Everybody Draws Mohammed Day

An editorial in The New Criterion (below in italics) on the Comedy Central censorship and Everybody Draws Mohammed Day gives me the hook to post the famous Danish Mohammed cartoons myself. The only reason I haven't done it earlier is that my computer skills were so rudimentary. 

Now that I'm upgrading my skills---doing proper links, posting videos and pictures---these cartoons were good practice for me. Since I can't draw, the least I can do is post the cartoons.

In April, Comedy Central received a (partially) veiled death threat against the creators of South Park from a New York–based group called Revolution Muslim. Their tort? Portraying Mohammed in a bear suit (a scene that Comedy Central, capitulating to the bullies, censored). 

In response, Molly Norris, a Seattle artist, suggested denominating May 20 “Everybody Draws Mohammed Day.” Nick Gillespie at Reason magazine took up the challenge and mounted an everybody-draws-Mohammed contest. By the time you read this, the winner will have been announced and, who knows, perhaps Revolution Muslim or some sister organization will have issued another round of death threats.

The conjunction of the words “cartoon” and “Mohammed” inevitably brings to mind the phrase “Danish cartoons,” the dozen images of Mohammed published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten five years ago. Everyone remembers what happened then: an excess of Muslim rage that left some 150 people dead and a goodly lot of Danish property trashed worldwide. 

What is not quite so well known is that the rampage was deliberately fomented by Danish imams who brought the cartoons to the Middle East to stoke the fury of their co-religionists. In fact, they brought not only the Jyllands-Posten cartoons but also three coarse images of Mohammed that they had created themselves. One portrayed Mohammed as a pedophile, one showed him with the face of a pig, the third we will forbear from describing. “It is,” Gillespie notes, “nothing less than amazing that holy men decrying the desecration of their religion would create such foul images, but there you have it. It is as if the pope created ‘Piss Christ’ and then passed it off as the work of critics of Catholicism.”