New Blog at New Domain
A Slow Motion Move
Happy Thanksgiving
David Horowitz: Verminous Anti-Intellectual Hack
Incompatible Cleansers
Falcon & the Sailor Boy
Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork
Oregano, Thyme, Savory, Peppers & Potatoes & Plato
Feeling a Draft
Militant Christianists
Inculcating Christianist Ignorance
Agent Orange Reparations
Nancy Bauer (A Slow Motion Move)
jd (A Slow Motion Move)
Nancy Bauer (A Slow Motion Move)
Pascale Soleil (A Slow Motion Move)
MJ (David Horowitz: Verminous Anti-Intellectual Hack)
alan (Happy Thanksgiving)
Dan Biston (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
jd (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
Dan Biston (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
jd (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
Torching the Danish Embassy · Feb 4, 11:36 PM
I stand second to no one in my opposition to the anti-Muslim foreign policy of the US & its allies in Iraq. I stand second to no one in my support for a free & independent Palestinian state. Alas, I stand second to no one in my opposition to fundamentalist religious stupidity in all its forms. Muslim, Christian, makes no difference. The cartoons are offensive to Muslims, yes. How many cartoons offensive to Christians or Jews have appeared in the Muslim press over the last year, I wonder? Images using the cross or the star of David to make a political point? The fanatics who torched the Danish embassy reveal their parochialism, which is understandable, I guess, in the way that the parochialism of an American fundamentalist Christian fanatic is understandable. That is, I can read the history & understand the economics involved, but my understanding is intellectual & does not extend to sympathy. The powerless populations of the Muslim world & of the United States take a kind of reptile comfort basking in the warmth of hatred. It makes sense, but I have no sympathy for religious fanaticism, no matter how understandable it is in historical & political terms. Individual human beings ultimately have an existential responsibility not to be stupid, not to sell their souls to demagogues for the price of a self-righteous adrenalin rush.
Update: Yule Heibel has a thoughtful post on this subject. There is also a comment thread at Burningbird in which most of those posting disagree with Shelley but maintain a civil discourse.
More from Yule Heibel: The timeline is revealing.
* * *
This whole issue (and how it’s being mediated) has left me feeling very dispirited. In the west, we’ve made “iconoclasm” into a kind of on-the-edge virtue, as when we call some famous architect “iconoclastic” because s/he smashes the cliche. To an extent, we’ve internalised our own historical iconoclasm, forgetting just what a barbarous, brutish, and exceedingly violent thing it was. And so we constantly question the cliches, because that’s what good avant-gardists in the iconoclastic army of modernity do.
But have we now reached the point where we’ve evacuated the Enlightenment so that it, too, is just another cliche? Have we reached the point where our “inner iconoclasm” lets violent iconoclasms, fed by bigotted and hate-filled representatives of blinkered fundamentalism, set the tone? I’d rather hear more from people like Irshad Manji.
— Yule Heibel 02/06/2006 01:37 PM #
— jd 02/06/2006 03:59 PM #