The Pankian Metaphor 2996

Bernd Felsche

Well, no. The fakes weren't all cartoons, but images circulated first in the Middle East *claimed* to have been published in the Danish press, but weren't. One was a very poor black and white copy of a newspaper photo supposedly of somebody posing as Muhammad with a pig snout and ears. It was actually a news photo of a Frenchman (with fake snout and ears) at an annual *pig-squealing* contest at some silly town festival in France. *No* connection with Islam or insults to Muhammad whatsoever.

It's not offensive to *all* Muslims even today, and certainly wasn't so in the past to *many* Muslims as the numerous medieval Muslim depictions of Muhammad show. Claiming otherwise is no more accurate than the claims of the Byzantine iconoclasts when they were in power that depictions of Jesus, Mary and the Saints were offensive to all "true" Christians and had always been so. It was the Wahabbi radicals that really got a lot of this poo rolling after they took over Saudi Arabia and systematically went about demolishing every old site in Mecca and Medina buttociated with Muhammad, destroying his tomb, tearing down mosques that offended them, and going on a book-burning spree. The obvious point being that the various Muslims who had control of the holy sites at various times for all those centuries had no problem with those artifacts. Depiction of Muhammad has always been a touchier subject, but there's obviously been not been universal condemnation of that in the past within the Muslim community despite the current line.

--Larry