Context for the cartoon protests

You may have caught this article in the Globe and Mail this past week. It really helped me to understand when I realized that there is more than just one cartoon (and they're all TERRIBLY offensive) that Muslims are reacting to:

Ahmed Akkari, a young Islamic scholar and Danish activist, was on a mission. Having failed to get the Prime Minister to take action over the cartoons' perceived slight to Islam, he had sought help from esteemed figures in the Muslim world, he says.

Over the next few weeks, he would hand copies of his green booklet to the grand mufti of Egypt, the chief cleric of the Sunni faith, leaders of the Arab League, the top official of the Lebanese Christian church and others.

They stared in amazement at the images in the book, he remembered during a lengthy interview yesterday, and vowed to take action to help him.

"They said to me, 'Do they really say this is the Prophet Mohammed? They must really have no respect for religion up there in Denmark.' And they said they would make it known."

Mr. Akkari now finds himself regretting the results of his brief journey, the somewhat distorted message of which flashed around the Muslim world by Internet, newspaper and text message, and caused millions of Muslims to believe that Denmark and the Nordic countries had become home to blasphemies.

While the Koran does not forbid depictions of Mohammed, the prohibition stems from concerns the Prophet expressed that even well-intentioned images could lead to idolatry or show disrespect for Islam's founder.

...

For his booklet contained not only the 12 depictions of the Prophet Mohammed that had appeared in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September. He also filled it with hideous, amateur images of the Prophet as a pig, a dog, a woman and a child-sodomizing madman.

Flipping through the book yesterday, he explained that these images had been items of hate mail sent to his colleagues by right-wing extremists who disapproved of their activism. These images, he insistently demonstrated, were separated from the newspaper cartoons by several pages of letters. "How could anyone mistake these for the newspaper images?" he asked. "It cannot be that anyone would make this mistake."

But protesters in Lebanon and elsewhere have cited these images in their actions. So have the organizers of a worldwide boycott campaign against Danish products, which is costing the country's economy.

Hey, I do not condone violence, and naturally those who have been violent or destructive to people/things have also damaged their own cause. BUT for those people who sputter at you that Islam is a religion of violence, here's some evidence you can dispassionately share with them to show them otherwise:

1. The Christian Crusades, where European Christians decided they would take over Palestine from the Muslims:

Some of our men cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the temple of Solomon, a place where religious services ware ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much at least, that in the temple and portico of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.

2. The Holocaust

3. The Troubles

The Troubles refers to the period of violent conflict in Northern Ireland beginning with the Civil Rights marches in the late 1960s to the political resolution enshrined in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. During that time more than 3,000 people were killed, most of them civilians.

4. There are at least 700 million Muslims around the world. If their religion was one of violence, don't you think we would have seen a little more damage done by the protests about the cartoons?

5. Think about all the stupid controversy the past few years about whether there was a "war on Christmas". (I say "stupid" because there were holidays, feasts, and celebrations around this time of year long before anyone decided it would be Jesus' birthday.) Could you imagine the outcry, the protests, the way some stupid people would behave if someone went around to churches all over the southern U.S. (and Lethbridge, Alberta) with books containing cartoons of Jesus as a child-sodomizing madman?

Let's get a grip, people. What we have in common as human beings is far greater than religion.

EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION.