As everybody knows by now an Iranian paper has commissioned a Holocaust cartoon contest in reply to the now-infamous Danish cartoons (more here). That seems like a strange decision when nobody involved in the controversy appears to be Jewish, but ok. Via boibgboing via Drawn!, a group of Israelis have decided that the best response is to commission their own anti-semitic cartoon contest.
Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel-Aviv, Israel, has followed the unfolding of the “Muhammad cartoon-gate” events in amazement, until finally he came up with the right answer to all this insanity – and so he announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest – this time drawn by Jews themselves!
“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”
The contest has been announced today on the www.boomka.org website, and the initiator accept submissions of cartoons, caricatures and short comic strips from people all over the world. The deadline is Sunday March 5, and the best works will be displayed in an Exhibition in Tel-Aviv, Israel.
I’m most of the way through a book of essays by Israeli humorist Ephraim Kishon (Wise Guy, Solomon) that has made people get up and move away from me on the bus [not because of the book, because I was trying and failing to stifle tears of laughter]. Iran might be bigger but I’m fairly confident that it isn’t funnier. Point, Israel.
Jack Roy
Oh, my. That is more like it. And it’s not even going to be a close contest—if you have ever heard American Jewish comedians kvetch about their people, you know the Iranians got nothing on us.
Bob In Pacifica
Not, point Israel. More point Jews.
Speaking of no sense of humor, I am a little upset at how Air America keeps screwing around with Marc Maron. He was by far the funniest guy on their network. Apparently Danny Goldberg (not good at figuring out humor) was the main force in pulling the plug on his morning show. He’s still under contract to AirAm and was supposed to start a new show out of Los Angeles on 1150 a few days ago, but it hasn’t started yet.
Pb
Nice response–this just goes to show that some people have a sense of humor, and some people just don’t. Therefore, I’ll be waiting for the ADL to condemn the actions of graphic artist Amitai Sandy and his contest…
Gary Farber
“Via boibgboing….”
Marcus Wellby
God, I never could stand Marc Maron on AirAmerica, but recently caught some of his older stand-up on Sirius and he cracked me up. I think AirAmerica finds a way to suck talent out of their on air personalities.
I haven’t listened to AA in some time though. I had high hopes when it first came on, but even I get sick of all politics all the time.
D. Mason
I couldn’t think of a better way for Israel to say FU to Iran if I had 6 months and a team of comedy writers. Classic.
Steve
I’m impressed that you have the guts to read something controversial on the bus. I do not!
Tim F.
They got up and moved away because I was trying and failing to stifle tears of laughter. Kishon can be hit or miss, but when he’s on he’s awesome.
Halffasthero
I am thoroughly impressed. I think that might prove to be the perfect thing to start a healing process. Show the Muslims (and the world) what it means to be tolerant.
Islam used to be the most enlightened faith (and educated)in the world and could shake their finger at anyone. Shame them right back into being what they once were. And the Jews shall lead them.
Houstonboy
I think I am going to blow up a Humus stand because of what the Muslims are making the Jews do to themselves.
Not.
The Other Steve
Honestly, I think this is the proper response.
Of course the whacky right won’t get it, as their response to this has been… “Well you know, actually, being able to stop people from saying things does have a certain appeal. We may hate muslims, but we hate free speech more.”
Jay Levitt
Reminds me of a great quote I read in the Big Book of Jewish Humor, attributed to psychiatrist Martin Grotjahn: “One can almost see how a witty Jewish man carefully and cautiously takes a shapr dagger out of his enemy’s hands, sharpens it so that it can split a hair in midair, polishes it until it shines brightly, stabs himself with it, then returns it gallantly to the anti-Semite with the silent reproach: Now see whether you can do it half as well.”
Al Maviva
This is pretty damn funny. It’s very Mouse-ian.
It begs the question though: how will the “Muslim street” react when it finds out that the Jews are mocking the “Muslim street”‘s efforts to mock the Jews, by building a better, bloodthirstier (and funnier) Protocols of the Elders of Zion? I’m sure that the Mullahs and AQ clerics of the world can find something in the Koran that forbids the mocking of people who mock Jews, even if it involves the production of things that facially are much better at mocking Jews than the original Muslim produced effort. Yes, maybe that’s it. When the Muslim world finds out that Jews can mock Jews better than Muslims, maybe it will be the cause of great humiliation, and justification for an all out war on Israel, just as Israel’s pullout of many settlements was a cause of great humiliation, since the PA didn’t drive them out in a fierce battle. Hey, we should make a cartoon about that…
What will the end result of all this Jewish anti-Jewish humor be – a fatwa against Larry David? Will space time collapse in on itself, when the “Muslim street” riots to stop the publication of anti-Semitic cartoons penned by Jews in Israeli newspapers? Will angry hammer-wielding mobs of Palestinians riot, and make demands for lumber, and finally gather with Jimmah Carter to build a Habitat-for-Humanity Embassy for the Danes?
