What do Canadian soccer scores, the Gaza Flotilla Incident, Marxism, and the origins of Christianity have in common? Simple: They all rely on the notion that winning is bad. The triumph of the downtrodden.

We now see the culmination of a grand historical arc playing out right before our eyes. And just as at most epochal turning points, the people experiencing it have little or no idea that it’s even happening.

I want to say just a few words about the Gaza Flotilla, but to arrive there I must first take a roundabout digression. Let’s start our journey in Canada.

The more you score, the closer you come to defeat

A kids’ soccer league in Ottawa recently instituted a new rule: If your team outscores your opponents by more than five goals, then you lose. That’s right — the high-scoring team loses the game:

Win a soccer game by more than five points and you lose, Ottawa league says

In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default.

The Gloucester Dragons Recreational Soccer league’s newly implemented edict is intended to dissuade a runaway game in favour of sportsmanship. The rule replaces its five-point mercy regulation, whereby any points scored beyond a five-point differential would not be registered.

Kevin Cappon said he first heard about the rule on May 20 — right after he had scored his team’s last allowable goal. His team then tossed the ball around for fear of losing the game.

As insane as this new rule might seem to the naive, it’s neither surprising nor unexpected: Similar anti-competition guidelines which punish winners have seeped into our culture over the last several decades. This Ottawa soccer rule is just the consummation of a larger trend. Many public school districts in the US now discourage or prohibit intra-class competition, not just in games but scholastically as well. Why? Because competition inevitably leads to winners and losers, which leads to athletic or intellectual hierarchies, which leads to social hierarchies, which leads to social inequality. And that‘s the biggest no-no of all.

But the prohibition against competition is often a prelude to a more Orwellian inversion of reality. Many kids’ sporting leagues have something called The Mercy Rule, in which the officials stop keeping score after a certain point if two teams are so mismatched that the game would otherwise become a farce. From there, however, it is a small step to the “Ottawa Rule” whereby you are allowed to score as much as you want, but if you outscore your opponent by too much, you’ll be declared the loser. (One imagines that inept-but-clever Canadian soccer teams will henceforth attempt to win games by “accidentally” scoring own-goals and kicking the ball backwards into their own nets as often as possible; eventually the league could devolve into a frenzy of “suicide soccer” as teams try to rack up as many points for the opponents as they can, seeking to “win” by losing by more than five goals.)

A similar thing happened to me in my elementary school days. One spring, our hip teacher announced that he would soon hand out the award for “Best Student” in the class. Much speculation ensued among the kids as to who it might be; the general consensus was that three students, based on our speed in finishing quizzes ahead of everyone else, were the obvious candidates: Karen, Ronald, or me. But when the big day arrived, the teacher announced, to everyone’s shock, that the Best Student prize was going not to any of us three but instead to Wayne. Wayne?!?!?!? Everyone turned to look at him in amazement. Wayne was, by any valid measure, far and away the worst student in the class. He still had not yet learned how to read. He couldn’t do basic arithmetic. He sat in the back of the room and harassed other students, and didn’t even bother to complete most assignments. In the modern era, he definitely would have been placed in a “special education” class for learning-disabled students, but our public school district back then had eliminated all “tracking” as discriminatory, so students of all calibers were lumped together. Our teacher explained that he was giving the award to Wayne because Wayne needed it more than anyone else, in order to boost his low self-esteem, which was the cause of his misbehavior. (Of course, having his psyche dissected in front of the class humiliated him even more, completely undoing any psychological benefit the award may have given him.) But here’s the kicker: our teacher then announced that Karen, Ronald and me had to sit in the corner and not participate every time there was a quiz for the rest of the year, as punishment for “embarrassing the other students” by finishing too fast and getting perfect scores.

My school district was ahead of the curve when it came to progressive ideals, and what happened to me back then is a natural progression from the non-competition guidelines now becoming commonplace across the country — just as Mercy Rules in sports can eventually lead to “the high-scoring team loses” Ottawa-style decrees.

Christianity, Marxism, and the Triumph of the Downtrodden

Championing the underdog is nothing new. There is a long history leading to what happened in Ottawa and my school.

While these days we tend to think of Christianity and Marxism as polar opposite ideologies in direct contradiction to each other, they both can be seen as formal expressions of the same notion: That the downtrodden, society’s losers, are actually the winners; and that the rich and powerful are the losers.

Jesus said, in Matthew 19:24, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” He also, in Matthew 19:21, said “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

The inescapable conclusion one draws from these statements by Jesus is that people who are wealthy and successful will in the long run be the greatest losers of all, because they cannot enter heaven when they die. You may be on top now, Jesus is saying, but eventually only society’s losers (the destitute) will get the ultimate reward — eternity in heaven.

