An open-and-shut case of hypocrisy

Telegraph - uk ^ | November 11 2993 | Mark Steyn

[Brian Allen]

The other day, a producer called me up and asked if I wanted to take part in a discussion about an American cartoon strip - to whit, B.C. by Johnny Hart, which has been running in a gazillion newspapers around the world for as long as I can remember.

I usually check in with it a couple of times a decade while waiting at the gate for a delayed flight, and am happy to find it refreshingly unchanged. It's set in a modified caveman era, which is to say that, like The Flintstones, its characters enjoy certain accoutrements not necessarily consistent with the time period.

On this particular day's strip, Johnny Hart shows us the caveman walking up a hill at night - there is a crescent moon in the sky - and heading for a wooden outhouse, with a crescent moon on the door, as outhouses traditionally have, at least in America. My own outhouse in New Hampshire certainly did, before it was dashed to smithereens in a hurricane (don't worry, I wasn't inside at the time).

Anyway, we next see a sound effect - "SLAM" - to indicate, presumably, the closing of the outhouse door. The final frame shows a speech bubble coming from within the outhouse with the words: "Is it just me, or does it stink in here?" The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) decided this was not an outhouse joke, but an Islamophobic slur disguised as an outhouse joke.

A reader in the Washington Post had noticed the six crescent moons in the strip, and suggested this indicated the real target of the gag. Cair drew attention to the fact that the sound effect of the alleged door slamming was stacked vertically, in a pillar-like shape, and thus could reasonably be read as "SLAM" contained within the overall shape of the letter "I" - or "ISLAM".

"Hmm," I said, thoughtfully, to the producer. "It's true that it's very hard to slam an outhouse door from the inside, what with the lack of space and so forth. Difficult to get back far enough to give it a loud enough slam to justify a sound effect. Unless there's a strong wind to whip it shut," I added, recalling my hurricane. "And even then, one would be more concerned to latch it carefully lest another gust blow it open again."

"That's Marshall Blonsky's line," said the producer, a little impatiently. Blonsky is professor of semiotics at the New School in New York and had apparently got to my penetrating insight ahead of me: "You don't slam an outhouse door." Professor Blonsky argues that the cartoon is indisputably constructed "in a polysemic fashion".

"I hadn't thought of that," I said.

"How about this?" said the producer. "If it's really just a sound effect, how come there's no exclamation?" "Hmm," I said, even more thoughtfully than before. In the end, I declined the invitation. Although I agreed of course that Islamophobic cartooning was the most pressing issue of the week, in my usual shallow way I'd become distracted by some of the day's more trivial stories - the 11 Hindus burnt alive by a Muslim gang in Bangladesh, the 13 Christian churches torched by Muslim rioters in the Nigerian town of Kazaure, and the 27 Turks and Britons murdered by Muslim terrorists in Istanbul.

No dead Jews in that particular day's headlines, but otherwise a good haul of Hindus, Christians and, of course, Muslims. Every society has its ugly side: in America, the problem is stone-age cartoons; in Nigeria, it's stone-age - or stoning age - reality. But one can't help noticing that polysemic cartooning seems a notably ineffective way of stirring up anti-Muslim feeling, at least when one looks at preliminary statistics for Muslims murdered in America this Ramadan, compared with Muslims murdered in, say, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

My advice would be to go for the direct approach, like Sheikh Anwar al-Badawi, the A-list imam who does the "Thought For The Day" slot on Qatar TV: "O God, destroy the usurper Jews and the vile Christians." Nothing very polysemic about that. Nothing very polysemic about Cair, either. America's most prominent mainstream Muslim lobby group, it has organised rallies that managed to climax with the singing of "No to the Jews, descendants of the apes." Its chairman, Omar Ahmad, has said that "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant". The Koran "should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth". But its supply of White House invites and presidential photo-ops never seems to dry up, and its willingness to see offence everywhere is treated respectfully by the media.

Meanwhile, while Islamic lobby groups and the most distinguished semiotics professors in America are analysing Johnny Hart's outhouse joke, the European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has decided to shelve its report on the rise of anti-Semitism on the Continent. The problem, as reported in The Telegraph, is that the survey had found that "many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups", and so a "political decision" was taken not to publish it because of "fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims".

Let's go back over that slowly and try not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the uselessness of these thought-police bodies: they're fine for chastising insufficiently guilt-ridden whites in an ongoing reverse-minstrel show of cultural self-abasement, but they don't have the stomach for confronting real racism. A tolerant society is so reluctant to appear intolerant, it would rather tolerate intolerance.

In Holland, the late Pim Fortuyn recognised that at some point the contradiction has to be resolved. In Nigeria and Sudan and other frontiers between the ummah and the rest of the world, it already has - in favour of sharia and the Islamists. It's hard to see why the enervated West should prove any more successful at squaring the circle. But we can at least cherish the absurdities on the way down: European Jews menaced by anti-Semites get less attention than American Muslims menaced by polysemites.

? Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.

[metesky]

Polysemite bump.

[backhoe]

I wondered just what in H!ll "semiotcs" were, so I ran a search and got this:

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Semiotics
... up to main menu. Semiotics Basics. ... Applied Semiotics (Peter G. Marteinson & Pascal
G.Michelucci). Topics in Semiotics. Biosemiotics: What is Biosemiotics? ...
Description: Well-organised semiotics links assembled by Martin Ryder
Category: Science > Social Sciences > Language and Linguistics > Semiotics
www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/semiotics.html - 70k - Cached - Similar pages

Semiotics for Beginners
This is a popular hypertext guide to semiotics by Daniel Chandler at the University
of Wales, Aberystwyth. Semiotics for Beginners Daniel Chandler. ...
www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html - 33k - Cached - Similar pages

Semiotics for Beginners
This is a popular hypertext guide to semiotics by Daniel
Chandler at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.aber.ac.uk ]

Sites of Significance for Semiotics
File Format: Unrecognized - View as HTML
Description: Webliography in English/Français.
Category: Science > Social Sciences > ... > Semiotics > Bibliographies
www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/french/as-sa/EngSem1.html - Nov 23, 2003 - Similar pages

www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/french/as-sa/
File Format: Unrecognized - View as HTML
Nov 23, 2003 - Similar pages
[ More results from www.chass.utoronto.ca ]

Center for Semiotics :: Index and News :: Semiotics :: Education ...
... Please refer to this site for latest updates! Wednesday, Semptember 10: Introduction
to Neuroscience, Cognitive Linguistics and Cognition and Semiotics: ...
Description: A research and educational unit of the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Site includes papers and publicatio...
Category: Science > Social Sciences > Language and Linguistics > Semiotics
www.hum.au.dk/semiotics/ - 21k - Nov 23, 2003 - Cached - Similar pages

Applied Semiotics / Sémiotique appliquée - Home
A refereed journal of literary research on the World Wide Web. ...
Description: A refereed online journal of literary research in English and French.
Category: Science > Social Sciences > Language and Linguistics > Journals
www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages

semiotics
Introductory models & basic concepts: semiotics. Semiotics - Saussure. ... Introductory
models & basic concepts: semiotics. Semiotics: Saussure - the sign. ...
Description: Summary of the major areas of semiotics as outlined by Saussure, as well as criticisms and the relationsh...
Category: Science > Social Sciences > Language and Linguistics > Semiotics
www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/ cshtml/semiomean/semio1.html - 89k - Cached - Similar pages

THE SEMIOTICS OF THE WEB
THE SEMIOTICS OF THE WEB *. Philippe Codognet. INRIA -Rocquencourt. BP 105,
78 153 Le Chesnay Cedex, FRANCE. and. Université Paris 6. LIP6, case 169. ...
Description: 'Semiotics of the Web': Philippe Codognet
Category: Science > Social Sciences > ... > Semiotics of Cyberspace
pauillac.inria.fr/~codognet/web.html - 33k - Cached - Similar pages

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My conclusion? Overintellectualized nonsense...

[goldstategop]

Of course. Liberals can't stomach Christianity but they can tolerate Islamic hatred of the West for the simple reason they themselves hate the West.

[hotpotato]

Already posted here

[StonyBurk]

Methinks the Muslim assasin was smoking too much of that
Turkish happy smoke when he read the funny pages. Open and
shut case of Islamic Christophobic dementia methinks they
protesteth too much.But what a CAIRING militant slave of
Allah to do bloating in th eland of the great Satan.

[Brian Allen]

Excerpted, actually.

And with a poster-altered title that didn't show up on my search.

I found it later by accident.

[coloradan]

As for outhouse doors slamming, I have been in several in which the door is closed by a rather strong spring. If you let go of the door while it is open, it most certainly slams.

[Valin]

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
S. Freud

[Brian Allen]

Sometimes a cigar is.

And sometimes a stopped clock tells the correct time.

And God knows CAIR long ago stopped one in the clock.

Or should have.

And Johnny's a Good old guy -- kinda a Christian Jackie Mason -- but I reckon he chucked out a hat to see if anyone picked it up and see if it fit and wear it.

Eh?

[And, just in case he needs a fallback position, I've met that kinda outhouse door plenty of times]

[gcruse]

I sympathize with your confusion.
Forgoing Google for an online dictionary
provides a little more light.

se·mi·ot·ics also se·mei·ot·ics
(click to hear the word) (sm-tks, sm-, sm-)
n. (used with a sing. verb)

The theory and study of signs and symbols, especially as elements of language or other systems of communication, and comprising semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics.

[backhoe]

Info appreciated.