I Don't Get It

Really. Honestly, I don’t get it.

Chalk it up to my ethnocentricity but I just don’t get what all of the hubbub is about. Okay, the cartoon is offensive, there’s no doubt about it, but, people are rioting about it. Heh? It’s a political cartoon. Its purpose is to annoy somebody somewhere, right? Now newspapers and television news reports won’t even show it, not even so we can decide for ourselves if its offensive or merely inane. Ug.

And there is talk of self-censorship on the part of political cartoonists and their editors. Censorship. Really. Over a cartoon.

I asked someone today what the big deal is here and they told me, “Extremists are stupid. Lets play some Katamari.” Now, this was from one of the most liberal people I know and, try as I might, I couldn’t come up with reasonable counter-argument. Extremists ARE stupid and it seems to me that religious extremists are reaching the top rung on the anti-Mensa ladder. Where the hell is the restraint? The understanding? The tolerance? Why is it that the only time I ever hear about the Islamic community is when some 12-year-old girl gets beaten to death for not wearing enough clothes? Or in conjunction with radical/terrorist activity of some sort? Sure, it’s easy to knee-jerk to the far right and blame the liberal-bias media or promenade to the far left and blame, well, the mainstream media, but that’s not solely where I get my news. Like many of you, I get my news from many different sources, left, right and centrist and the results are nearly always the same: some journalist telling me about how Islam is a religion of peace and the Quran preaches tolerance and how some idiot walked into an internet café and blew him or herself up. Because an Imam told him to. Now there is a 30K dollar bounty on people connected with this set of cartoons. Great, now the SAS has to go put fresh paint and carpet in Salman Rushdie’s old place. And, btw, where is this level of moral outrage when it comes to horrific prisoner abuse?

Now, again with my ethnocentricity (or theocentricity) but to my mind this is like a local bishop telling me to go kill a bunch of folks because a political satirist made a joke about choir-boy-groping priests.

"choir-boy-groping priests..."

So I don’t get it. Why not just boycotting the cable channel that aired the show containing the remark? And what's the contrition like for missing Bill Maher and accidentally hitting Ann Coulter? (Bless me father for I have missed my mark…) So, I’m trying to get it and I’m trying to be open-minded although I only have my limited frame of reference to try to make sense of things.

But I may have a solution, or a partial solution. They (we) need a spokesman. They (we) need the equivalent of Martin Luther King, Jr. elucidating from the rooftops that the gun-toting, anti-Semitic, anti-west jihadists do NOT represent them. Loudly. Forcefully and with conviction to any idiot with a camera. *sigh* Where are you Rev. Mohammed Luther King-Ali Jr.? We need your help.

I have always asserted that there will eventually be a karmic realigning of sorts, a snapping back to purpose, if you will. Call it ‘coming down off our collective sensationalistic-reactionary purple haze’ or even checking in with our common sense on a global scale. But it seems like it’s a long time in coming if it’s coming at all and I’m starting to despair.