From Christianity’s founding and for the next three centuries it was indeed the religion of the underdog; not only were Christians persecuted and oppressed, but their very oppression was seen by early Christians as evidence of their moral rectitude. Suffering was a way of cleansing the soul; the worse off your station in life was, the closer you were to God. Early Christianity was a religion of the lower classes, not of the elite or aristocracy, and as such was almost a form of spiritual proto-Marxism. The worse off you were in social terms, the better off on the spiritual plane. By losing in this this life, you win in the next.

(Of course, all of that changed starting in the 4th century with Constantine, the Council of Nicea and Theodosius, when Christianity transformed into a state-sponsored religion and a powerful political force — but that’s for a different essay.)

1500 years later, Karl Marx came along and invented an anti-religion which nonetheless derived from the same principle: that poor people were the actual possessors of power. The difference between Marxism and Christianity is that under Jesus’ teachings the underdogs’ reward was in the afterlife, whereas Marx envisioned a here-and-now revolution for the oppressed to seize power and become the winners on Earth.

Both Christianity and Marxism appeal to people’s sense of empathy and compassion, something which had been somewhat lacking in other religions and economic systems. But history has shown us that once the oppressed become winners and take power — whether it be the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages or the Russian serfs after the 1917 Revolution — they in turn inevitably become the oppressors themselves. From this we can derive a new axiom: The new boss is always the same as the old boss.

(Of course, I fully realize that Christians will be just as horrified to have their faith compared to Marxism as Marxists will be horrified to have their ideology compared to Christianity, but the key point of similarity, at least to me, is undeniable. Of course there are innumerable differences as well, and both philosophies have changed over the centuries, yet still at their origins they both claimed to champion the underdog.)

Using our empathy as a tool against us

To this day, both Christianity and Marxism are hugely influential worldviews, and aside from those people who overtly identify with one camp or the other, most everyone else ascribes to some kind of political ideology which is at a minimum informed by either Christianity or Marxism. That is to say, Christian values suffuse conservatism, and Marxist values suffuse liberalism — even if you yourself don’t think of yourself as a Christian or a Marxist. Yet since both ideologies share one common feature — sympathy for the underdog — and since most people fall somewhere in the conservative/liberal dichotomy, then everyone in the Western world, regardless of what side you might be on, harbors some secret sympathy for the oppressed and disdain for the victorious.

It is this salient fact that the propaganda maestros of the Gaza Flotilla are banking on. The whole goal of sailing ships toward Gaza is not to “break the blockade,” but rather to seek out and initiate a conflict with the Israeli military. And here’s the key: not merely to enter into a conflict with the Israelis, but specifically to lose a conflict with the Israelis. Because only by losing can the activists and militants claim the victimhood mantle and declare a moral victory. So, just as in a Canadian soccer game, by losing they win.

Arab Culture and the Strong Horse

The West’s affection for the underdog is now widespread throughout the world — except in the Middle East, where Arab culture still reveres the powerful and the victorious. In 2001, Osama bin Laden famously remarked, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” This seemingly innocuous homily summarizes the difference between traditional Arab values and Western values: Not only do bin Laden and his ilk revere the dominant party in any relationship, he assumes that everyone else does likewise. It is for this specific reason that Al Qaeda (and Al Qaeda’s millions of admirers) thought that the 9/11 attacks were a good idea: If we can inflict a defeat on the enemy, Al Qaeda reasoned, then we will gain the world’s sympathy, because we we will have taken the role of the Strong Horse.

Needless to say, bin Laden got it completely reversed: Every time terrorists strike, their cause loses credibility in the West’s eyes, because by killing innocents they have become the aggressor and the oppressor. Most terror groups and Islamic extremist groups still operate under bin Laden’s “Strong Horse” misapprehension.

Luckily for the Islamic extremists, some Western leftists more clever than they have stepped in to rescue the otherwise-discredited Islamist cause. Far-left groups like the Free Palestine Movement and the International Solidarity Movement, along with their innumerable media enablers and Marxist Euro diplomats, have patiently explained to the Islamists that scoring violent victories is counterproductive; the real way to achieve political success in the Western world is to be the victim of a violent defeat. That way, you earn the world’s sympathy, and the powers-that-be give you what you want. It worked for Gandhi in India; it worked for the 1950s Civil Rights movement in the US; it can work for you. Lose your way to victory. Problem is, every power in the Western world already knows this, and they thereby resist appearing as bullies — so the only way to become a victim is to goad your unwilling opponent into defeating you. If you can sufficiently hide the goading from public view, then the response will seem like an aggression, and you win if you lose.

I imagine it must have taken quite a bit of philosophical reconfiguring for the extremists to grasp this ridiculous and counter-intuitive Western way of thinking, but they decided to give it a try. Lo and behold — it worked! At least it worked if you are an MSM collaborator in the ruse. In reality, most of the Islamists still don’t quite grasp the whole concept, so (for example) one can still see the militants on the Gaza flotilla chanting slogans about killing Jews and hoping for success or martyrdom. Uh, fellas, we’re supposed to be posing as the victims here — cool it, will ya?

