I think there is something wrong headed about how they are going about this issue. On the one hand extremism, and not just extremism, but the many prescriptions for violence in Islam, need to be confronted and resisted. On the other hand, observing a particular convention does not seem to be appropriate, the convention being the depiction of the Muslim prophet. Something doesn't make sense here. It just so happens that they have a particular practice of non depiction. That in itself is something to be respected, while the response of murdering people for those depictions is wrong. so in a sense both sides are wrong, as regards depiction.

It seems to me that they are fighting the wrong fight by making an issue of depiction. In that respect they are attacking with a certain violence when they depict. They are quite simply not respecting the religion. This is not to say that the religion should not be critiqued, or that its totalitarian impulses should be respected or observed. Those impulses are indeed there as far as I can see, because while there are some passages which until respect for other religions - although I don't know what the attitude is supposed to be for atheists - there are other passages which clearly amount to narrative oriented to taking over the world.

It seems as though it might be better to deal with the idea that there is no god but Allah, that is the idea of a monotheism. This amounts to saying is that on the one hand I respect your religion and practices, but on the other hand, I actually don't respect the core tenets of your believe, or, rather, I don't believe them. What does it mean to not believe what another believes, and what does it mean for someone to have this believe that is, frankly, irrational?

But this throws us back into a basic argument between theism and atheism. Just as some attention turns to the everyday Muslim as regards supporting the prescriptions for violence within Islam, this issue throws us into bringing attention to the basic condition of belief and adherence: it means asking, so you really believe that this is the one God and that is the creator and all other people are doomed, etc.? This is a well-known condition as regards certain kinds of faith. The question might be, why isn't this activated more? When someone says they are of a certain faith, should we become silent as we are often told to do? I believe it was Christopher Hitchens who pointed out that when people nod their heads approvingly when others in their activist group proudly announce that they are in a kind of face activism, the people approving of this are making some kind of mistake. Perhaps religious faith and non faith hard willing alongside one another to comfortably. Should it'd be so easy for someone to really take up a whole system of belief that has, to be blunt, a lot of BS in it? Should we sit there and talk to them when we know that they are in the process of organizing the whole world and us as a part of it into some grand narrative that we know and tails a totalitarian goal, a project of conversion of the whole world, a process of categorizing everyone in the world, way of deciding who is who, who gets into heaven, etc.? And yet at the same time even in that context, we are given to a certain respect. Should we show such respect? Does it amount to violence or something somehow unacceptable to either really seriously question that, directly and face to face? And what is the difference between doing that and drawing a picture of their religious leader and then draw a mustache on it or tearing a picture of the Pope in half? Indeed, what happened after Sinead O'Connor it that on that TV show? What was the reaction? No one was murdered, I guess. On the other hand she did suffer quite a lot of shunning, which is a kind of violence in its own right. But there is this difference between doing a kind of symbolic action of violence, a violence to symbolism itself perhaps, and directly and substantively challenging or expressing disagreement with something. That means something like saying, I want draw a mustache on your guy, but I think that what you are doing in believing that line of thought is wrong and I am compelled to say something about it again and again and again. You might not murder me unless I do draw a mustache on your guy, or simply draw him as the case may be, but what happens when I respectfully and nonviolently refuse to cooperate with your belief, not simply by my believe in what I believe will you believe what you believe, but my refusing to sit in the same room with you wh say out loud, hey, wait a minute, you're organizing the whole world in this really elaborate religious process thing that you have going on, and I sense it, & I think it is wrong, & I know that you're walking around organizing the whole world that you see around you into the saved and the unsaved, into the good and the evil, into those who are in your faith and those who are not, and the whole thing exudes side effects of various cuts. Furthermore I know that the texts that you read and the devotion that you carry out have definite prescriptions for violence, and these make you more tolerant of other violence is in the world, and there is something wrong with all of that, & I am obliged to say something about it and to do so again and again.

This is very problematic, as we know. We could say that to preach what apparently amounts to a certain atheism runs the risk at the very minimum of being obnoxious. On the other hand, many mile a minute preachers have worked very hard to raise their faith by inculcating people into their mentality precisely by going on and on and on. And there are many ways of going on and on, only some of which depend on speaking at length semicolon others until just the opposite: maintaining a rather forceful silence bet is used to preserve a certain sanctity of certain beliefs, i.. E., that which is so important that we do not even speak of it. Whichever way a faith is maintained, the question is, should we be going along with it as much as we are? But, at the same time, if we choose to go against that grain, is it still ever appropriate simply to bad mouth the religion? If the Muslims have a thing about depicting their profit should we be depicting it, or is this really missing some important? Does this amount to a certain violence?

It is interesting that things have gone this way in a milieu, nearly worldwide, that has shown that it is uniquely incompetent as regards non-violence in particular. The Arab Spring that was supposed to be something turned out to be a monstrous disaster, aside from Egypt 2011 and Tunisia. Why? Because the thinking people of the rest of the world did not support non violence adequately. The truth is that non violence is the only way change will happen in the Arab world. Now it is most interesting that the challenge that Charlie Hebdo has made to Islam has taken the form of this essentially mild violence to Islam. But it has not embraced and more serious nonviolence. Instead, it is trucking in a fairly pedestrian use of religious symbols and, especially, assumptions, as is the tendency where comics are concerned. Restricted in their range of expression due to space, tending toward short statements and meme like expressions, comics at best lack the new once, distinctions, and painstaking expressions that are necessary for addressing fundamental issues concerning faith, violence, and world affairs. Indeed, comics are very prone to caricature, to information, to helping produce the cartoonish reality that tends to dominate the world of politics.

Indeed, it might be said that Charlie Hebdo is itself another form of religion. Tending toward the iconic, toward the symbolic, toward the caricature, it appears to be more of a piece then it realizes. I am NOT a Muslim, but I don't know that I am Charlie Hebdo either. I also don't think that people who say they are Charlie are really truly semicolon the only people who can lay claim to that are those who, at leaphet of the Muslim actually do depict the prophet of the Muslim religion. I should point out that it is strange when we hear this referred to simply as the profit rather than the prophet of the Muslim religion, rather like referring to the church rather than a particular church.

This whole problematic must still refer to fundamentals of nonviolence. But we know, that everyone knows what non violence in this. it can be depicted and understood simply by sketching out a cartoon character of Gandhi in a gag of some kind. That's all there is to it. Why, it is all like a cartoon. The whole world is like a cartoon. And simple cartoons can solve all the problems and they explain the simple truth of it all. To which I call bullshit.

I have thought for a long time that what I call cartoonism is one of the chief destructive forces in the world today. I have seen its ravaging violence firsthand. I have refused it on many occasions. I throw down this gauntlet against cartoonism itself. I am Charlie Hebdo at a level that even Charlie Hebdo would neither appreciate nor understand. Charlie Hebdo's argument with Islam is a lovers quarrel, as the new cover of the magazine shows most pointedly. It is a bloody ugly quarrel between cartoons. One may reach under that Charlie Hebdo isn't going around shooting people. I am not so sure that is true. People join ranks around this issue with what is above all a massive surge of confident assumption about who is who, what is what, what is to be done, who is Charlie Hebdo, who is not Charlie Hebdo, what is right, what is wrong.

It is of nonviolence to lay open not just what occurs within an arena but the arena itself, its mid en scene, and those buried beneath such arenas. We have barely begun to understand these matters.

I'll come back for the typos later.