Saturday, February 04, 2006

My Savior can kick your Prophet's ass...

We'd like to take a shot at explaining some of what's going on right now in this "freedom of expression" dispute between the Middle East and Europe. We'll finish it up by showing why Asia will eventually rule the world.

We'd like to present an image that may serve better to present exactly why the outrage (though four months later) has boiled over about the silly cartoons of ole' Mo(hammed). So, first, imagine your one of the many inhabitants of a Middle Eastern country who is not blessed enough to be literate. You've never read a paper. In fact, you've never read anything.

You can understand pictures though, and this morning someone shoved a picture of your beloved prophet Mo. In your life, God is the most important aspect, and Mo is God's right hand man. Like Brandt to Jeffrey Lebowski (though you, right there, you don't know what I'm talking about). Mo's the guy that says, "Her life is in your hands." Twice, because God told him to.

Imagine, then, someone showed you a picture from some newspaper far, far away where almost everyone knows how to read and there are more or less, even in such a small nation, 2.5 million more internet users than your country. You don't know all that though, because you don't have the internet. If you did (and you could read), you'd probably be worried about being arrested for whatever it was you decided to do.

This picture shows Mo, God's homeboy, with a fuse sticking out of his turban like a bomb. You're not fooled, because you've heard all about these Western governments from your leaders. You know exactly how they're determined to keep you down. Most of all, you know (from your leaders) that they are the reason (especially the US) that your poor.

You're pissed.

Every time you look at that picture, you don't see Mo. No, you see Jesus, one foot in Europe, one in the US, spread eagle over the Atlantic. Jesus is lifting up his tunic and spanking his ass in front of the entire Middle East, saying, "What are you gonna do about it, Ahmed?"

Jesus would then, if it were an animation, teabag Mo.

Now that we've thoroughly offended everything, we'd like to say, "Exactly." Because, just as Jesus had nothing to do with those caricatures of Mohammed and the hate talk that ensued, neither did Mohammed. This whole situation has little to do with religion, just like the flag burnings have nothing to do with the flags.

The most obvious reason this is not really a religious issue, well, would be the lack of fatwas for the murder of thousands of people in London, Spain, the United States, etc. at the command of Osama "Yo' Mama" Bin Laden (may Toby Keith rot in hell for his irrisistable cognomen) until May 2005.

This isn't a critic of Muslims, their religion, or religion in general. This is a critique of the fact that many religious people let political figures dictate their perception of religion, to the point that no one can distinguish the one from the other. It is exactly this reason that gets Muslims in Damascas burning flags and poor Americans in Appalachia voting against their needs.

There's is so much more to this cycle: Europe's integration problems, European immigrants integration problems, the lack of industry in Arab nations (just look at the dismal number of patents coming from the region), the lack of education in the Arab world.

The moral of the story: Leave Jesus and Mohammed out of this, because your political figures already have.

As for what Asia has to do with any of this, well, they don't really have the religious quibbles there that we have in the West and Middle East. That provides for very few barricades in march towards taking over the world economy (no, that doesn't mean they have no morals).

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