Cleric offers $1 million bounty to kill cartoonist

[MrBrau1]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060217/ap_on_re_mi_ea/prophet_drawings

 

[DaveC]

Yeah, that's a fantastic way to fight the stereotypes in the cartoons.

I don't get it. Denmark draws Mohammed with a bomb for a turban, and the Islamic community gets mad, saying that this does not represent their religion. And then one of their leaders goes right out and does this.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Would be too tit-for-tat to put a bounty on the Clerics head - or maybe a bullet in it?



Please don't kill the Cleric, just mock his prophet until he gets upset - put some scandalous cartoon images in his head.

 

[verte76]

This is barbaric.

 

[Muggsy]

that's a really stupid reaction... but you know what? I think that the cartoonist was looking what he didn't lost, drawing that. I mean, what kind of reaction was he expecting ? it was obvious that radical sectors would get pissed after seing that drawing.

When the photographer Andrés Serrano did his "piss christ" many people from the catholic and christian sectors got really mad , they didn't got violent but the anger was there. But Serrano had a complete discurse after the image, so the pic wasn't gratuite at all. I'm not saying that this kind of art doesn't have to be done ( I can't say that!) but I say that if you do a piece or art or something that may offend some people in a way or another you have to be prepared for the consecuences. If you are not, you are not a good artist with integrity, that what i think,

 

[Justin24]

Jeez they say they dont want to be stereotyped, yet they show their true colors. I think they need to update their lifestyles and be a little more liberal. I think they all suffer from Blue Balls Syndrome.

 

[nbcrusader]

What is a cleric doing with $1 Million? Does he have his own television show?

 

[verte76]

What is a cleric doing with $1 Million? Does he have his own television show?

It's been said that Islam is a merchant-friendly culture. I never thought it could go this far.

 

[Muggsy]

I would kill him ... but that's because his drawing is ugly .... hehehehehehehe


and, yeah... I can draw better than him... in fact I'm a lot more respecful and inteligent than him. I wouldn't do a thing like that, cuz being muslim doesn't mean to be violent, not all the people who follows the Coran is violent, and Mahoma is not a symbol of violence. In his attempt to show the muslim people as violent the cartoonist failled, showing himself and the people who are behind him as ignorants.

 

[A_Wanderer]

They were drawing cartoons in response to a childrens author being unable to get a picture of Mohammed because artists were in fear. The cartoon fiasco has proven that if you offend Islam you will risk death even if you live in the western world.

If you have a situation where you risk death for a form of expression that does not harm anybody then something is very seriously wrong.

There is no right not to be offended and there is no law that we have to be respectful of religion. There is on the other hand laws against murder and death threats. They are not morally the same and responsibility for this rests firmly upon those inciting violence against the cartoonists and those who carry out illegal actions.

I hate to say it but this entire fiasco has only given more evidence towards those that treat Islam as a backwards and violent religion, and I can't say that I entirely disagree.

 

[Se7en]

It's been said that Islam is a merchant-friendly culture. I never thought it could go this far.

isn't that partly how the religion came to be? as a way to unite the arabian peninsula for political & economic gain? that's certainly how it seemed in my second age of empires course several years ago.

 

[A_Wanderer]

More info, the bounty was not 1 million dollars, rather 1.5 million rupees

A Pakistani cleric today offered 1.5m rupees (£9,600) and a car as a reward to anyone who killed the cartoonist who drew images of the prophet Muhammad.
Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi, a prayer leader at the Mohabat Khan mosque in Peshawar, made the announcement to a 1,000-strong crowd outside the mosque after Friday prayers.

"This is a unanimous decision by all imams that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed, and whoever will take this insulting man to his end will get this prize," he said

link

Well thats alright, probably not worth the trouble

But then again

A minister in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Haji Yaqub, announces an $11m (£6.3m) reward for anyone who beheads the cartoonist who drew the images.

Taken from the BBC website.

 

[AussieU2fanman]

Sigh, I don't see the great wall of Western/Eastern tension dying down anytime soon, it sure as hell is going to get worse before it gets better.
One thing I'm still not quite clear on, how would we classify the Muslims that are causing all this violence and retaliation towards Western symbols? Are these regular Qu'ran abiding Muslims or idiotic/ignorant Extremists? They must be extremists because the Qu'ran surely would condemn such actions, and if it doesn't condemn these actions, what a *******up religion/way of life it truely is and I wouldn't be sorry for saying that. Any religion any would support such violence in the retaliation for a cartoon portraying something they find offensive to their way of life, seems quite contrary to my definition of religion.

