Monday, April 14, 2008

Doesn’t Plantu Makes Everyone Gag, Though?


Gagwatch:

The attempt to organise a boycott (via) of Danish products in Saudi Arabia is still rumbling on and Hatim Misfir, a government official in the country, has trotted out the old canard about freedom of press and expression being okay as long as no-one uses it.

Last week, French cartoonist Plantu appeared to endorse this position, expressing concern over renewed tensions between the West and the Islamic world after the republication of the cartoons.
Of course he’s all about tolerance, so long as he’s completely intolerant of the branch of civilization that tolerates him. His intellectual limits are obvious:
After the 2006 controversy, he had launched the initiative "Cartooning for peace" with caricaturists from around the world to promote tolerance and mutual understanding between cultures.
his isn’t a philosophical position, it’s a payoff and an exchange. While he has friends cartooning in the Arab world, their fate isn’t the matter at hand what Euro-lefties wring their hands about getting their own societies to hold some people to a different standards as others. No, what compels them to this is a sort of bigotry that makes them unable to distinguish between Arabs and Islamists. In particular those Islamists who wouldn’t tolerate his cartoons for a moment.

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