Scott & Co.:

A minor (very) point of contention: in the halcyon days of Bloom County I never believed that it was a more liberal version of Trudeau’s truly awful Doonesbury. If it was more liberal, it artfully evaded my usually efficient crypto-liberalism detection system.

Thank you and Taki, the bursar of this great site.

Dan

they obviously felt it wasn’t worth the hassle.  You wouldn’t have drawn a comic strip about the black panthers in the 60’s either

Dan, I was a fan of Bloom County as well, but my liberal college classmates, it seemed to me, were right to find it more on their wavelength than mine.  Interestingly, here is Breathed’s self-evaluation, found on Wikipedia:

“Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he’s a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you’ll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you’ll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I’d be a Libertarian, if they weren’t all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.”

Of course, even back then, I thought of libertarians as liberals, so it may just be a difference of vantage point.

Lester, what wasn’t worth the hassle? “ You wouldn’t have drawn a comic strip about the black panthers in the 60’s either.” Whether I would or not is beside the point.  The point here is that this comic strip isn’t about Islam.  To continue your analogy, this strip would be like someone writing a comic strip in the 60’s about the spoiled white suburban youth who wanted to join the Black Panthers.

Apparently, however, American newspaper editors are such cowards that, not only can they not deal honestly with Islam, they can’t even allow a humorous reference to it in their pages--even if the humor is directed at a ditzy white girl.

it was a practical decision.  they didn’t want a bombed out office

Lester, you seem to be missing the point: It wasn’t about Islam.  Are you seriously suggesting that Muslims are so sensitive that they would perpetrate violence over a cartoonist poking fun at a ditzy non-Muslim girl in a comic strip?

Here’s a quote from the Editor & Publisher piece that I linked to: “Shearer told E&P;that WPWG checked with a couple of Islamic experts to see if the ‘Opus’ strips might be offensive, and they said the comics were OK.”

Your reaction is precisely the kind of behavior that I criticized the editors for.  If this is what our “free press” amounts to, then we might as well hand the country over to the Islamists now, rather than after a struggle.

So the point is if you can make it enough of a “hassle” to publish something then you win.

so what?  let them win.  do people have some burning desire to draw cartoons of muslims?

Regarding lester’s comment: “so what?  let them win.
do people have some burning desire to draw cartoons
of muslims?”

Scott you are correct- Lester and his cohorts seem to
be too numerous in America.

Lester the loser says let them win!
Bring on Sharia!!

As for me and my house- we will remember Lepanto!!!!

@Mr. Richert, a true conservative is never for unrestricted “free speech”.  Free speech is for politics not for lampooning religion or for sexual innuendo. For one thing respect for religion, any religion, is conservative, it is a virtue.  Somehow conservatives miss the idea and any training in virtue. What in the name of virtue defends the Mohammed cartoons? Libertarianism is not conservatism! To defend “Berkeley Breathed” is not conservatism, it may be libertarianism, but it isn’t pious, respectful, or gravitas. Trash is Trash and Trash has no grounds for defense. Dirt has no place but outside, not constitutional protection.

WLindsayWheeler, thanks for the lecture on “true conservatism.” Now, perhaps you can tell me where I defended “unrestricted ‘free speech.’” I can assure that I have never done so, and didn’t in this case.

As for the claim that “respect for religion, any religion, is conservative, it is a virtue"--really?  Tell me--is Satanism a religion?  If so, then your remarks would apply.  What about the Mayan religion?  Is respect for the practice of human sacrifice “conservative, it is a virtue”?  African or South Seas animistic religions, which practiced cannibalism?

Read the cartoon.  As I wrote above, Breathed “isn’t . . . making fun of serious converts to Islam, such as ‘Abdul,’ the eighth-generation German-American convert whom I have been profiling in a series for Chronicles.” Instead, he’s quite rightly satirizing a particular type of religious dabbler that we see all too often in America--someone who adopts the foreign just because it is foreign.  Such behavior isn’t pious; it’s superficial, silly, and destructive.  And we’re surrounded by it every day.