What we’re now seeing is the tug-of-war internecine struggle between the power-seeking Islamic militants who still live by ancient Arabian codes, and their Marx-inspired Western partners trying to rein them in and use the victimhood/sympathy technique instead. Back and forth, back and forth, as the rest of the world watches in disgust: Violent terrorist acts and declarations of supremacy are interspersed with poorly acted passion plays of victimhood. Do the Islamists really expect us to permanently grant them the role of victim when half the time they’re the victimizers?

Personally, I’m tired of the game, specifically because I know it’s a game. Their real goal is victory and dominance by any means, and I’m not fooled when they use our own cultural norms to deceive us.

Rather than posting a variety of short videos documenting the incitements and failed attempts at victimhood-posturing by the Gaza flotilla militants, I strongly encourage readers to view this clip by Shraga Simmons of MediaGoliath which not only incorporates much of the video evidence into one handy package, but also crisply explains the win-by-losing victimhood strategy explained in this essay:

My latest report from the front lines:

The Stench of Elitism Hung Heavy in the Air

Barack Obama returned triumphant to San Francisco on Tuesday and was welcomed by throngs of cheering supporters.

…

Not.

You’d think he’d receive a hero’s homecoming, considering that San Francisco is the most liberal big city in the nation and its residents voted for him in overwhelming numbers. But in stark reality, here’s the full extent of the cheering section that awaited him:

A grand total of two people.

Incredible as it may seem, these were the only two identifiably pro-Obama demonstrators I saw all day. On the other hand, there were hundreds upon hundreds of fiercely anti-Obama protesters, attacking him from…

..the left, and…

…the right.

How did we get here? Let’s go back to the beginning of the day and tell the story chronologically.
…

And another photo from later in the report to whet your appetite:

Read the rest here!

Today is Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, a completely made-up satirical “holiday” dedicated to the concept of drawing Mohammed cartoons, as a way of making a statement about freedom of speech.

Not everyone agrees with this idea, however. And I’m not just talking about the expected naysayers — that is, fundamentalist Muslims (who demand that no one be allowed to depict their prophet) and progressive multiculturalists (who run interference for fundamentalist Muslims by insisting that we all obey Islamic demands or risk being branded as racists).

No, even some level-headed conservative-leaning pundits have begun to cast aspersions on this whole Mohammed cartoon thing. Most notable among them is J.E. Dyer, whose recent article posted at HotAir entitled “Provocation isn’t the highest form of free speech” made the argument that mocking Mohammed is basically pointless “provocation” and that, although provocative speech is protected, it is the embarrassing stepchild of the noble, high-toned political speech imagined by our forefathers, and as such should be avoided lest we come off as brutes and rubes. To quote the key passage of Dyer’s thesis,

The right to offend others is something that gets a pass because of the good that comes from the better, higher, more important right to make our own philosophical decisions. The right to be deliberately offensive is a parasite, not a first principle.

I disagree. Strongly. And I’ll tell you why.

Who Decides What Is Provocative?

Protesters in Pakistan yesterday, angry about the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day Facebook page

This is not an argument over the right to be “provocative” or “offensive”; rather, is it something much more significant — an argument over who gets to determine what counts as provocative or offensive in the first place. The Western world dragged itself out of the church-dominated Dark Ages and into the Enlightenment in part over this precise issue: the freedom to engage in speech and actions which formerly had been classified as the crime known as “blasphemy.” It seems such a trivial and quaint issue in retrospect, and hardly worthy of note from our hyper-secularized 21st-century perspective, but tell that to the millions of people who for centuries lived under the yoke of governments which used accusations of blasphemy and other religious misbehaviors as a primary tool of tyranny and oppression. The modern world dawned with the American and French Revolutions and the emergence of the explicitly secular state — the Americans rejecting the Church of England as Britain’s legally enforced national religion, and the French shrugging off centuries of acquiescence to domination by the Catholic Church in civil affairs. In both cases, new governmental paradigms were established in which there was an inviolable separation of church and state, which in practice meant no civil laws enforcing religious doctrines and (most importantly for our discussion) no laws against blasphemy.

The original “Draw Winky” ad from a 1971 comic book

We’re now so accustomed to this liberated society that we have all but forgotten how horrible it was in the Bad Old Days before our Founding Fathers (wipes away tear) created a safe haven for the human mind, a place called the United States of America. The laws and punishments of the Puritans and of the Spanish Inquisition and all the rest were decisively and emphatically swept off the table and replaced with a simple principle: personal freedom. Freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech.

