A Culture of Contradictions, Review City Pakistan

Review City Pakistan
www.geocities.com/reviewcity
Whether it was the bloody crusades, continual suicide bombings aimed at obliterating enemies of God’s last religion or the war-bent aftermath of 9/11, nothing has made the ongoing clash of civilizations more apparent than a puny little cartoon, one that has brought to light the ugly face of western contempt. The debacle of a barbaric portrait of a man Muslims hold dearer than any ideal fathomable has proved to be nothing but a resounding slap on the face after all our years of ass kissing and nauseating yelps of enthusiasm when asked to ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘roll over’ and ‘play dead’.
Depicting Hazrat Mohommad (PBUH) as a terrorist encapsulating a bomb for a turban seems to be the tip of an iceberg that has its vice-like grips of intolerance deeply rooted within a hotbed of social deconstruction. The west manages to give away time and again just how trigger-happy it can be when it comes to provoking the sentiments of the third world. Falling back on the crappiest excuse in the book, one that entails ‘freedom of the press’, they have demonstrated a culture of contradictions all of their very own. Is it not these very same Europeans who banned the head-scarf in France, who frisk search every man with a beard and suspicious name (read Muhammad) at almost every airport in the world and seek to root out all immigrants on the basis of their ties with suspected militants who have no more affiliation with them than Osama has with Heidi Klum? Freedom of art, craft and movement, my foot.The stance of the Danish government is to vindicate the cartoons’ right to be published under the banner of unrestraint but, instead, they should really ask themselves one question: does freedom of speech really have to come at the cost of having to tolerate speech one finds abhorrent? Ever find yourself asking just when and where the ‘liberalist’ west will draw the last straw? I know I do.
We Muslims may be called fanatics (and I do not, for a single second, doubt that we’d be much better off without a few radical elements), anarchists against the idea of pacifism and a far cry from tolerant in pursuits such as gender equality and the like, but one thing we are not and never have been are defilers of the prophets of any God sent creed, be it Jesus, Moses or any other messiah in a list that runs into the thousands.
It’s not our problem that fractions in the west have made Jesus Christ ‘superstar’ the butt of many perverse jokes, that they make dashboard tributes of him winking and flashing the thumbs up sign while personifying his new-found and revamped image of being an all round ‘nice guy’ and making movies such as The Last Temptation Of Christ in which he is shown giving in to the allure of a life less extraordinary. It’s not our problem that throughout the ages, Christians the world over are beginning to lose their faith for a new world order, one in which ‘sensibilities’ may be aversely affected if prayers are offered in schools, the word ‘God’ is not to be mentioned in front of impressionable young kids and the advent of a Muslim uprising is seen as a threat to life as they know it. It’s not our problem when radical Christian elements blow up abortion clinics to protect their Catholic faith and it sure as hell isn’t our problem when priests and other clerics of the holy order fondle young alter and choir boys due to their pent-up homosexual tendencies. But it is our problem if they jump onto the bandwagon of religious regurgitation by repulsively illustrating the entire enormity of our 1500 year-old faith within a few strokes of the hand that holds the pen of blasphemy in a comic strip of degradation.
What the west wanted, the west got: a backlash of violence and hatred that has the unguided potential to spew forth a tsunami of vengeance and brute force which is exactly the kind of reaction we have going against us. It’s pretty obvious that this is going to be played down as an ‘extreme’ answer by ‘barbaric’ religious fundamentalists, exactly the kind of image we’re trying to throw out the blood splattered window. Whether sufi, progressive or extremist, we all feel pretty passionate about the Prophet’s depiction and aren’t afraid to show it.
However, this is where our own common sense should come into play. Do we really want to give those Danish and European flag bearers of emancipation the response they’re crossing fingers for by picking up our guns, torching the councils of their representation and chanting hate slogans or do we opt for the more cool and calculated approach by waging a quieter, smarter war on liberal ignorance. The boycott of Danish goods is cute, but it can get a whole lot cuter with a 1.3 billion Muslim strong campaign against the documentations of degradation through a thought process that does not entail violence. Whatever the answer is, it does not lie in mayhem and disorder.
This fiasco is not about Christians vs. Muslims or the West vs. Islam, it is about the incapacity of a nation of focused fools to understand that they cannot, under any circumstances, play around with the divine sentiments of those who in many a case put their faith before their lives. That’s playing with fire territory so don’t go crying to mommy when your pants get burnt.
This was solely a premeditated act of disconcertation and malicious provocation, one that requires an immediate apology and rebuking of any further efforts to reprint this joke of expressional freedom.
Review City Pakistan
www.geocities.com/reviewcity