The Volokh Conspiracy

I thought it was very insulting to nude Amish.

Link worked for me. Good old Salon.

No problem here in Tucson where the Arizona Daily Star printed the piece as they do each and every Sunday

I notice there are plenty of papers usually willing to post stuff which is offensive to Christians.

Plenty of papers are willing to post stuff which is offensive to Christians because modern Christians are more likely to engage their voices in protest than their explosives.

I think this may be similar to the old cachet of being banned in Boston. Could elevate trash--I mean a crummy book--to best-seller status.
More contention, please.

In the meantime, papers can decide whether they'd offend more Muslims by running the 'toon or admitting they're afraid of getting blown up by Muslims. The problem is that the latter may not actually offend Muslims.

I wonder if Islam is really the reason the strip couldn't get printed. That last joke seems a little explicit for a newspaper comic strip (though I don't read those much, so maybe I just don't know how risque they get).

Also: did anyone else find the strip a little offensive from a feminist perspective? I don't mean to start a crusade about this (wrong word, I know), but there was something about it: partly the assumption that a guy would be grateful not to have to deal with the usual flighty empty-headedness of women; and partly the gleeful look from the boyfriend as he contemplates a girlfriend who doesn't "deny a man's rightful place." But I'm not a regular reader of the strip, so maybe, if I knew the characters (e.g., if that male character is always portrayed as a chauvinistic idiot), I'd see there was nothing offensive about it.

By the way, have there been any actual public reactions from muslims or muslim groups to this strip? And is there anything about it that a muslim -- even a fundementalist muslim -- would find offensive about it?

Oh, and one last thing. At the beginning of the strip, the male character calls his girlfriend a "Muslim Fundamentalist," and she corrects this to "Radical Islamist." Isn't that backward? I would have thought the first term would be preferred by members of the group in question.

My posts here always end up longer than I intend them to be. Sorry.

Ack. And I double-posted. Now I'm even sorrier.

By the way, have there been any actual public reactions from muslims or muslim groups to this strip?

I don't know, Latinist, but why would that be relevant anyway?

Do we really need to gauge reaction to a comic strip, or any other published work, by the potential reaction by any group?

Well, yes our MSM does, as witnessed by this and their previous lame refusal, in concert and unanimously, here in the land of the "free and the brave", to print the Danish cartoons.

Sad days are upon us, and it will only get worse as our press continues to capitulate in our name.

I would be interested to hear why the papers that didn't run the strip didn't do so. It didn't seem offensive to me, but then I am not Moslem. Nevertheless, it seems to me less offensive than much of what Breathed has done since coming back.

Clearly, they pulled it for fear of offending the Amish, who, if they ever found out about the strip, would likely does something awful like not care one whit.

The strip struck me as neither very funny, nor particularly likely to give offense to any but the most censorious. Breathed's certainly done better. On the other hand, that was my reaction to the Danish cartoons, too, and we know what happened THERE.

I'd like to know whether there's been any real outpouring of Muslim outrage in the US at those folks ("South Park"'s writers, and the much-less-well-known posters on "Islam Watch", for instance) who, whether funny or not, are being somewhat more deliberately outrageous (as in "You thought that was offensive?! I'll show you offensive!!")

r gould-saltman

Washington Post Writers Group Executive Sales Manager Karisue Wyson told E&P some papers "won't publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con. 'They just don't want to touch that,' she said."

via Joan Walsh - Salon

i.e., They are afraid of offending Muslims. And people are afraid of offending Muslims because they are afraid of Muslims.

Well, I thought it was funny. I've known a lot of ditsy women in my life, and some of them are ditsy over religion. "Fatima Struggle" was particularly good.

RBJ--

Are you sure that the "For Better or Worse" and "Funky Winkerbean" strips were run in every newspaper in the country? Just because YOUR paper ran the two strips in question doesn't necessarily mean that they were run in every paper. Here, some papers chose not to run the Opus strips. Of that number, some may have chosen not to run the strips for fear of offending Muslims. That's their right. Others may have run the strips for fear of offending their readers. That's their right too!

Newspapers decide to run or not run strips all the time. For example, Scott Adams tells the story of a strip he wrote where he wanted to show a police officer shooting at a hostage taker. His strip was repeatedly rejected because of an unwritten rule that prohibits guns from being shown in the funnies. Eventually, he was able to get the strip published by turning the gun into a doughnut. That's all he did. It still shot bullets, it still went "Blam."