Everybody Expects the Islamic Inquisition

Well, the Spanish Inquisition may be a distant memory now relegated to Monty Python skits, but the self-appointed Islamic Inquisition is threatening to take its place. Remember that the Spanish Inquisition (and the much larger papal inquisition which preceded it) existed for the purpose of enforcing religious dictates on the general populace, including and especially religious crimes such as heresy, blasphemy, and apostasy. Punishment for these deeds could be severe and often as not included torture or execution. This is exactly what the Islamic fundamentalists want to impose on us in the 21st century: Obedience to religious dictates, enforced where necessary by violence.

Luckily, outside of a few Middle Eastern countries, the Islamists do not have the power to enforce their hellish vision of society. But that doesn’t stop them from trying. Where they can’t impose their religious rules by force, they try to impose them by fear and intimidation. Since we have our freedoms permanently etched into our Constitution, the Islamists are going to have little luck getting blasphemy laws passed in the U.S. Yet they can achieve the same result if they can use terror to bring about our own self-censorship. Which is exactly what they have set about doing, the most recent round starting with the murder of Theo Van Gogh in 2004 and reaching the boiling point with the Danish Cartoon Controversy in 2006. The pot hasn’t stopped boiling since. The Islamists’ strategy is to kill, or threaten to kill, anyone who gets media attention for “disrespecting” Islam or Mohammed — thereby convincing the rest of us infidels to remain silent if we know what’s good for us.

Updated 2010 version of “Draw Winky” (parody by buzzsawmonkey)

And here we come to the crux of the matter. Which side in this conflict gets to determine what counts as “disrespectful” (a contemporary euphemism for “blasphemous”)? In the jihadists’ view, any depiction of Mohammed — even a positive or honorific depiction — is deemed blasphemous. It’s our religion, they say, so we get to say what’s offensive. Yet if we grant them this inch, they’ll take another inch (it’s also disrespectful to write Mohammed’s name without a worshipful “PBUH” after it), and another inch (it’s disrespectful to criticize Islam in any way), and before long it’s the whole mile, and we once again will be living in an intellectual Middle Ages in which religious tyrants dictate our every thought and action.

So you can see the urge of every sane-minded Westerner to say a hearty Fuck you! to anyone who tries to erode away the bedrock of our free society. The more insistent (and violent) these attempts at erosion, the less civil the resistance will become. Which is exactly as it should be. If the Islamists want us to to stop mocking (or even questioning) Mohammed, they can achieve this goal quite simply: Just go away and leave us alone. Don’t bother us, and we won’t bother you. Seriously, 99% of non-Muslims don’t give a good goddamn about Mohammed one way or the other, and we’d gladly ignore him and his followers until the end of time — if they’d just stop trying to boss us around. But if someone comes to our safe haven and tries to impose a repressive or restrictive rule on us, then that is the exact rule we’re going to flout until the interlopers learn their lesson: We don’t take kindly to bullshit medieval religious oppression in these parts.

And so we return to J.E. Dyer’s essay, where she essentially argues that freedom of speech is simply the vehicle through which we can express our political ideals without fear of reprisal. While that may be true, it leaves out the final piece of the puzzle: Freedom of speech itself is our highest political ideal. We need freedom of speech not merely so we can discuss Aristotle and the Teapot Dome Scandal and non-proliferation treaties, but more importantly we need freedom of speech so we can defend the unconditional right of freedom to speak — or think, or draw, for that matter. As soon as someone comes along and says (as Dyer does) that some forms of speech are “better” or “higher” than others, the implication is that the the low-class expressions are somehow less worthy of defending. But that way lies the road to ruin. We would soon begin to slide down what I call Niemöller’s Slippery Slope, which in this instance would begin, “First they came for the cartoonists….”

It is precisely the most offensive speech which needs to be defended, because that is the only speech which ever gets challenged in the first place. If we cave in on this seemingly trivial issue, we have already lost.

Mario Savio in 1964 helped launch the Free Speech Movement into national consciousness by climbing atop a police car at U.C. Berkeley and denouncing campus rules which prohibited political speech

The New Free Speech Movement

And it is often on the most trivial of points that history pivots. Take, for example, the original Free Speech Movement of the mid-1960s, which was the fuse that ignited the social transformations in the second half of that decade. At first, the initial dispute was over something as ridiculous as which student groups were allowed to have a literature table on U.C. Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, and whether or not the sidewalk bordering the campus counted as university property (where leafletting would be banned) or city property (where it would be allowed). Hardly something worth getting worked up over. But the students pressed the issue, and pressed, and eventually an utterly trivial local dispute became a not-so-trivial local dispute, and when the University caved in, it opened the floodgates to student activism and social upheaval first at Berkeley and eventually across the nation (and world, for that matter).

I posit that this cartoon fiasco may look as trivial now as did the silly Berkeley sidewalk dispute back in 1964, but it could very well morph into a new Free Speech Movement which could affect the course of history just as much as did the first one.

