Sadly, the grand poobahs at Facebook have caved into the Islamic Extremists: the main Everybody Draw Mohammed Day Facebook page has been “disappeared” in the last hour or so; clicking on it just brings you back to your main Facebook page.
Sad.
Edited 5/22 to add: Now back up again and, according to them, not Facebook’s doing.
Kurt Westergaard, creator of the Mohammed Bomb Turban image and Patient Zero of Islamist Cartoon Rage, says he approves of Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.
“The initiative must surely be understood as a manifestation of freedom of expression, where Muhammad and my drawing has become icons of this culture struggle. I always think it is excellent when it is touched by the debate. There is obviously a risk that it may provoke some of the dark forces which then inspired terror. But it is not so much to do, we must not let ourselves be cowed.”
(Hat Tip: Tundra Tabloids. )
In other Everybody Draw Mohammed Day news, http://www.drawmuhammadday.com/, a site that was very slow getting off the ground at all, seems to have completely disappeared. Hmmmm…
Today is Draw Mohammed Day! (If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ve probably figured that out already.) Just in case this is your first visit, you can find my own craptacular contribution here.
In addition to all the pages mentioned yesterday, I just like to give special thanks to Over the Hedge creators Michael Fry and T. Lewis for participating. It’s one thing when us yahoos out in the sticks do it (even those, like myself, who are quasi-semi-demi-famous), and quite another for those who are actually risking their livelihood to stand up for the First Amendment. Especially when so many others aren’t.
While looking around for comments on Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, I came across this post by one Kamran Haider. It offers quite a different Islamic take on the cartoon controversy than you usually read:
Every now and then someone throws a lit matchstick to the curtain covering our weaknesses and we start dancing around the fire to amuse the whole world….now when someone draws cartoons of the prophet, their idea is not to spread paganism but it is either to express resentment or plain hatred or apparently for the sake of free speech. Our way of reacting to this is normally, rioting, knocking down our own property and killing innocents.
Instead, I want to pose, some different questions to the muslim community. Lets just go back in history and ask ourselves, how did the prophet himself react when people in his time used all means to offend him (facebook didn’t exist back then but if you study history you will find out they used everything that they had at their expense)? What did he do when people threw garbage at him?
If the prophet was alive today and an old lady had thrown garbage at him, what would her fate be at the hands of angry mobs of ‘devout muslims’. Most probably they would storm her house and tear her into pieces. Wait a minute though…would the prophet let them do this? Since he chose to take care of her when she got sick instead of ‘getting offended’ then I am pretty sure he wouldn’t suggest rioting, burning down their own property in anger, killing innocents and mounting an irrational response.
I don’t agree with everything in the essay, but it’s certainly worth reading.
Just a reminder that tomorrow, May 20th, is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Sites participating in the event include:
Note that many of the images on those sites are NSFW.
A couple of them have already put up my craptacular contribution.
Some are wondering if this demonstration of First Amendment rights will have any influence on the real world. Given that the Pakistani government has blocked Facebook over the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day group there, I would say that it already has. If we allow ourselves to have the limits of our freedom of expressions set by the most extremist elements of global radical Islam, then the First Amendment is doomed.
So all those who oppose letting the First Amendment wither under the twin assaults of radical Islam and political correctness should get drawing!
I previously mentioned liberal outrage at the Arizona border control bill, despite 61% of the nation approving of the same bill. But liberals doubled-down on the charges of racism, with numerous left-leaning locales calling for boycotts. Hell, Obama even apologized to China (you know, the same China that killed 60-75 million of their own people) for Arizona trying to enforce the same laws his administration is unable (or unwilling) to enforce.
Result? 71% of Americans now support Arizona’s bill.
That’s some might fine politicking you’ve done there, Lou…
David Pryce-Jones
The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs
Harper & Row, 1989.
I had heard this was one of the best overviews of Arab culture, and I’ve been reading it off and on between other things. It’s enlightening and depressing. Pryce-Jones asserts that all Arab nations are mired in a power-challenging/money-favoring culture based largely on a shame-honor response. By his account (and he calls on an extensive array of sources to back up his arguments), Arab (and, to a lesser extent, Turkish, Berber and Persian) cultures have always been ruled by strong men succeeding in establishing themselves by force and ruling through violence and money-favoring to eliminate or control possible rivals. The powerful rule (not only for themselves, but for their clan and allied clans) and the weak obey. It reminds me of that line from Black Hawk Down: “In Somalia, killing is negotiation.” In his view, Islamofascism, socialism, communism, Baathism, Pan-Arabism and modernization have all had whatever ideas they originally espoused suborned to become just another avenue for power-challengers to intrigue against the current power-holder, and likewise an excuse for the power-holder to ruthlessly suppress and eliminate possible rivals. He says that all outsiders (Western as well was Soviet) have misread the intentions of various power-holders by taking them at their word rather than viewing their statements as mere excuses or pretexts for their actions, to be discarded as easily as an old shirt should the situation call for it. He also says that mercy, human rights, democracy, etc., are all viewed as signs of decadent weakness by those within power-challenging cultures. In some ways, his is a very compelling argument; in others, it’s such a totalizing worldview that just about any action can be explained in power-challenging terms, and a system that explains everything explains nothing. Still, it’s a fascinating book (including very interesting chapters on how Nazi propaganda took root in the middle east, and the Arab-Israeli conflicts), and an important part of the puzzle as to why the Middle East seems to remain stubbornly immune to “rational” solutions.