 

[U2Man]

What is a cleric doing with $1 Million? Does he have his own television show?

 

[verte76]

Mohammed did want to unify the Arab world. When he was born there was no central authority in Arabia. The basic unit of society was the tribe. To this day, the basic unit of the Arabian society is the tribe. Remember, the modern countries were designated by European powers. Mohammed unified all of Arabia, then after he died they grabbed Syria and the Persian Empire, then northern Africa, then there was a split and pretty soon you had three rival claimants to the caliphate (the leadership of the Islamic world) and two branches of Islam, the Sunni and the Shi'ites.

 

[nbcrusader]

Mohammed did want to unify the Arab world. When he was born there was no central authority in Arabia. The basic unit of society was the tribe. To this day, the basic unit of the Arabian society is the tribe. Remember, the modern countries were designated by European powers. Mohammed unified all of Arabia, then after he died they grabbed Syria and the Persian Empire, then northern Africa, then there was a split and pretty soon you had three rival claimants to the caliphate (the leadership of the Islamic world) and two branches of Islam, the Sunni and the Shi'ites.

Interesting, his method of unification is playing out again today.

 

[verte76]

The important thing is that basically Arabs don't care about national borders. They care about their tribe. Al-Zarkawi doesn't care that he's Jordanian by birth. He cares about his membership in his tribe. It's different for other ethnic groups. A Turk is very proud to be a Turk, and they don't have tribes in Turkey. I don't know that much about Persian customs. The Kurds are ethnically Persian, that's why there's so much friction between them and the Turks.

 

[nbcrusader]

So, when Muslims talk about protecting "their land" it is an undefined region roughly surrounding Mecca and Jerusalem and places in between?

 

[verte76]

So, when Muslims talk about protecting "their land" it is an undefined region roughly surrounding Mecca and Jerusalem and places in between?

It's always been sort of vague. The Ottoman Turks didn't impose uniformity and allowed Jewish and Christian worship in their lands. The sultan and the caliph (religious monarch) were two different people. Originally there was only one ruler, a caliph. This word is anglicised from the Arabic and means successor--a successor to Mohommed. I believe it's only Saudi Arabia that doesn't allow other religions to be practiced on their land. The Palestinians only started to raise a stink about their situation when a whole non-Muslim nation, Israel, was created. The Muslims were irked because they wanted Jerusalem, and now they feel like it's occupied by a "foreign power".

 

[yolland]

Reuters, Feb. 18, 2006

One of the cartoonists, asking for anonymity, said this has not been the first threat. "The drawing I made was meant as a practical joke aimed at the paper and yet I have been dragged into this absurd situation," the cartoonist told Reuters. "I didn't think anyone outside the newspaper's readers would see the cartoon and now a billion people have. It's a surreal situation."

 

[anitram]

It's always been sort of vague. The Ottoman Turks didn't impose uniformity and allowed Jewish and Christian worship in their lands.

Sure they did.

They arrived in the Balkans, and gave you a choice - convert or have your head chopped off. Do you have any idea how many people there died at the hands of the Ottomans?

For example, prior to the arrival of the Ottomans, Bosnia was a country populated by ethnic Serbs and Croats, both of whom are Christian (Orthodox and Catholic, respectively). The Turks invaded, and pillaged the area, forcibly converting people, murdering thousands. This is how you got a Muslim population in what is Bosnia today. It was most certainly NOT done by peaceful means and the Turks had absolutely no respect for Christian worship.

 

[verte76]

Then how come the Jews of Bursa welcomed the Turks as liberators and were glad that the Greeks got the hell out of town? Why was an invitation sent out to the Jews to come settle in the Ottoman Empire when Ferdinand and Isabella kicked them out of Spain? True, some churches were turned into mosques, most notable Santa Sophia, and they enslaved a whole bunch of Slavic Christians because they weren't allowed to enslave Muslims. They got the kids' names out of parish churches in the Balkans, so there must have been some life in these institutions.

 

[verte76]

Sure they did.