The Mohammed cartoons — whether they appear in a Danish newspaper, on South Park, on Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, or anywhere else, are basically our way of saying, Bring it on. They are an intentional goading to accelerate the inevitable clash of civilizations: totalitarianism vs. democracy, religion vs. secularism, repression vs. freedom, Islam vs. the liberal West — choose your definitions. It’s coming, whether we like it or not. And it’s quite apparent to the Mohammed cartoonists and their supporters that, currently, Team Islam does not have the tools to win. Philosophically, militarily, financially, analytically, morally and in just about every other way they have a losing hand. But the crazy part is, they don’t seem to realize it quite yet. So, from a strategic standpoint, if your opponent is overconfident and bound to lose yet still itching for a fight, it’s best to let him engage now and get defeated, than wait for some future day of conflict where the outcome may be in doubt.

Islamic extremists still seem to think that banning Facebook or threatening to kill the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day organizers will somehow make the problem of blasphemy go away. They don’t yet understand that we in the West have spent the last 600 years not merely earning the right to be blasphemous, but more importantly creating a society and a worldview in which there is no such thing as blasphemy, because all forms of speech are permitted and religious bullies no longer get to determine what is forbidden.

Now get out your pencils and start drawing.

UPDATE

Over the last few hours I’ve received an avalanche of Mohammed cartoon submissions in response to the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day “contest.” And even though it isn’t a real contest (and even if it was a competition I am not the organizer nor any kind of “judge”), I did just receive a submission which stands out as far and away the most eye-catching of the bunch. If I was a judge, this Mohammed cartoon, by an anonymous artist who wishes to go by the name “Tad Pole,” is currently my favorite to be deemed the “winner” of today’s Draw Mohammed contest:

On a recent trip to Berkeley I was traveling down College Avenue and noticed something which caused me to raise an eyebrow:

At the intersection of College and Derby are two buildings: On the left is the Julia Morgan Theater, a popular performance space for plays, musicals and concerts; and on the right is Chabad House, the East Bay headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, which also functions as a local Jewish community center.

The buildings have been standing across the street from each other for decades, without the slightest whiff of controversy or animosity.

But as you can see from the photo, the current production at the Julia Morgan Theater is Oliver!, the musical based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and to advertise the show, the producers placed a huge banner out front depicting Fagin, one of the lead characters.

Here’s a split-screen closeup, showing the Fagin banner more clearly on the left, and the Chabad banner more clearly on the right.

This wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy except that Fagin is considered to be an insulting anti-Semitic stereotype, and the banner was positioned to face directly toward Chabad House across the street. When the Chabadniks look out the building’s front windows, they have to gaze directly at a 10-foot-tall image of a stereotypical “greedy Jew.”

Now, while it may be true that the script for Oliver! tones down the anti-Semitic aspect of Fagin’s character and treats him more as comic relief than a villain, in the original editions of Oliver Twist Fagin is completely despicable, and is considered by many to be the most anti-Semitic literary character of the 19th century.

While I can only assume that the juxtaposition of the Fagin banner and the Chabad House was inadvertent, somewhere in the back of my mind I still have the nagging feeling that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t entirely coincidental after all.

Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist, sketched some caricatures of Mohammed as a dog back in 2007, and for his efforts earned himself a fatwa — a death sentence issued by the good clerics of Al Qaeda in Iraq for the capital crime of depicting Islam’s prophet. Today that death sentence was nearly carried out as Vilks was assaulted (by a Muslim screaming “Allahu Ackbar!”) while giving a lecture in Uppsala, Sweden about his experiences with censorship. Luckily, Vilks survived; unluckily, he was headbutted directly in his face by the attacker; Vilks’ glasses were smashed, but police were on hand to prevent the follow-up beheading which the fatwa-givers had called for.

A Swedish TV station was on hand and managed to catch the attack on video:

What you actually see here is the immediate aftermath of the attack: the cameraman missed the headbutt by a second or two, and by the time the camera pans down from the screen, Vilks is already crumpling to the floor and the attacker is trying to dodge his way out of the police’s grasp.

But the video is remarkable in a different way: It shows dozens of Muslims repeatedly screaming “Allahu Ackbar” in what looks like religious ecstasy over violence committed in their name, and joy over witnessing an attempted murder as punishment for blasphemy.

This happened today in Sweden, mind you, not during the Middle Ages nor even in 2001 in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Right now, in what is supposed to be the most liberal and progressive nation in the world.

Coverage of the Incident

Reason magazine seems to have been the ones who broke the story in the English-speaking world; it was quickly picked up by HotAir, which reminds us that recently arrested would-be terrorist “Jihad Jane” was plotting to kill Vilks over his sketches. The Jawa Report captured a screenshot of a Muslim woman on Facebook saying of Vilks “I would have shot him” rather than merely headbutt him.

