Michelle was on Hannity and Colmes Tuesday night. Here follows the transcript.
Colmes: Deadly rioting continues tonight throughout the Muslim world over cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammed carried in European newspapers. Iran is one of the countries with the largest protests and today it’s leading newspaper announced a contest to find the best cartoons about the Holocaust. Joining us now are columnist Michelle Malkin and the author of Why They Don’t Hate Us University of California, Irvine, Professor of Islamic Studies Mark Levine.
Mark, what do you make of this? What should we be looking at here in terms of when we watch, see these kinds of protests, violent in many cases. And what do you make of it?
Levine: First of all thanks for having me back on and I think the first thing we need to do is not generalize. At most, one out of every 100,000 Muslims in the world is participating and maybe one out of every million are actually participating in some kind of violent way. So we don’t want to generalize this into some kind of clash of civilizations, which a lot of people wish it was, but which so far it hasn’t become. I’ll just tell you what happened in my house, when I first heard about this, the uproar last week, or the renewed uproar. I had a fairly well known Muslim religious scholar staying with me and the first thing he wanted to do, he said, “Let’s get on the web and see these things.” And when he looked at them, of course, supposedly Muslims aren’t supposed to look at depictions of Mohammed, he looked at them and he smiled, not because he thought they were good, but at how childish and crude they were. And, you know, this is the response of Muslim leaders all across the world. So we need to understand that this is, while they’re very newsworthy and it’s very catchy to see the flames and everything, it’s by no means the vast majority.
Colmes: Michelle Malkin, the news media, of course, is focusing on the violence and the people who are inciting violence as a result of this. And, as Mark points out, is a small percentage of the 1.4 billion Muslims in the world, and it’s unfortunate to use this to tag an entire race and group of people, an entire religion, as a violent religion, which it is not. Would you agree?
Malkin: Well, that’s not what I’m doing Alan. And I agree with Mr. Levine that we shouldn’t generalize. And one of the main problems with this entire debate is that the vast majority of people who are hearing about this conflagration have not actually seen all twelve cartoons. That’s why I published them on my website. And in the face of all these American newspapers and broadcast media outlets, that won’t publish them. And that’s why, in the interest of informed journalism, I brought all twelve with me today. If you actually look at all twelve in context, it’s absolutely clear that that these cartoons were not published by Jyllands-Posten to deliberately provoke or to denigrate the religion of Islam. Look at the first three top cartoons, they are completely innocuous, they are not “crude” as Mr. Levine described, don’t trust people who are describing the cartoons for you. Look at them for yourselves. There’s nothing wrong with those top three photographs. And, in fact, if you look at the other artwork, six of the twelve don’t even depict Mohammed. Four of the twelve are broaching directly the topic of intimidation of European artists in the face of radical Islam. And, yes, there’s the one at the bottom that everyone’s talking about with the bomb, to the extent that any American media publishes any of these cartoons at all, it’s always the one that’s arguably the most inflammatory, but even that one has a point and that is the hijacking of Islam by radicals and militants.
Hannity: Mark, let me follow up on that point. How many newspapers in the region have shown anti-semitic, anti-American, anti-Bush, anti-Christian, anti-Catholic cartoons and there is limited or no outrage? We showed some of them on this program last night.Levine: You’re absolutely right.
Hannity: That’s a problem.
Levine: You’re right. And this is why one doesn’t justify the other.
Hannity: That’s a good point.
Levine: I think the defense of free speech on all sides gets a little bit ludicrous. I mean, people, you know, the New York Times could if it wanted to, run an op-ed using the “n” word, or calling Jews bad names, or Christians. It could do that, but it has no editorial reason for doing so, there’d be no news value in doing it, so publishing these cartoons, I don’t think this was just to inform people. It clearly, especially in the context of Denmark, was to inflame an already hot situation.
Hannity: You know something, there’s been a lot cartoons, about a lot of religions, a lot of, frankly insensitive and lacking in taste. And I don’t deny any of that’s true in the case of some of these. But Michelle, you know, one of the things that bothers me, you have newspapers in this country. I haven’t seen the Washington Post run this as a news story. The Washington Post didn’t have any problem running the Tole cartoon last week using soldiers who lost their arms and legs to make a political point. Yet they say this about sensitivity and good taste here.
Malkin: Yeah, that’s exactly right Sean, and the obvious point about the glaring double standards in our American media it needs to be repeated. And, of course, you’ve got to make that point in the context of showing all twelve cartoons. And I do not concede, Mr. Levine, that these twelve cartoons are any near on the order of kind of cartoons and filth that are propogated in the Arab media, state subsidized media, every single day in this world. And, you know, of course, the point is that Judaism and Christianity and the Hindu religion are slighted or insulted. People don’t go around, around this country, around this world, waving swords and promising to behead, annihilate and massacre their believers.
Levine: Absolutely.
Colmes: Michelle, we’re out of time. Michelle we thank you. Mark we thank you. Unfortunately we’re out of time for this segment. We thank you both very much.
I don’t know where Mr. Levine got the idea that Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons to inflame. His quote (from above) “It clearly, especially in the context of Denmark, was to inflame an already hot situation.”. What already hot situation Mr. Levine? The cartoons were originally published in September in Denmark. I don’t remember any inflammation from them then. Egypt published these same cartoons in October. (via Gateway Pundit) There was no inflammation then either.
The inflammation came after elections in Palestine and Egypt. The inflammation came after the IAEA is to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, the next chairmanship (by rotation) is due to be Denmark.
Michelle’s follow-up post and lots more on the cartoons at her site.
Video of the segment at Expose the Left.
Linked by Michelle Malkin again. Thank you!
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