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Opinions on Mr Ramsey's honesty and conservatism do not all make a ringing endorsement:

More On That Bruce Ramsey Column

Andy Macdonald has already said most of what needs to be said about the column, but Ramsey came on the John Carlson show and left me so annoyed that I have to add some points.

Let me begin by noting three serious factual errors in the column: First, Ramsey says that:

A taboo prevents American newspapers from running cartoons attacking Sharkansky's religion, which is Judaism.

I'll leave it to Stefan to say whether the last part of that sentence is accurate (assuming he wants to), but in fact American newspapers, including the Seattle PI and the Los Angeles Times, have run cartoons that have attacked Judaism. There was, not that long ago, a considerable controversy in the PI over a Ted Rall cartoon, for that very reason. And there have been similar cartoons in the Seattle Times, as Stefan Sharkansy notes in a post he finished about an hour before I finished this one. Of course such cartoons are common in most of the world.

Second, Ramsey says that we have other, similar taboos:

Always there are beliefs, opinions and images that are out of bounds. There are images of Jesus — or Martin Luther King, or the pope, or any person — that may not be shown.

In fact, all three have been attacked with cartoons, and in other ways. This very day, the New York Times — which has refused to publish the Danish cartoons — published a picture of Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary", which was, as you may recall, made out of dung. Although few attack Martin Luther King now, he was often attacked during his lifetime, in cartoons, and in print. And if Ramsey will take a moment to search Google images with "Pope + cartoon" he will find almost 400 cartoons, including at least one by David Horsey.

Third, Ramsey says that there are 1.5 Billion Muslims. That's almost certainly way too high. There are no official figures for the number of believers, but a useful site, Adherents, gives this summary estimate on Islam:

Contemporary figures for Islam are usually between 900 million and 1.4 billion, with 1 billion being a figure frequently given in comparative religion texts, probably because it's such a nice, round number.

Besides those factual errors, there is an enormous insult in the column. Ramsey implies that all or nearly all Muslims would be offended by the images. In fact, Muslims, for centuries, have created just such images, by the thousands. You can see a representative collection here, though you may have trouble getting through to the site. To claim that all Muslims would be offended by images which they and their ancestors have been creating for centuries is both absurd and an enormous slur on most Muslims. (The Wahabbi sect, which would be offended, is both rather recent and a very small fraction of the world's Muslims. Wahabbis have offended many other Muslims by their destruction of historical artifacts in Saudi Arabia, some dating to the time of Muhammad, or shortly after.)

The conversation with Carlson did not clarify Ramsey's views. He was surprised when a caller asked him about the Abu Ghraib images, and argued that it was all right to publish those because they undermined President Bush. (He did not discuss whether the difficulties those pictures caused our troops were worth the trouble they caused the president, but I fear he would say they were.) No one asked him whether the false story about Koran desecration put out by Newsweek and carried in the Seattle Times should have been taboo, but someone should have.

Although his views seemed muddier after his time with Carlson, I did hear two possible clues to his thinking. In an earlier job, he had close Muslim friends. And, as he candidly admitted, he knows little about Muhammad. (And presumably about Islam, and its often violent history.) If we put those two together, we have a possible explanation for his views on the cartoons, and perhaps other subjects. Knowing little, he took as fact what his Muslim friends told him about Islam. And he has never bothered to do a little digging to check what they said. If that is the explanation, then it is about time he did.

(If Ramsey wants to learn more about Muhammad, let me immodestly suggest he start with my brief essay, WWMD? And for those who do look at it, let me ask you to look carefully at the last paragraph in which I argue that most Muslims behave far better than the founder of their religion did.

I must apologize for the promise at the end to discuss my sources, which I never got around to. Briefly, what I was going to argue is that many modern sources on Islam and Muhammad have been corrupted by political correctness and fear of Muslims. They are not necessarily wrong, but they leave out some of the more dismaying parts of Muhammad's life and the history of the religion he founded.)

More: I was so annoyed that I forgot to mention this interesting fact.:

While Muslims engaged in violent protests worldwide over caricatures of Muhammad have insisted any image of their prophet is considered blasphemous, a prominent frieze in the U.S. Supreme Court portrays the Islamic leader wielding a sword.

And it dates back to the 1930s. Wonder whether Ramsey is struck, as I am, by the fact that it hasn't caused many riots in all that time. And I would like him to tell us whether he thinks we should redo the building.

Even More: The cartoons were published last October in an Egyptian newspaper — and nothing happened. No riots, no demands for boycotts, nothing.
Posted by Jim Miller at February 08, 2006 06:10 PM

http://www.soundpolitics.com/archives/005701.html