Outside the Beltway

Everybody Draw Mohammad Winner

James Joyner
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Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch have an exceedingly long post announcing the winner of the “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day” contest.

The back story, in case you’ve somehow missed it:

In recent months, a Swedish cartoonist that sketched Mohammed as a “roundabout dog” as part of a planned street installation was assaulted during a lecture and, the following week, two extremists attempted to burn his house down. In January, the elderly Danish illustrator Kurt Westergaard, who contributed the most memorable image (of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban) among the dozen cartoons printed in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, narrowly escaped being murdered by retreating to a panic room in his apartment while an axe-wielding maniac hacked through his door. Just over the past few weeks, Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central, redacted a South Park episode featuring a possible representation of the Prophet after a website “warned” of violence and ordered The Daily Show‘s Islamic correspondent, Aasif Mandvi, not to comment on Islamic extremism (a self-described moderate Muslim, Mandvi is against it) in the wake of a failed terrorist bombing in Times Square.

Gillespie and Welch show the winning designs of the three finalists.   The winner:

[O]ur grand prize winner . . . pushes iman and infidel alike to do the work that would condemn them to death under the most extreme reading of injunctions against representing Mohammed.

There is a deeper lesson here: Connect the dots and discover that we all must be Spartacus on Everybody Draw Mohammad Day. And that in a free society, every day is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.

Indeed.

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9 responses to “Everybody Draw Mohammad Winner”

  1. Alex Knapp Avatar
    Alex Knapp

    Death threats are often made against artists who “blaspheme” against Christianity, and sometimess attempts are made against those artists lives. For example, a play called “Corpus Christi” was recently shut down because of threats of violence from Christian Fundamentalists.

    And yet, we don’t have a “Everyone Write a Blasphemous Play Against Jesus Day.”

    Funny, that.

    I wholeheartedly support freedom of speech and think that people should be able to say, draw, perform whatever they want. But from both the promotion of and contest entries for “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” seems to me to be more of an excuse to be jerks than any kind of real statement.

  2. Dantheman Avatar
    Dantheman

    “But from both the promotion of and contest entries for “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” seems to me to be more of an excuse to be jerks than any kind of real statement.”

    And the choice of winning entries (none of which actually depicted Mohammed) is beyond lame. Are they pretending to be defiant, while actually knuckling under to the threats?

  3. G.A.Phillips Avatar
    G.A.Phillips

    And yet, we don’t have a “Everyone Write a Blasphemous Play Against Jesus Day.”

    lol you men we don’t have movies, t.v., Internet, colleges, public schools, Broadway, radio, books, magazines, parades etc, etc? come on man 99% of the history of the world is a
    Blasphemous Play Against Jesus Day…..

  4. Edison Avatar
    Edison

    An alpha male culture such as Islam defends the honor of its main alpha male through violence.

    This is the point of the exercise: will we allow these bullies to dictate to the world or not.

    If not, we can expect to have a long time to defend our rights of free expression.

    The law of the jungle…the survival of the strongest…is the ethical basis of Mohammed’s cult.

    This supremacist cult of intimidation, assassination and violence shall not be allowed to win by the civilized peoples of the world.

    Islamic political supremacism cannot win.

  5. Neil Hudelson Avatar
    Neil Hudelson

    I’ve never understood why followers of a Jewish zombie carpenter’s cult with an alpha-male culture get so worked up over nomadic Arab merchant’s cult because of their alpha-male culture.

  6. Michael Reynolds Avatar
    Michael Reynolds

    Neil:

    I think the answer is obvious: zombies are way cooler than merchants.

  7. tom p Avatar
    tom p

    Let me decipher this:

    An alpha male culture such as Islam defends the honor of its main alpha male through violence.

    OK…

    This is the point of the exercise: will we allow these bullies to dictate to the world or not.

    How ya gonna do that?

    If not, we can expect to have a long time to defend our rights of free expression.

    Ya know, I was taught (like back in the 3rd grade) that “freedom of expression” came with responsibilities: Call somebody a “weenie” and you had to prove it.

    The law of the jungle…the survival of the strongest…is the ethical basis of Mohammed’s cult.

    And your Cult is what: Hiding behind a 400,000 man armed forces as well as the FBI, the CIA, the TSA, the ad infinitem?????

    This supremacist cult of intimidation, assassination and violence shall not be allowed to win by the civilized peoples of the world.


    Who    ? the “civilized” people who go out of their way to insult more than a billion people with a simple drawing????

    Islamic political supremacism cannot win.

    Wrong. They cannot lose, as long as you engage in this kind of a pissing contest.

    Doug M told me 2 days ago, that this was an attempt to convince Muslims that death threats were not an answer to blasphemy.

    I told him then, that this was like “trying to convince a bunch of bikers that they shouldn’t beat the holy crap out of a guy for pissing on their Harleys….”

    By pissing on their Harleys.

    You wanta try it? (pissing on Harleys) Go ahead, give me an argument an American will understand…

    and then explain why you shouldn’t get your ass beat into next month.

    Go ahead, give it a try…

  8. An Interested Party Avatar
    An Interested Party

    So very true…

    I don’t hate Reason as much as John does, but their unbelievably self-congratulatory, faux-courageous “Draw Mohammed Day” was truly one of the most gutless things I have ever seen in my life. The three winning pictures all look as though they were chosen specifically so as to avoid inflaming radical Muslim sensibilities (one is a beach, one is a play on Magritte, another is dots with a face).

    If these losers had the guts to face down a possible fatwa, I might have some respect for them. But it’s far braver, I’m sure, to strut around in leather jackets, write paeans to heat-packing tea-baggers, and pretend you’re sticking it to Al Qaeda with allusions to French surrealist art, just the way John Galt and Howard Roark did, all on the Koch family’s dime.

    Grow a pair, fellas, or shut the hell up.

  9. Herb Avatar
    Herb

    Seems to me that the freedom the Reason guys are most interested in protecting is the freedom to be a jerk.

    I support the freedom to draw Mohammad if you want, but if you’re doing it just to piss someone off, you might want to rethink the purity and righteousness of your motives.

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