The larger point of this piece was the inability of Americans to make important distinctions, which, combined with cowardice, leads to situations like these.  A number of the comments on this thread have simply confirmed my point.

Mr Richert, you took the words out of my mouth.  This confusion of “respect for all religion” with “conservatism” is why, on another thread, I posted the following spoof-lyrics of the old Fundamentalist song, “Gimme That Old Time Religion”:

“Gimme that old Zarathustra
They don’t make gods like they used to!
I’m a Zarathustra booster!
He’s good enough for me!
Gimme that old...time...religion!”

As some of us have been discussing on a few threads here, “old time religion” can be a bit TOO old, like Aztec ritual human sacrifice.  (Although, personally I wouldn’t refrain from a night contemplating Aphrodite, cf Taki’s article “A Greek in the Temple of Venus")

And as for this bit:  “...he’s quite rightly satirizing a particular type of religious dabbler that we see all too often in America--someone who adopts the foreign just because it is foreign.  Such behavior isn’t pious; it’s superficial, silly, and destructive...”

...well I’ve known more than a few exemplars of that phenomenon.  One, who will of course remain unnamed, is a middle class White Englishwoman who was raised mainstream Protestant, became a Communist in the 1970s, then became a Christian again, and then converted to Islam.  Throughout that decades-long solipsistic pilgrimage of hers, during which she ingested more illegal hallucinatory drugs than George Bush, the only consistent belief of hers was that America is a destructive and uncivilised
“young country” (spoken in those very middle-class English tones dripping with ignorant contempt, misinformed by 40 years of English-socialist-effete-intellectual anti-Americanism), although she did modify this stance a WEE bit after she discovered that she was the adopted child of an American soldier stationed in England during WW II - but then the only reason why that was acceptable to her was because her biological father was partly (marginally) of “Native American” descent.  Consequently she became a passionate, romantic admirer of “Native American” culture, while she was simultaneously a Muslim, an almost 100 percent White English Muslim who identified more with American Red Indians than with white Anglo-Americans.

Around ten years ago, while I was living in England, I told her an anecdote about how, at one provincial English pub, one local English Brownshirt thug heard my (relatively mild) American accent and then saluted me in a mocking way, saying, stupidly, “America!” while he sang some garbled phrases of the US national anthem in mocking tones.  Now, at the time, I regarded that vulgar performance as an expression of English nationalism.  But my (former) friend, the White-English-Muslim, corrected me, saying, “No, John, he was satirising FASCISM!  American FASCISM!  THAT is what he and other English people don’t like about your country - it’s your FASCISM we don’t like!”

Sound like you’ve fallen through the rabbit-hole?  If so, then you understand.  That English-nationalist thug didn’t give a flying f--- about American “fascism”; he just saw a target of opportunity, an American face and voice, and he just wanted to take the piss.

Yet my former friend, the White English Muslim, defended that vulgarian English thug.  Now if you ask, why?  What did she have in common with him?  Nothing more than indulging in licentious hatred;
nothing more or less.

Licentious hatred is its own raison detre; it appears under many guises and so-called “ideologies”, but it’s all the same in the end.  And many, or most, White Western “converts” to perceivedly “exotic” religions, are ultimately motivated not by faith or by ideology, but simply by their own vanity, for which simple licentious hatred is their only authentic purpose.

John,

If you don’t mind me asking, why did you continue speak with this person?

You guys are missing the key element of conservatism: common sense.  You don’t mess around with muslims and comics in 2007.  I mean duh.

hey scott richert, you think you’re so great, why don’t you draw or put yuor name on a comic that has a muslim character in it and post it here?  I’ll link it to shiachat and from there it will go around the muslim world.

I haven’t been able to post a comment in about 15 hours.  This is a test comment.