The point is that different newspapers may have different reasons for not running the strips. As private organizations, they have the right to say what they want. That right includes the right to NOT say things they don't want to say.

That said, I found the strip to be damned funny.

--PtM

I'm struggling to understand the insult. I don't see it... unless they're somehow thinking that Islamic Rage Boy would be offended by the Steve Dallas charicature. I think that's a bit too subtle, though.

I can, however, see people (particularly those who live in safe feminist bubbles) falling all over themselves to say this is an insult to Islam.

That's not exactly the same thing.

Wait...shouldn't Muslims be PROUD of this cartoon? You have an element of pop culture proclaiming that a proper Islamic woman would not engage in sex before marriage. Isn't that exactly what Islamists say is the case? Didn't the book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" reference the claim (by Iranian religious leaders) that Christian women were whores who engaged in sinful premarital sex while Islamic women maintained their purity?

Heck, even if it's insulting that a dippy dunce like Lola (who lost her "purity" long, long ago) would become an Islamist, she's still spreading the "word." There's hope even for stupid white chicks.

The real reason this strip was not always published may well have been because it offended wacko feminist sensibilities.

Were that the case, then "Cathy" would never be printed, as its portrayal of women as eternally obsessed with weight and looks likely does not please feminist sensibilities.

I concur with all fo the blame falling on the Muslims, and the "wacko" women, who control the newspaper industry in the United States. Obviously things woud be different if the major newspapers were controlled by Christians, or Jews, or males . . . But if they were, what would the oppressed masses at the Volokh Conspiracy complain about?

Phantom -- No, I am not sure that every newspaper that ran those cartoons printed those specific ones. However, I've lived in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest and Northwest and subscribed to 6-7 different newspapers. I have seen "questionable" strips run in many different newspapers, even in fairly conservative areas such as Columbia, SC (where Doonesbury is on the editorial page).

My point is, I have seen enough different newspapers running strips with implied sex in them. As well, B.C. running strips with "Fat Broad" written into it.

Hmmm - and all this after I just read the following at the Wiki link for the preceding Animal Farm post:

British censorship and suppressed preface
During World War II it became apparent to Orwell that anti-Russian literature was not something which most major publishing houses would touch — including his regular publisher Gollancz. One publisher he sought to sell his book but rejected it on the grounds of government advice — although the assumed civil servant who gave the order was later found to be a Soviet spy.[6]

Orwell originally prepared a preface which complains about British government suppression of his book, self-imposed British self-censorship and how the British people were suppressing criticism of the USSR, their World War II ally. "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. ... [Things are] kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact." Somewhat ironically, the preface itself was censored and is not published with most copies of the book

Allentown Morning Call ran the strip. Good for them.

"Fatima Struggle" was brilliant. It hints at some of the Nazi idealogy (yes I said it) underlying the radical Islamicists movement.

Many commentators have suggested the Al Qaeda movement is infected with pernicious western ideas, not unlike Hitler's. Hence, My Struggle (Mein Kampf). Fatima Struggle is thus a combination of the name of Mohammed's daughter and the title of Hitler's weaselly little book. Somehow explaining all this makes it less funny, though :)

Does anyone not think that the sex joke on 8/12 is a bit more explicit than the 8/26 sex joke (that I still haven't figured out)? "focus on this pole"

In more ways than one, Islam seems to be the crybaby child of all the major religions, with, say, Judaism &Christianity tired, grey elders.

I notice there are plenty of papers usually willing to post stuff which is offensive to Christians.

May I say, boo-effing-hoo.

IB Bill,
I think you are jumping way too far ahead. "Jihad" - in its most benign translation, means "struggle." Perhaps the character was originally "Fatima Jihad," but that was nixed on the first edit. It's not Breathed making some clever nazi word play, but rather that the basic similarities are completely unavoidable and everyone will eventually stumble into them.

Phantom,
I heard your story about the doughnut as well. However, I don't think there really is a newspaper rule against guns in comics, as we see them all the time in all the action hero dailies (e.g., Dick Tracy, Spider Man, even Mark Trail). Oddly, there was even just this month an extended gun play story involving some pistol whipping by none other than.... The Phantom. ( see the funniest blog on the internets: the comicscurmudgeon.com )

Wooga: Oops. That's certainly a simpler and more direct explanation, and no doubt true. Thanks.

One thought: We could translate Hitler's book as My Jihad!