I am not Charlie. I don’t support being inflammatory when feelings are so raw. But I don’t like being bossed around. What about something more harmless? You know, where the right thing is being rejected. Just as the extremists don’t speak for all of Islam, responding to them by ridiculing what all Muslim’s regard as holy is equally non-reciprocal. But what about meta-irony, like the New Yorker cover showing the Obamas as terrorists fist bumping in the Oval Office? People were up in arms, but that cartoon was reducto ad absurdum making fun of people painting the Obamas as terrorists. So what about a cute cartoon? One that wouldn’t offend me if Allah were holy to me. One that just says: I am a cartoon. And Mohammed, like Jesus or Moses or Buddha, was just a man. And sometimes those guys are in cartoons. And we should help each other to live in a world where that’s allowed, even encouraged. So although the legend of a nation of Danes wearing yellow stars so the Nazi’s could not tell who was Jewish is sadly not true, King Christian did snub Hitler, and his subjects did display various emblems of defiance. The question is what’s being defied. If we all portray silly, harmless, non-malicious cartoons of Mohammed, if everybody walks around with neutral or pro-Islamic symbols of support for expression (vs. ridicule, or even satire), who they gonna single out?
