The Death of Doonesbury

The death of Doonesbury

From Patheos:

Doonesbury Creator Attacks Anti-Islam Cartoons Instead of Those Who Murder Over Them

by Terry Firma

When Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau received the George Polk Career Award, he took the occasion to assail Charlie Hebdo and its Mohammed cartoons.

It wasn’t new territory for him. After the violence over the 2005 Danish Mohammed cartoons broke out, Trudeau, disappointingly, pronounced his solidarity with, or at least his patient understanding of, the rioters. He rejects cartoons that are critical of Islam, he explained at the time, because he sees making a statement about freedom of speech by drawing even the mildest representation of Islam’s prophet as a useless, empty gesture.

“What exactly would that statement be?” he rhetorically asked an interviewer of the Santa Barbara Independent.

That we can say whatever we want in the West? Everyone already knows that. So then the question becomes, should we say whatever we want? That, to me, is the crux. Do you hurt people just because you can? Because you feel they shouldn’t be deeply hurt, does that mean they aren’t? Should the New York Times run vicious caricatures of blacks and Jews just to show the First Amendment in action? At some point, common sense and sensitivity have to be brought to bear.

Huh. So we can “say whatever we want” in Western democracies, Trudeau claims; “Everyone already knows that.” I guess that excludes Theo van Gogh and Lars Vilks and Salman Rushdie and Stéphane Charbonnier, among other artists. After all, their right to speak their minds has been partially or entirely abrogated either by their actual murders (van Gogh and Charbonnier), or by ongoing attempts on their lives (Rushdie, Vilks)...

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