So a Somali man whose faith is so weak he feels he has to kill someone who parodies the prophet Mohammed tried to kill one of the Danish cartoonists whose cartoons outraged Muslims around the world who never even bothered to look at the cartoons.

Let's face it. If your faith is so weak you feel threatened by cartoons of your religious figures, the problem is with you, not with the people writing the cartoons.

In honor of those Muslims whose faith is so weak, I reprint here the original Danish cartoons. Those who bother to actually look at them will note that in reality most of them are not even critical of Islam or Mohammed and, in fact, some are actually making fun of Western stereotypes of Muslims. So for the Somali idiot who tried to kill the Danish cartoonist, I reprint those cartoons for YOU: (thanks to prophetcartoons.com)

These first two are making fun of the newspaper that commissioned the cartoons and so should in no way be offensive to Muslims.

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Tell(www.tellng.com), one of the foremost magazines in Nigeria devoted this week's edition to what it calls The Other Side of Islam in Nigeria. A curious topic indeed. I really wanted to know what this other side of Islam was so I decided to purchase a copy of the magazine. After going through it I was disappointed because I found out that Tell had repeated the same mistake many journals and newspapers in Nigeria have made in the past. It treated the serious threat of Islamic fanaticism in Nigeria with kid gloves.
The magazine identified the Other Side of Islam as the violent plot to islamize the country.(That is correct). It attributed the upsurge in islamic radicalism in northern Nigeria to 'mass poverty, illiteracy and ignorance'.(That is what analysts always say) And those interviewed by the magazine said that economic development and infrastructural transformation would be the solution.(Are they sure?)
Personally I think the person who anchored the story and those interviewed shied away from the truth about the underlying causes of religious fundamentalism in northern Nigeria. And that is part of the problem. Whenever it comes to diagnosing and treating the disease of islamic fanaticism, nobody wants to call a spade a spade. Nobody wants to hit the nail at the head.
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The relationship between Muslim Fundamentalists and Mickey Mouse gets stranger and stranger. From Guysen International News:

A sheik from Saudi Arabia, a former diplomat posted in Washington, has put out a fatwa on Mickey Mouse, calling him the new enemy of Islam. "Mickey Mouse is a soldier of Satan, and everything he touches becomes impure," said Sheik Muhammad al-Munajid. (Guysen.International.News)

"According to sharia law, the mouse is a repugnant and corrupting animal," he said during a show broadcast by Al-Majd television.

Interestingly, there is some similarity between the views of Muslim Fundmentalists and Baptist Fundmentalists regarding Disney. Baptists were raging against Disney's corrupting influence (I kid you not) some 11 years before this Saudi sheik jumped on the bandwagon. From Religious Tolerance.org:
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In 2005 there was much sound a fury about a series of Danish Cartoons portraying the prophet Mohammed. The bottom line was that several Danish cartoonists drew cartoons including the prophet as part of a newspaper's publicity stunt. Two of the cartoons were making fun of the newspaper's publicity stunt itself. Two were, arguably, based on racial stereotypes. At least one specifically addressed Western stereotypes of Muslims. In other words, the cartoons were a mixed bag of attitudes towards Islam and the West's attitudes towards Islam.

The overwhelming reaction in the Muslim world was of outrage, often with no real knowledge of the actual cartoons.

This controversy has come back. One of the cartoonists, Kurt Westergaard, was targeted for death by Muslim terrorists. This plot was stopped by the Danish police. In response to the terrorist threat 11 Danish newspapers reprinted Kurt Westergaard's original cartoon...further pissing off Muslim nations.

Again...much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In response to this new controversy, I want to show all 12 of the original Danish cartoons followed by my public response to the cartoons and the controversy. Folks, there are major issues of tolerance, freedom of expression, and basic human decency involved here. When someone insults you (which MOST of the cartoons were NOT doing) you don't kill them or threaten them with death. If you do, you are essentially a psychopath. You can insult them back, boycott them, sue them...whatever. But to kill someone or threaten someone with death over a cartoon is insane. So, here are the cartoons and my original comments:
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Current TV, Al Gore's innovative TV channel, has done some pretty amazing things. They got film crews into North Korea, into places in Iraq far from the Green Zone, and were the first journalists into a Somalia arms market before the Islamic Fundamentalists took Mogadishu. It is their willingness to go where most journalists don't have the balls to go that makes the network worth watching.

Back when they went in to film Mogadishu in chaos, with battling warlords and their factions making arms dealing a major industry, it was astonishing the constant aura of threat that permeated Mogadishu under the warlords. These are the people Clinton had nearly defeated, but lack of Congressional support led to a withdrawal that allowed a resurgence of chaos. And Bush sat back allowing that chaos to happen, making the Islamic Fundamentalists the ONLY option Somalis had for stability.

When I participated in a live radio broadcast some months back discussing the initial takeover by the Islamic Fundamentalists, most of the Somalis who participated considered the Islamic takeover a good thing for one reason: it promised stability. They expressed their appreciation for the American intervention and a sense of betrayal at the American withdrawal. In the absence of American influence, they saw the fundamentalists as the only way to end the chaos.

And so Mogadishu and the whole Southern half of Somalia fell to fundamentalists and Bush did nothing. By and large the Western Press did nothing but report from a distance. But CurrentTV went in to see what life was like under the Somali Taliban.
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Back in June, I think it was, my blogging about Bush's disastrous foreign policy failures enabling a rising Islamic Fundamentalist Caliphate, as I described it, got the attention of BBC radio. They invited me to participate in a call in program about the rise of Islamic fundamentalists in Somalia, which was my first 30 minutes of fame. I didn't really feel like I came off well on their show as it wasn't really a format I was comfortable with, but it sure was flattering to have my blogging noticed!

Since then I have continued to write about our increasing losses to Islamic fundamentalism and our failures to counter it. Most recently I wrote about the rise of fundamentalists in Bahrain. I criticize the Republicans for failing to back Clinton's attempts to stabilize Somalia and to stop al-Qaeda, instead chastising him for being "obsessed with al-Qaeda" as if that was a bad thing. I criticize Bush for putting the war against the terrorists who attacked us on the back burner in his rush to attack the two Muslim nations arguably most opposed to al-Qaeda: Iraq and Iran. By picking on these three groups, Bush has picked fights with three completely disparate parts of the Muslim world: secular Sunni, fundamentalist Sunni and fundamentalist Shi'ite. Attacking all three in essence confirms in the eyes of much of the world the accusation that Bush has declared a Crusade on all Islam.
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