And the mainstream media? To its eternal shame, in the BBC’s coverage of this incident they refer to Mohammed (as they are required to refer to Mohammed as part of the BBC’s style guidelines) as “the Prophet Muhammad”, with the epithet “Prophet” preceding his name in each instance. Does the BBC similarly refer to Jesus Christ as “The Messiah” or “Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” or even “Jesus the Christ”? No. Due to abject fear and groveling cowardice, they use one religion’s own descriptor for their founder, but not any other religions’ descriptors for their founders.

The Backstory

I covered Lars Vilks extensively back in 2007 with a special entry in the Mohammed Image Archive. For those mystified as to what the heck a “roundabout dog” even is, my Archive captions make it all clear:

In the nation of Sweden there is a contemporary urban folk custom of placing in the center of “roundabouts” (the circular traffic islands in the middle of major intersections) whimsical homemade sculptures representing pet dogs. The sculptures, which are fairly commonplace in Sweden, are called “roundabout dogs” (rondellhund in Swedish). In the summer of 2007, Swedish artist Lars Vilks made some paintings of Mohammed as a roundabout dog; after they were rejected by two art galleries wary of controversy, a sketch based on one of the paintings ended up being published in a small local Swedish newspaper, Nerikes Allehanda. Incredibly, this ignited an international furor, with protests, diplomatic quarrels, and threats of violence. The original sketch, seen above, was also posted on Vilks’ blog.

Over the following month, Vilks continued to draw additional sketches of Mohammed as a roundabout dog, as a regular dog, and as a human in various satirical settings, and posted them to his blog on July 21, July 22, July 23, July 25, July 26, July 27, July 29, July 30, August 11, August 13, and August 18.

More details about the original 2007 international furor can be found at these links:

The Lars Vilks Muhammad drawings controversy, at wikipedia.
Newspaper article in Swedish about the beginnings of the incident.
Turkish hackers attacked Swedish Web sites as retaliation for the roundabout dog Mohammed.

If you’re as outraged by this ever-escalating terror campaign against artists as you ought to be, remember to disseminate and repost any and all images of your choosing from the Mohammed Image Archive, which (as noted in my earlier post) contains just about every picture of Mohammed ever created.

For maximum blasphemy, start using mocons (Mohammed Icons) instead of smiley-faces:

Mohammed (((:~{>
Mohammed as a pirate (((P~{>
Mohammed on a bad turban day ))):~{>
Mohammed with sand in his eye (((;~{>
Mohammed wearing sunglasses (((B~{>
Mohammed with a lit bomb in his turban *-O)):~{>
The devil mo ]:~{>
Mohammed with a nuclear bomb in his turban. @=(((:~{>
Mohammed being shot by Starship Enterprise =-o * * * (((:~{>
Mohammed sees a Danish (or Swedish) cartoonist !((((8~{o>

Mocons are the most efficient way to digitally propagate the maximum amount of Mohammed imagery per byte.

New, at Pajamas Media:

South Park is the least of Islam’s problems: The Mohammed Image Archive displays every Mohammed portrait ever created

The existence of the Mohammed Image Archive is old news to long-standing zombietime readers, but the recent South Park brouhaha reminded me that many people are still not aware of it, and continue to think Mohammed depictions are taboo or hard to find. This new essay is a reminder that Mohammed pictures are commonplace, at least on the Internet. And it’s also the first time I’ve ever blogged about the Mohammed Image Archive, because I first created it back in 2005, before zomblog was added to this site!

A sample, to whet your appetite:

In 1928, Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company (a German firm which had developed concentrated beef extract and bouillon cubes) issued a series of advertising trading cards to promote its canned beef extract products. The 1928 card set (one of hundreds of different designs issued by the company over the years, on various themes) illustrated six different pivotal points in Mohammed’s life. The most beautiful of the cards was the second one, seen here, which showed the Archangel Gabriel escorting Mohammed up to the presence of Allah in Paradise — the climax of his legendary “Night Journey.” (The full set of all six cards are visible on the Archive’s Miscellaneous Mohammed page.)

The zombietime empire has now grown: First a photo archive, then a blog — and now a tour company!:

On any given day in San Francisco, a dozen or more political events — rallies, teach-ins, protests, lectures, conferences, demonstrations, performances and more — are happening all over the city. Most out-of-town visitors have heard of San Francisco’s legendary political activism, but they don’t know where to go to witness it in person. The problem for tourists is that the city’s political scene is a moving target — events’ locations change from day to day, and unless you have an insider’s knowledge of where each upcoming event is likely to occur, it’s entirely possible to spend your vacation in San Francisco without scoring any souvenir snapshots of West Coast political activism with which to impress your friends back home.

That is — until now.

Zomguide is a revolutionary new service for globetrotters visiting San Francisco and hoping to soak up the real local color. Whether you’re from Tokyo, Peoria or Sausalito, Zomguide will provide your own personal tour guide for the day, leading you and a small group on an exciting walking tour from protest to sit-in to workshop to riot. Each day’s itinerary is unique! No two tours are the same, since every day has a fresh array of political outbursts. Our researchers track down the most interesting events, and the final route is only revealed hours before each tour begins.