Oy vey.
Only one thing is clear. No matter what happens, it will only serve to make the Islamacists hate America more.
Tim F.
That’s another thing. The protestors in Pakistan have started chanting ‘death to America!’ Where’d that come from? It’s like their hymnal has one page and most of it’s empty.
skip
“Danish not Jewish”
Well, not Israeli anyway. I read in LeMonde and the Suddeutsche Zeitung that Flemming Rose, who cooked up the Mohammed cartoon contest, is indeed Jewish and a friend of Daniel Pipes of Campus Watch.
Has this since been disproven?
That might explain the link in some feverish minds.
SoCalJustice
Not from Iran, it’s not. It’s par for the course.
A strange decision would be if the newspaper ran a contest not involving Jews or the “myth” of the Holocaust, or if it condemned the violent responses around the Muslim world as ridiculous, ill-conceived overreactions to a manufactured controversy (courtesy of Imam Laban of Denmark), and implored its extremist co-religionists to grow up, stay in school, drink their milk, and put down the crack pipe.
yet another jeff
Can we just make American flags out of flame-retardant material?
The Other Steve
I suspect they’ll treat it as evidence that the holocaust was not real, and the Jews are out to take over the world.
Same response they always have, sadly.
yet another jeff
Wouldn’t condemning violent reponses be considered blasphemy by the Truly Unhinged?
Houstonboy
Skip
Who cares?
Bob In Pacifica
I was debating the Mohammed cartoon thing at other, more liberal blogs. The problem is that Islam is a religion made for a tribal desert culture of the seventh century. The whole thing about not creating an image of Mohammed was to prevent creating idols. But, of course, the human mind creates idols without pictures. And it a culture with printing presses, television, etc., an absolute ban on certain images smacks against reality.
All religions seem to suffer from their ancient sources. Think about basing the justice of land ownership based on what “God” “promised” “Jews” 2600 years ago. Don’t start me on Christianity. Religions make people hypocrites. My guess is that fundamentalists of all faiths will have a series of bloody wars to sort out what “God” wants. No, wait, that’s history.
So a rabbi, a priest and a Muslim cleric go into a bar… A group of Japanese golfers are struck by lightning, killed and go up to heaven where Saint Peter…
guav
I think the point of the Iranian anti-Semitic cartoon contest is because anti-Semitic cartoons are actually illegal in many of the countries that ran the Mohammed cartoons (in fact, simply denying the Holocaust is actually illegal in many European countries), so I think this is a reaction to the hypocrisy of calling the Mohammed cartoons a “free speech” issue when free speech doesn’t generally extend to inflammatory or ethnically-offensive cartoons.
Of course, the fact that many of these Arab countries have no compunctions about running anti-Semitic cartoons and do so quite frequently clearly undermines that whole argument. But I’m just sayin’ …
The Other Steve
As muslims have done with the Quran and the writings. Notice how all Islamic buildings and such are just covered with scripture?
They worship the words.
The other thing… Islam is kind of like Christianity, in that the Quran contradicts itself. That is, in the first part is basically the story of Mohammed fighting the Man, but then in the end Mohammed is the Man. Now that he’s in control he has a whole different set of rules. So the “laws” that Muslims abide by depends. Are they in control? Well then, these are the laws you must follow. But if they aren’t in control, then there is a whole different set of rules.
So it’s like any human behavior. To claim you are being upright and following the rules is easy when you manipulate the rules to fit your argument.
skip
“What’s the point”
The point is that Flemming Rose claimed to have started the cartoon contest as a free speech manifesto, yet he is a long-time pal of Daniel Pipes of Campus Watch–an organization that squelches free speech that, just coincidently, takes the other side in the Middle East.
For my part, I find it hard to understand how you expect to sell the benefits of free speech by deeply offending Moslems OR Jews.
