| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front |
| I was a tool of Satan |
| 2003-12-12 |
| EFL - one cartoonist’s response to the gnashing of teeth and breast-beating engendered by one of his ’toons. It’s reasonably humorous, particularly if you share his distrust of organized religion as practiced in the 21st century. Last year, I drew a cartoon that showed a man in Middle Eastern apparel at the wheel of a Ryder truck hauling a nuclear warhead. The caption read, "What Would Mohammed Drive?" Besides referring to the vehicle that Timothy McVeigh rode into Oklahoma City, the drawing was a takeoff on the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign created by Christian evangelicals to challenge the morality of owning gas-guzzling SUVs. The cartoon’s main target, of course, was the faith-based politics of a different denomination. Predictably, the Shiite hit the fan. Can you say "fatwa"? My newspaper, The Tallahassee Democrat, and I received more than 20,000 e-mails demanding an apology for misrepresenting the peace-loving religion of the Prophet Mohammed — or else. Some spelled out the "else": death, mutilation, Internet spam. "I will cut your fingers and put them in your mother’s ass." "What you did, Mr. Dog, will cost you your life. Soon you will join the dogs . . . hahaha in hell." "Just wait . . . we will see you in hell with all jews . . . ." The onslaught was orchestrated by an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR bills itself as an "advocacy group." I was to discover that among the followers of Islam it advocated for were the men convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. At any rate, its campaign against me included flash-floods of e-mail intended to shut down servers at my newspaper and my syndicate, as well as viruses aimed at my home computer. The controversy became a subject of newspaper editorials, columns, Web logs, talk radio, and CNN. I was condemned on the front page of the Saudi publication Arab News by the secretary general of the Muslim World League. |
| Posted by:mercutio |
| #10 Mohommad would also have a chain link steering wheel, fuzzy dice, and shag on the dash....... |
| Posted by: Jarhead 2003-12-12 9:21:20 PM |
| #9 Presumably, victimization was one of their motives for leaving their native countries, yet the subtext of many of their letters was that this country should be more like the ones they emigrated from. Heh. He hit the nail on the head. The CAIRites are upset that offending Islam is not a capital offense in the US. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2003-12-12 9:05:26 PM |
| #8 "Dead man walking"you poor,miss-begotten fool. |
| Posted by: raptor 2003-12-12 7:39:37 PM |
| #7 I'd like to see somebody set up a website where people can submit all the lovely letters they've received from representatives of the Religion of Peace. It would make for some entertaining reading, and would probably open a whole lot of eyes. |
| Posted by: BH 2003-12-12 5:29:21 PM |
| #6 C'mon - everyone knows Mohommad would drive a Volkswagon bus, not a modern SUV. CAIR just wants accuracy, that's all. |
| Posted by: ccwbass 2003-12-12 4:55:58 PM |
| #5 And too double post again.... DM is very much considered in TLH as an NMM sort of cartoonist. That's a compliment NMM. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2003-12-12 4:45:10 PM |
| #4 Actually they hate DM for Kudzuu.. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2003-12-12 4:43:45 PM |
| #3 If you're gonna draw 'em out of their holes (not very hard to do), you have to be ready with the tongs and your basic heavy burlap bag. A threat of cutting off one's fingers and putting them in one's mother's ass is, um, colorful, no? I wonder what social norms spawned this colloquialism / idiomatic (idiotarian?) little jewel... Boggles. RopMA. |
| Posted by: ,comma 2003-12-12 4:39:56 PM |
| #2 When the truth hits close to home, some people will take it well and others won't. The current state of the Middle East sure does explain a lot of things... :) |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2003-12-12 4:33:56 PM |
| #1 I hope he's packing some heat... |
| Posted by: Raj 2003-12-12 4:22:30 PM |