In celebration of Everyone Draw Mohammed Day, I’ve produced my own artistic contribution to the form. I’ve taken as my subject a particular historical even in the life of Mohammed, the Battle of Badr, in 624 AD, in which Mohammed first promised paradise to his followers in battle. The original was rendered in black ink on an 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet of laser printer paper. I considered digitally cleaning up mistakes, but thought that would detract from the overall “art brut” feel of the piece.
Below find a thumbnail of drawing. Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version.
In addition to (Wahabbist-defined) blasphemy, this work also commits the sin of resurrecting a two-decades stale Saturday Night Live catchphrase.
I think this drawing goes a long way to explain why I’m a writer rather than an artist…
Previous information on “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” can be found here and here.
Unless you’ve been on an extended off-Internet vacation the last few weeks, you’ve probably heard about Arizona’s enactment of the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” AKA Senate Bill 1070, AKA the Arizona Illegal Alien Bill. You can find the complete text of the law here. (At 16 pages, it’s relatively short as such things go, though the use of all capital letters throughout for the actual statute language (a sadly common practice) does tend to strain the eyes.) The bill is the result both of the federal government’s inability to control the illegal alien problem for several decades, as well as the Obama Administration’s apparent disinterest in even pretending to to care about border control issues.
Liberal reaction to the bill was as swift as it was predictable: They called everyone who supported it racists. (Note also the inevitable liberal politically correct speak in calling illegal aliens “undocumented citizens.” Oh they’re citizens, all right: citizens of Mexico. (And, in a few cases, points further south.)) And they’ve been calling supporters of the law racist pretty much non-stop pretty much ever since the bill was passed.
And what effect has all those accusations of racism had on the law itself? It’s more popular than ever. 61% of voters polled approve of it.
Not only that, a majority of Democrats say the bill shouldn’t be repealed until we see how well it works first.
If liberals intended to stigmatize those who support securing the border as ignorant racists, then the project has been a miserable failure. Just like their attempt to brand Tea Party supporters as racists was a miserable failure. Just like their attempt to smear opponents of ObamaCare as racists was a miserable failure.
In light of all this, one must come to one of the following conclusions:
A. A majority of the American people are racists.
B. Liberals have finally cried wolf so many times that no one believes them when they accuse political opponents of racism anymore.
Personally, I’m going with B.
All of which made me think up this joke:
Q: How many liberals does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They believe that if they call the light bulb a racist long enough, they’ll force the light bulb to change itself.
When I posted about making May 1st Victims of Communism Day, I was not at all surprised that some on the left would get their knickers into a knot over the very idea. However, I was surprised that one left winger took exception not only to the date, but the idea that communists had killed millions of people at all. It was rather like coming face-to-face with a flat-earther or a Holocaust denier; you know such people exist, but you never expect to run into them in polite society. I thought such thinking had disappeared even on the left except among such hardcore dead-ender communist apologists as CPUSA or the Spartacist League (and, of course, Internet trolls). The only question today is not “did the communists kill tens of millions of people,” but “precisely how many did they kill?”
Since historical awareness of the sheer vastness of communism’s legacy of genocide seems to have faded, now would be a good time to review the extensive historical record of communism’s crimes against humanity.
In Death by Government, R. J. Rummel estimates the total Soviet death toll at just under 62 million. You can see the breakdown here. That breakdown shows 11.4 million deaths under Collectivization, which would include the Ukrainian Famine, also known as the Holodomor.
In Robert Conquest’s definitive The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (based on hundreds of sources of information, including dozens of interviews with famine survivors), he puts the total for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization” period (including the Ukranian Famine, the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) at 14.5 million.
The Final Report of International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine produced by The Stockholm Institute in 1990 came up with a total of 7.5 million.
The Black Book of Communism came up with a smaller total of 4 million for the Holodomor, and 2 million for Dekulakization, as well as a total communist death toll of 94 million (smack dab in the middle of the 85-100 million death toll estimate in the summary), broken down as follows:
65 million in the People’s Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America
10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international communist movement and communist parties not in power.”
Rummel, by contrast, came up with the following estimates in Death By Government:
62.9 million in the Soviet Union
32.9 million in the PRC while in power, plus an additional 3.5 million killed by the communist Chinese before taking control
2 million in Cambodia
1.7 million in Vietnam
1.5 million post-WWII Poland
1 million in Tito’s Yugoslavia
plus a suspected 1.6 million in North Korea
If I added that up correctly, that comes out to 103.6 million people. (Rummel’s overall total for the 20th century includes murder and genocide carried out by non-communist regimes.)
In light of more recent scholarship, Rummel has adjusted his estimate of Mao’s victims upwards from 38,702,000 to 76,702,000. (Note: I do not own Rummel’s Statistics of Democide, which goes into considerable statistical detail concerning how he arrived at his estimates.)
In Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts, he estimates Mao’s victims at 30-80 million.
Pretty much all the sources on the Khmer Rouge genocide give estimates in 1-3 million range, most around 2 million.
Ethiopia’s deposed Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam is one of the few communists actually convicted of genocide in a court of law.
In summation: Communism probably killed at least 85 million people, and might have killed as many as 140 million people.
I hope to have interviews with with of the most notable authors/historians on issues of communist genocide in the near future.
Below are some books I can recommend on the subject. Keep in mind that the edition I own is probably the first edition listed here, while the Amazon links go to more recent in-print editions.
