I usually hate those pre-fab, made-up holidays like Arbor Day and Toyota Truck Week, but here’s one I can really get behind: Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! Hallmark, start printing up those cards!
Via Dan Savage’s blog at The Stranger, some clever chappie (I don’t know who) has declared May 20, 2010 “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day,” in support of Matt Stone and Trey Parker and in opposition to religious thuggery.
The “religious thuggery” line refers not to rough play in the Lutheran Hockey League (“Wednesdays are 50 cent beer nights!”), but to the death threats directed at South Park creators Stone and Parker after they dared to feature a storyline about Mohammed, treated exactly like they treat every other subject on their show.
Some Muslims apparently didn’t take kindly to being satirized like everybody else, though, and so came the threats, which Comedy Central took seriously enough to censor the episode and bleep out mentions of the prophet.
Producers of “South Park” said Thursday that Comedy Central removed a speech about intimidation and fear from their show after a radical Muslim group warned that they could be killed for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
It came during about 35 seconds of dialogue between the cartoon characters of Kyle, Jesus Christ and Santa Claus that was bleeped out.“It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part,” producers Trey Parker and Matt Stone said. Comedy Central declined to comment.
Earlier this week, the radical group Revolution Muslim said on its website that “South Park” had insulted their prophet during last week’s episode by depicting him in a bear costume.
Obviously, the proper response to this is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Reason magazine heartily endorses it:
I will be employing my tremendous skill as an illustrator, of course, and expect that my colleagues will do the same. If they refuse, they will be declared weak-kneed, namby-pamby, quisling infidels and will be shamed on this blog (Though such idle threats rarely work these days; perhaps I could threaten them with a painful death, which seems to do the trick).
And so does Allah…Pundit at Hot Air:
Cue the predictable media squealing that “you’ll only antagonize them!” Antagonism, actually, is an idea straight out of the Hirsi Ali playbook: Her point to Anderson Cooper in the clip I posted earlier was that only by sharing the risk of retaliation for blasphemy can the public help protect her, Parker, Stone and other insolent infidels. If each threat produces more blasphemers than it silences, then threats suddenly become counterproductive.
I don’t know if it will do a lot of practical good (as opposed to say, killing terrorists, burning their houses to the ground, and building Thomas Kinkade gift shops on the ashes), but it will be fun, and I’ve got no problem with a well-placed “nyah-nyah!”
(Via, as are all things, Instapundit)