Best of all: The first tour is free!

To introduce our new service, Zomguide presents here a recreation of our April 15, 2010 afternoon tour, complete with detailed pictures from throughout the itinerary, as well as a transcription of the guide’s narration. Come along and see what political tourism in the Age of Obama is really like!

Our April 15 afternoon tour made four stops:

✦ 12:00pm 1. Rally Against Carbon Trading

✦ 1:00pm 2. SEIU Immigration Amnesty Protest

✦ 1:30pm 3. “Block That Tea Party” meeting

✦ 4:00pm 4. San Francisco Tax Day Tea Party

Here’s the daily itinerary map handed out to each tour participant:

There was also a separate morning tour and even an evening tour on April 15, visiting other parts of the city. Future tours will visit a completely different array of events — each day brings a fresh agenda, a new crop of unexpected political moments.

Ready to start? Let’s go! …

…

…Continue reading the rest here!

My latest:

Crashing the Crashers: Tea Party Infiltrators Outmaneuvered in S.F.

(This is actually just the first report about the events in S.F. on April 15: More to come soon!)

Here’s a sample picture to whet your appetite:

One of the most bizarre groups in California’s political galaxy goes by the name of Q.U.I.T. — Queers Undermining Israeli Terror — also known sometimes simply as Queers for Palestine.

QUIT tags along and makes regular appearances at the various omnibus anti-war and anti-Israel rallies around the Bay Area; they almost never organize protests on their own. But yesterday, April 8, was one of those rare days in which there was a protest organized by and exclusively attended by QUIT.

The focus of their anger this time around was the “Out in Israel” film festival at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater, which is “a special showcase of new, recent and classic films from Israel exploring lesbian and gay life, imagery and stories.” The film festival is itself part of the larger overall Out in Israel LGBT Culture Festival, which celebrates all things gay in Israel.

Now, one would think that there would be nothing controversial in the slightest about a pro-gay festival in San Francisco. So I was mystified as to what exactly QUIT — itself purportedly a gay rights group — could possibly find so offensive about a pro-gay-rights festival as to merit a full-blown street protest. Out of curiosity, I decided to check it out, and to sincerely try to comprehend and present to the public their point of view.

QUIT did not go unopposed. Local pro-Israel groups San Francisco Voice for Israel (SFV4I) and Stand With Us got wind of the QUIT protest and quickly put together a counter-protest to bring a dose of sanity to the proceedings.

Here’s an overall shot of the protest, showing QUIT’s pink banner on the right, and a crowd in front of the Roxie Theater on the left. (Apologies for the extremely poor quality of these protest photos — they were taken by someone with a low-resolution cell-phone camera.)

“No Pride in Apartheid; Boycott/Divest From Israel” reads QUIT’s banner.

Now, I’ve written about QUIT before, pointing out their suicidal cognitive dissonance in supporting a society (Palestine) in which homosexuality is absolutely forbidden, generally under penalty of death. What I wrote back then (nearly five years ago) remains true; this paragraph bears repeating:

“In fact, the cognitive dissonance of Queers for Palestine — marching in support of those who would kill you if they were given the opportunity — only serves to illuminate the cognitive dissonance of the entire “anti-war movement.” Because the goal of the “War on Terror” is to protect the liberal, free, egalitarian democratic society that we all cherish from the forces of oppression, totalitarianism and religious fundamentalism. Yet the anti-war crowd strives to compel the very soldiers who are defending them to lay down their arms, as if the battle would suddenly cease if one army were to stop fighting. So the anti-war crowd must ignore the evidence that one side is fighting to impose the harshest form of religious conservatism not just on their own countries but on the entire world given half a chance, whereas the other side (our side) is fighting to preserve a progressive civilization. That’s right, folks — this war’s for you.”

The same principle applies to the Israel/Palestine conflict, which is a microcosm of the wider Islam-vs.-the-West “Clash of Civilizations.”

The narrow sidewalk in front of the Roxie was completely blocked with QUIT protesters and SFV4I counter-protesters.

I checked QUIT’s Web site to see if they had anything about this event, but the site is updated so infrequently I found no mention of it. Even so, at the protest itself I was lucky enough to nab a copy of QUIT’s manifesto explaining their rationale behind the protest. Click on the image above or here to view a larger, more readable version.

Our vocabulary word for the day is “pinkwashing,” QUIT’s clever twist on the notion of “greenwashing,” which itself is of course a twist on “whitewashing.” “Greenwashing” describes the PR campaigns of corporations which try to cover up their environment-unfriendly policies with a veneer of supposedly “green” initiatives. “Pinkwashing” apparently means to use the PR-boosting power of being gay-friendly to cover up one’s other flaws. (Unfortunately for QUIT, the term “pinkwashing” has already been reserved by breast-cancer awareness groups to refer to companies that abuse the “pink ribbon” cancer awareness logo to boost sales.)

