I think it’s safe to assume that Lady Gaga is more famous that this Chick guy. Here she is yesterday wearing a burka and a purse that says cunt. Who or what the cunt refers to is not mentioned. In any case, why no anti-Gaga riots? Because you’d be at fault to look for reason in the things that surface and leads to riots. There is no logic. It’s completely random. Actually I faintly remember Hannah Arendt or Orwell write something about this. This kind of terror is supposed to be at random for it to have maximum effect. The victims are never to feel safe.
Incidentally the largest effect of this most recent set of riots seems to be to have removed the Syrian conflict from the front page. It’s all about priorities. Muslims killed by the tens of thousand vers. an amateurish movie by an unknown nobody. The Arab street has chosen.
It’s not up to “the Arab street” to decide which stories will make it onto the front pages of Western news media.
I quite agree with you that some anti-American rioting by clueless fundamentalist-Muslim mobs over a stupid loon’s hate-speech video, even if a handful of Americans tragically lost their lives as a result of it, is less intrinsically important in the context of world news than the violent toppling of the Syrian regime. But is anybody surprised that Western media, particularly American ones, consider the former to be a bigger story?
It’s Western news editors and news consumers who have currently “removed the Syrian conflict from the front page”, not “the Arab street”.
I used to see Chick tracts all the time. I liked finding new ones and sharing them with my friends. We’d read them aloud when we were very stoned.
Exactly. We’ve seen this often enough to know these sorts of controversies rarely just happen. They often start months after the so-called insult to Islam was made and broadcast or published.
None, because there are no cases of the Bible borrowing from older religions, obvious or otherwise.
Now I can’t tell if I am being whooshed or not.
Um…what? Yes indeed, there are lots of pieces of the Bible that historical scholarship has traced to an origin in an earlier religious text. (The Genesis flood narrative, for example, is a Hebrew-monotheism variant of a flood myth already known in ancient Near Eastern polytheistic texts.)
Maybe what you mean is that the Bible doesn’t explicitly present itself as borrowing from earlier religious texts, the way the Qur’an explicitly references the Bible? But then you’d have to say that the explicit New Testament allusions to the Old Testament somehow don’t count.
Normally, I’m not a fan of children toilet papering houses, but in cases like that I would make an exception.
I’ve seen them–they were just called tracts–I didn’t even know one person made them all, as I never bothered reading them. The only one I did read was one I found a laundrymat, and it was that one that shows the Gospel in pictures and then includes a sinners prayer at the end. This one was in Spanish.
My explanation for why Muslims don’t seem to care about Chick is that most of them never see his work. The reason why the video on YouTube is a big deal is that it can be shown on TV to a bunch of people. And it flat out says bad things, unlike Lady Gaga who just wore something provocative.
It’s actually the exact opposite. These “spontaneous” riots are carefully orchestrated by local leaders to shore up power on the local level. It’s ridiculously easy to whip unemployed young men into a frenzy. It doesn’t even matter what the premise is. Uniting disaffected people against a faux enemy is the oldest method of political control in the book.
Carefully cultivated anger can be very helpful for gaining local power, but this anger needs the occasional release point to keep it working. A riot can let off steam that could potentially be turned on said leader and creates cognitive dissonance binding the participants to the cause. It’s an easy way to gain power.
Jack Chick or Lady Gaga could both be reasonably useful ways to fuel the fire, but nobody is trying all that hard, because they don’t have to.
Why would Arab Muslims get upset over Lady Gaga?
Anyone who’s to the Middle East would laugh at that suggestion.
Racy Arab music videos play 24/7 on TV, in bars, nightclubs, and internet cafes throughout the Arab world.
Here’s Haifa Wehbe, one of the more popular singers in the Arab world.