Mark Steyn weighs in with his usual pointed (and hilarious) commentary concerning the recent CAIR flap with Johnny Hart's B.C. cartoon:
Although I agreed of course that Islamophobic cartooning was the most pressing issue of the week, in my usual shallow way I'd become distracted by some of the day's more trivial stories - the 11 Hindus burnt alive by a Muslim gang in Bangladesh, the 13 Christian churches torched by Muslim rioters in the Nigerian town of Kazaure, and the 27 Turks and Britons murdered by Muslim terrorists in Istanbul.
No dead Jews in that particular day's headlines, but otherwise a good haul of Hindus, Christians and, of course, Muslims. Every society has its ugly side: in America, the problem is stone-age cartoons; in Nigeria, it's stone-age - or stoning age - reality. But one can't help noticing that polysemic cartooning seems a notably ineffective way of stirring up anti-Muslim feeling, at least when one looks at preliminary statistics for Muslims murdered in America this Ramadan, compared with Muslims murdered in, say, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Every society has its ugly side: in America, the problem is stone-age cartoons; in Nigeria, it's stone-age - or stoning age - reality.
If Mr. Steyn wants to see stone age reality in America, he need look no further than his local abortion clinic.
You're half-right, Coward: is there any evidence that Stone Age Man destroyed his own offspring in the womb? Our evils are peculiarly advanced, not retrograde.
Eric,
I have no such evidence, but I do know that infanticide has been with us for quite some time. The Ancient Romans and Greeks did it and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians (Carthage being a colony from Phoenicia) made a religion out of it. None of those were stone age, but neither for that matter is Nigeria.
I think he makes a valid point. We need to be less concerned about non-P.C. cartoons and more concerned about Muslim aggression against Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
But Anonymous also makes a valid point: before America corrects the flaws of the world (tries to take the splinters out of its brothers' eyes), maybe it needs to end abortion (take the beam out of its own eye).
Nathan,
Ending abortion is no more possible than ending murder, ending theft, or ending rape. What is possible is to have just laws that value and protect the life and dignity of the unborn just as we have laws that value and protect the life, diginity, and even property of the born.