They arrived in the Balkans, and gave you a choice - convert or have your head chopped off. Do you have any idea how many people there died at the hands of the Ottomans?

For example, prior to the arrival of the Ottomans, Bosnia was a country populated by ethnic Serbs and Croats, both of whom are Christian (Orthodox and Catholic, respectively). The Turks invaded, and pillaged the area, forcibly converting people, murdering thousands. This is how you got a Muslim population in what is Bosnia today. It was most certainly NOT done by peaceful means and the Turks had absolutely no respect for Christian worship.

Perhaps they harrassed Christians but not Jews?

 

[anitram]

Well of course they didn't manage to convert everyone. The Croats of Croatia proper survived largely because they were colonized by Austria-Hungary at the time, and the borderline held against the Turks. The majority of the Serbs resisted conversion, and in fact this was the first step in the ethnic strife in the Balkans. The Ottomans forcibly converted a chunk of the population and then subjugated the remainder Christian population for hundreds of years, setting up resentment which started rearing its head soon thereafter.

From Demetrios Constantelos. “The ‘Neomartyrs’ as Evidence for Methods and Motives Leading to Conversion and Martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 1978, Vol. 23:

The phenomenon of forcible conversion, including coercive en masse conversions, persisted throughout the 16th century, as discussed by Constantelos in his analysis of neomartyrdom in the Ottoman Empire:

…mass forced conversions were recorded during the caliphates of Selim I (1512-1520),…Selim II (1566-1574), and Murat III (1574-1595). On the occasion of some anniversary, such as the capture of a city, or a national holiday, many rayahs were forced to apostacize. On the day of the circumcision of Mohammed III great numbers of Christians (Albanians, Greeks, Slavs) were forced to convert to Islam.

Constantelos concludes:

The story of the neomartyrs indicates that there was no liberty of conscience in the Ottoman Empire and that religious persecution was never absent from the state. Justice was subject to the passions of judges as well as of the crowds, and it was applied with a double standard, lenient for Muslims and harsh for Christians and others. The view that the Ottoman Turks pursued a policy of religious toleration in order to promote a fusion of the Turks with the conquered populations is not sustained by the facts.

 

[verte76]

Aren't the Bosnians descended from the Bogomils, who were Gnostics to begin with? They had their origins in tenth-century Bulgaria and were led by a charismatic leader named, surprise, surprise, Bogomil. Didn't they get kicked out of there due to persecution by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church? The Bogomils were later harrassed by the Catholic Hungarians, and then I honestly thought they became the Bosnians. I read a translation of a Bulgarian newspaper that blasted the Turkish occupation of Bulgaria as a four-hundred year old nightmare. Needless to say the Turks don't discuss it this way. Who in the hell are you supposed to believe?

 

[anitram]

No, the Turks converted (forcibly and by pressure) European Christian Slavs living in Bosnia to Islam.

This is the group which is today known as the Bosnian Muslims. The remainder of the Bosnian population - Croats and Serbs who lived in the region but escaped conversion for centuries - were previously also called Bosnians, but since the war they now generally just go by their ethnicity. There is really no such thing as a Bosnian ethnicity, genetically speaking.

 

[A_Wanderer]

So, when Muslims talk about protecting "their land" it is an undefined region roughly surrounding Mecca and Jerusalem and places in between?

No it is any and all land that is or has been under Islamic rule: al Andalus, Sicily and every piece of land taken up by Israel.

 

[verte76]

Did they do this just at the conquest, or follow the policy until the modern era when the Ottoman Empire collapsed? The Janisseries were originally Christian when they nabbed them in the Balkans as they couldn't enslave Muslims. These kids were all converted by force to Islam when they got to school in Asia Minor. I need to dig up my medieval historical atlas. It will help if I can find the damn thing.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Mohammed
((~{>

Mohammed playing Little Orphan Annie
(((8~{>

Mohammed as a pirate
(((P~{>

Mohammed on a bad turban day
))):~{>

Mohammed with sand in his eye
(((;~{>

Mohammed wearing sunglasses
(((B~{>

Mohammed with a bomb in his turban
*-O~{>

Mohammed on a *really* bad turban day.
)8~{>

blasphemy

 

[financeguy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathars

Example of forced conversions at the time of the Inquisition.