QUIT is accusing Israel of “pinkwashing” its treatment of Palestinians by promoting how gay-friendly the nation is while sweeping under the rug its “apartheid policies” toward Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. I invite you to read QUIT’s manifesto above and try to wrap your mind around their point of view — which may not be an easy task. Note how QUIT in no way disputes the fact that Israel is queer-friendly; nor do they dispute the fact that gays in Palestine generally face immediate execution (by mob violence, government dictate, or even at the hands of their own families) if ever found out. Mostly, QUIT conveniently fails to mention what happens to gays in Palestine, but to the extent that they do mention it, they lay the blame on Israel. QUIT’s “logic” goes like this: Israel has the Palestinians trapped like rats in a cage, and it is this desperate social condition which causes Palestinian society to become so twisted that it oppresses its own people; furthermore, by closing the borders, Israel prevents gay Palestinians from fleeing the horrors of Palestine for the freedom of . . . Israel.

Dizzy yet?

Of course, my analysis is this: The members of QUIT are in a “hipper-than-thou” arms race with other far-left radicals, and realized that if they want to be at the forefront of leftist political activism, they absolutely need to be anti-Israel and pro-Palestine, as that has become a defining feature of far-left ideologies. But as a gay rights group, QUIT was confronted by the deeply unfortunate fact that gays are safe, free and happy in Israel, while being oppressed, closeted and/or dead in Palestine. Other far-left groups coped with this problematic political conundrum by studiously ignoring the whole issue, thus obviating the need to resolve it. QUIT, on the other hand, uniquely has attempted to address the issue head on. Yet in order to somehow justify being pro-Palestine while at the same time supporting gay rights, QUIT necessarily needed to engage in the most ludicrous philosophical gymnastics in order to find some way to reconcile two irreconcilable positions.

But the end result is worse than QUIT could have imagined, because when all is said and done, they are promoting a society in which gays are simply not allowed to exist, and end up championing the grotesquely oppressive Arab/Islamic social order.

If QUIT truly cared about the rights of gays in Palestine and the Middle East, they would celebrate the treatment of gays in Israel and point to it as a model for other Middle Eastern countries to emulate. Instead of fighting for Arab self-rule in Palestinian territories — which would inevitably lead to a complete extirpation of all gay rights if not all gay people — QUIT should take the position that Israel should administer the Palestinian territories, because only under Israeli rule could gay Palestinians have any chance of survival. And instead of advocating that Palestinians continue their violent confrontational stance against Israel, QUIT should absolutely insist on Palestinian non-violence, which would allow the endless Intifada to fade away, quell all terror incidents, and allow Israel to once again open the border to Palestinian day workers and immigrants — and allow gay Palestinians to escape to the freedom of Israeli society.

But no. QUIT does the exact opposite of all those things. Which makes them among the most mystifying, and in some ways, the most loathsome of all leftist protest groups.

At the rally was a pro-Israel protester waving an Israeli gay pride flag in front of a brutally direct sign which takes the notion of “gallows humor” literally: Under the words “Gaza LGBT Center” are drawings of gay Palestinians lynched by Gaza’s theocratic rulers, Hamas.

Right next door to that sign were members of QUIT displaying their narrative: “Former Palestinian Village Open for Settlement: Jews Only — Queer Friendly.”

Here’s one thing I can say in QUIT’s favor: Unlike many other Bay Area protest groups, they are non-aggressive and non-confrontational. Mostly, they just stand there holding signs without getting into interpersonal conflicts. That’s how, as in this picture, protesters from two opposing camps can stand elbow-to-elbow and yet both remain all smiles, despite having diametrically opposed political views.

One of the SFV4I protesters held a sign riffing on the possible derivation of the acronym “Q.U.I.T.”

Another (again, sorry for the blurry photos) pointed out that Israel has a Gay Pride Parade — something that would be unthinkable in most Islamic countries. I think Dan Kliman — the Oakland doctor who for years was at the forefront of the Bay Area’s pro-Israel gay rights activism and who died over a year ago under somewhat mysterious circumstances — would concur.

Right around the corner from the Roxie, just steps from the protest, I noticed this casual bit of anti-Semitic graffiti on the window of a check-cashing business — unnoticed by all the protesters and counter-protesters. Someone had written the word “Jewish” on a roll of money pointing to the word “tax,” which is apparently either a reference to the old “Jews are money-grubbing” stereotype; or is a reference to the “Jewish Tax or “Kosher Tax,” an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that has been voiced at earlier SF anti-Israel protests; or, more simply, is a way of identifying Jewish-owned businesses for the next Kristallnacht.