Comic Depictions of Mohammed: Knowing When to Hold and When to Fold

posted at 1:56 pm on April 24, 2010 by Howard Portnoy
[ Terrorist Attacks ]   

Did you hear the latest knee-slapper about Moses? Actually, I don’t have a joke about Moses to share, though if I did and chose to, I wouldn’t need to go into hiding. If the joke were sufficiently tasteless or insulting, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League might issue a statement. Beyond that I know of no organized source or form of ritual retribution I would summarily face for my sacrilege. I wouldn’t need to live in mortal fear that some rabbi would assign a price to my head, instructing his congregants to hunt me down, machete in hand. That is because in my religion—and I suspect in yours—that just isn’t how things are done.

It’s not how they should be done in any religion, but sadly that just isn’t the world we live in.

Much has been written in recent days on the pickle “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone put themselves in by depicting (or rather not depicting by dressing him in a bear costume) the prophet Mohammed in an episode of their popular cartoon series. By now, the absurdly over-the-top reaction of a New York-based jihadist group has been too ubiquitously documented to require reprise here.

Much of what I’ve seen in commentaries adopts the same point of view as an editorial in today’s New York Post titled “Cowardly Central.” The bottom line of the editorial is summed up in a single, closing sentence: “And until the West decides—culturally and collectively—not to take it any longer, it’s only going to get worse.”

The general point is hard to dispute. Behind it is the attitude—in a very real sense it was a warning—that we Americans conveyed in the days and weeks after 9/11 by flying the American flag and displaying posters showing Old Glory and carrying the legend “These colors don’t run.”

But there is an important distinction between that situation and this one. It is one thing to stand tall and hang tough as a nation. It is quite another to do the same when you as an individual have been singled out and have a bounty on your head.

Before you exception me your exceptions, understand: I agree with the general tenet that if you give the islamist cretins an inch, they’ll take a mile, and that we should not tolerate their threats, which are little more in the end than thinly veiled excuses to kill more of us “non-believers.” They certainly needed no provocation to wantonly murder 3,000 innocent Americans on 9/11, and we now know from another headline this morning that they will keep on trying with every last breath in their being.

That eventuality—a day when the last of these monstrous miscreants takes his last breath—is something to be devoutly wished for. But until it arrives, we need to do what it takes to survive—both en masse and as individuals. If that means we resist depicting their prophet, so be it. It’s a small sacrifice to make it if means living to fight another day.

It is a truism of survival that under threatening circumstances it is important first and foremost to keep you head. At this critical juncture in the lives of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, let us all pray that they are able to keep theirs.

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