AM