Kimmitt
Well, they ARE fundies…
Al_Maviva
Tim Says: The protestors in Pakistan have started chanting ‘death to America!’ Where’d that come from? It’s like their hymnal has one page and most of it’s empty.
The radical hymnal does indeed have one note, and it’s against anything that’s not part of a sufficiently radical form of Islam. MSM coverage of the radicals’ concerted efforts to blow the original publication of the cartoons into a conflagration is strangely absent. I’d love to know more about the three or four forged cartoons (seen the one of the guy in the pig snout yet?), as well as the printed summary, the inflammatory tract on the cartoons that has been reprinted and passed around the South Asian / Middle Eastern world by the Islamic Brotherhood. It’s as if we can’t understand the narrative here, it’s so obvious and in such low-res that when we look closely at it we can’t read it.
But it’s simple, really. There is a substantial chunk of the Islamic world that not only hates the U.S., but hates European society, hates Asian society, hates its own society if it isn’t of sufficiently rigid (i.e. batshit crazy) sharia rule. They aren’t kidding about wanting to put the whole world under sharia law, and they aren’t unsophisticated either. They’ll do it through terrorism, or a riot-driven coup, or elections, whatever it takes.
The radicals’ actions, however, aren’t caused by anything other than the radicals. The U.S. catches crap no matter what because we are the big guy on the block. Moderate Muslims and even conservative but not crazy Muslims don’t like the radicals either, because they are on the radicals’ shitlist too. They are just of a slightly lower priority than we in the U.S. They are the folks we should be watching and concerned about, because they are the folks, long term, who have to win the war within Islam, and they are the folks we can live with long term. They probably feel pretty isolated lately, with the U.S.’s comments being widely interpreted as condemning Denmark.
The radicals’ activities play nicely into the narrative of the victimhood of the post colonial peoples. Your question Tim, amounts to “why do they hate us about the cartoons when we had nothing to do with these cartoons, and even condemned their publication?” We find it easy to view the radicals’ actions as a natural response to U.S. imperialism or whatever Chomsky’s meme of the day is – it fits the Marxist and neo-Marxist notion of wars of national liberation. So we assume the reaction to this or any other slight will fit the pattern of oppresion/insult & revolutionary reaction. It doesn’t work that way though. The radicals hate us because they hate us, just as they don’t much like libertarian gay Dutchmen, gays in their own country, women who can read, team sports, or art work. Hating the U.S. isn’t a starting negotiating point, for the radicals it is what they are. Anything we do is just a further excuse for immediate action demonstrating their hatred of us; so much the better if our maneuvering is clumsy or oppressive, which gives moderate Muslims a grievance that the radicals can work with to draw the moderates into the radical camp, or at least out of the pluralistic “we can live with the west” camp. The cartoons aren’t an offense per se; they are an excuse for the radicals to act offended, to rally the talibs and the less educated street rabble, and an excuse for a campaign to try to drive moderates out of the pluralist camp and into the radicals’ own camp. If they can destabilize the Pakistani government, or kill some (to their mind) depraved westerners while they are at it, so much the better.
“Why are they angry about this?” is a great question, but a question like that really only applies where moderate muslims are pissed about something – and from what my moderate muslim professional associates tell me, while the cartoons were offensive, they weren’t the stuff that most normal Muslims would be street fighting angry over.
srv
We will win their hearts and minds with blasphemy. It’s all about free speech. Sooner or later they’ll think just like us.
RonB
Profundus Maximus has spoken.
Jesus. Now that everyone has been thoroughly schooled, shut up and go vote Republican.
Chris Johnson
Of course the Jewish are funnier. I think the idea is that if you’re laughing hard enough, you might miss :)
Chris in Cali
That should really take the wind out of the sails of this controversy!
On a side note, Andrew of Arabia is also good for a laugh every now and then.
The Other Steve
You may have a point. I’ve been trying to follow that lead and find more links between this Rose and Pipes fellas, but I can’t find much of anything.
Beej
Al Maviva
Loved your first post! And you gotta love this Israeli reaction. Finally a response that is “proportional” to the seriousness of this issue.
Skip
” I’ve been trying to follow that lead and find more links between this Rose and Pipes fellas, but I can’t find much of anything.”
Try Wayne Madsen’s blog and do a search for Flemming Rose. It is an intriguing site anyway, especially with regard to NSA.
Skip
srv:”We will win their hearts and minds with blasphemy. It’s all about free speech. Sooner or later they’ll think just like us.”
Nicely put. And to the point.