Everybody Draw Mohammad Winner
Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have an exceedingly long post announcing the winner of the “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day” contest.
The back story, in case you’ve somehow missed it:
In recent months, a Swedish cartoonist that sketched Mohammed as a “roundabout dog” as part of a planned street installation was assaulted during a lecture and, the following week, two extremists attempted to burn his house down. In January, the elderly Danish illustrator Kurt Westergaard, who contributed the most memorable image (of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban) among the dozen cartoons printed in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, narrowly escaped being murdered by retreating to a panic room in his apartment while an axe-wielding maniac hacked through his door. Just over the past few weeks, Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central, redacted a South Park episode featuring a possible representation of the Prophet after a website “warned” of violence and ordered The Daily Show‘s Islamic correspondent, Aasif Mandvi, not to comment on Islamic extremism (a self-described moderate Muslim, Mandvi is against it) in the wake of a failed terrorist bombing in Times Square.
Gillespie and Welch show the winning designs of the three finalists. The winner:
[O]ur grand prize winner . . . pushes iman and infidel alike to do the work that would condemn them to death under the most extreme reading of injunctions against representing Mohammed.
There is a deeper lesson here: Connect the dots and discover that we all must be Spartacus on Everybody Draw Mohammad Day. And that in a free society, every day is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.
Indeed.
Death threats are often made against artists who “blaspheme” against Christianity, and sometimess attempts are made against those artists lives. For example, a play called “Corpus Christi” was recently shut down because of threats of violence from Christian Fundamentalists.
And yet, we don’t have a “Everyone Write a Blasphemous Play Against Jesus Day.”
Funny, that.
I wholeheartedly support freedom of speech and think that people should be able to say, draw, perform whatever they want. But from both the promotion of and contest entries for “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” seems to me to be more of an excuse to be jerks than any kind of real statement.
“But from both the promotion of and contest entries for “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” seems to me to be more of an excuse to be jerks than any kind of real statement.”
And the choice of winning entries (none of which actually depicted Mohammed) is beyond lame. Are they pretending to be defiant, while actually knuckling under to the threats?
lol you men we don’t have movies, t.v., Internet, colleges, public schools, Broadway, radio, books, magazines, parades etc, etc? come on man 99% of the history of the world is a
Blasphemous Play Against Jesus Day…..
An alpha male culture such as Islam defends the honor of its main alpha male through violence.
This is the point of the exercise: will we allow these bullies to dictate to the world or not.
If not, we can expect to have a long time to defend our rights of free expression.
The law of the jungle…the survival of the strongest…is the ethical basis of Mohammed’s cult.
This supremacist cult of intimidation, assassination and violence shall not be allowed to win by the civilized peoples of the world.
Islamic political supremacism cannot win.
I’ve never understood why followers of a Jewish zombie carpenter’s cult with an alpha-male culture get so worked up over nomadic Arab merchant’s cult because of their alpha-male culture.
Neil:
I think the answer is obvious: zombies are way cooler than merchants.
Let me decipher this:
OK…
How ya gonna do that?
Ya know, I was taught (like back in the 3rd grade) that “freedom of expression” came with responsibilities: Call somebody a “weenie” and you had to prove it.
And your Cult is what: Hiding behind a 400,000 man armed forces as well as the FBI, the CIA, the TSA, the ad infinitem?????
Who? the “civilized” people who go out of their way to insult more than a billion people with a simple drawing????
Wrong. They cannot lose, as long as you engage in this kind of a pissing contest.
Doug M told me 2 days ago, that this was an attempt to convince Muslims that death threats were not an answer to blasphemy.
I told him then, that this was like “trying to convince a bunch of bikers that they shouldn’t beat the holy crap out of a guy for pissing on their Harleys….”
By pissing on their Harleys.
You wanta try it? (pissing on Harleys) Go ahead, give me an argument an American will understand…
and then explain why you shouldn’t get your ass beat into next month.
Go ahead, give it a try…
So very true…
Seems to me that the freedom the Reason guys are most interested in protecting is the freedom to be a jerk.
I support the freedom to draw Mohammad if you want, but if you’re doing it just to piss someone off, you might want to rethink the purity and righteousness of your motives.