Commenting on the furor over the Mohammed cartoons, Juan Cole says this:
Had the Danish newspaper published antisemitic cartoons that showed, e.g., Moses as an exploitative money lender and brought into question the Holocaust, there would also have been a firestorm of protest.
He’s right. But would Jews throughout the world have burned Danish embassies, threatened to kill the editors of offending newspapers, etc? Not a chance. Cole overlooks this crucial difference. Indeed, it is the crucial difference. And he’s blind to it.
Want further evidence? This university professor apparently draws no distinction between non-violent and violent protests:
The Muslims are protesting this incident vigorously, and consider the caricatures insupportable. We would protest other things, and consider them insupportable.
Be sure to read the comments to Cole’s post. The majority of them disagree with him.
I dont even think he got that one part right (in regards to the moses cartoon). Arab media prints exactly that kind of material, and yet thier embassy’s are safe from pyromaniac jews. How come?
Not too mention that the cartoons of Mohammed were hardly that divisive. The worst one had him with a turban shaped like a bomb, which, in an artistic sense, could symbolize anything (such as he has a brain full of explosive ideas??).
Marc, may I suggest you also file this posting under the American Left. Cole’s views are so tainted by his vitriolic hatred for Bush that he seems to exhibit a certain glee in his posting of every bit of bad news coming out of Iraq, especially if it has a body count. Not only do I find him intellectually distorted, he gives me the creeps.
It’s Juan Cole. I find it very disheartening he is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies yet he continually shows he knows nothing about the region, or at least the region today.
Blogs like yours are what keep me sane. You visit the cess pools so I don’t have to. I’d appreciate it, though, if you’d quote the moonbats less and paraphrase them more. Their actual words give me the shakes.
Juan Cole’s definitely slipped from “understanding” to “justifying” here. The “first world” and “third world” stuff is a dead giveaway. That being said, he’s right insofar as the vast majority of Musliim’s have reacted just as many other groups would: with non-violent outrage and the power of the purse. Given this, it is perhaps more telling that he doesn’t seek to discuss variation in the response (or, if he does, I can’t find it).
There is a further, perhaps even more important difference.
Anti-semitism is an attack on a people, and not long ago, this attack has turned out to be murderous (holocaust).
An attack on Mohammed is not an attack on a people, only on what they believe.
I wonder if Cole the “Dhimmi” has taken the time to read some of the juicier cartoons appearing in the Muslim press recently. The anti-Semitic and anti-Christian filth represented in these “cartoons” compare favorably with Hitler and the SS, but not with what the Danes published.