Thus spake Marlette...
by Greg Swann
In defense of this almost-unbearably apposite political cartoon, cartoonist Doug Marlette avers:
Just as Christianity and Judaism and probably Zoroastrianism are distorted by murderous fanatics and zealots, so too is the religion of Islam.This is interesting because all three faiths have been under continuous attack for centuries by the always 'peaceful,' always 'tolerant' Islam. So accepting is Islam of alternative points of view that Zoroastrianism was actually driven out of Persia. Marlette's editor at the Tallahassee Democrat, Mary Ann Lindley, rises gamely to his defense:
At least 90 percent of the nearly 5,000 Muslims worldwide who have e-mailed me in the past few days were personally insulted yet not willing to personally condemn the Taliban, Osama bin Laden or militant Islam and their reign of terrorism.How much more ringing this endorsement might have been, had the newspaper actually had the guts to run the cartoon. A reader's letter, quoted in WorldNet Daily, makes the point better anyway:
"I have noticed outrage about the cartoon, but I have not noticed outrage from Muslims concerning the devastation and carnage that radical Islamists have caused," wrote Rebecca Davis. "Their silence concerning radical groups from their own faith speaks louder than words."After all, how would Marlette expect anyone to 'get it' if the world had not had its fill and then some of 'peaceful' Islam? No one can satirize the unfamiliar.
All this controversy is made possible by the carrion-eaters of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations. The cartoon, decried in thousands of emails from angry Muslims, did not appear at all in the Tallahassee Democrat, and it appeared only briefly, and only then by accident, on the Democrat's web site. CAIR advises care not because American editors are insufficiently gutless, but because they are insufficiently cautious about their cornucopian surfeit of gutlessness. That we owe our awarenss of Marlette's impudence to their imprudence is a travesty.
There were death threats, of course, and not just a few. But so far American Muslims have refrained from burning down the Democrat's place of business, which puts them one-up on their Nigerian brethren. And--also of course--from the other target of the cartoon, the purportedly-Christian envioromaniacs who wonder "What would Jesus drive?" we have heard not a peep. That's because, despite their mental infirmities, they know they live in the United States, a country that owes some part of its greatness to the impudent editorial cartoon. For the New Year, CAIR might resolve to discover America. Not the country, but rather the state-of-mind, a state-of-mind that is everything Islam is not.
