Where’s Muhammad?

Take note of Wiley Miller‘s comic strip Non Sequitur in your newspaper this weekend if it regularly appears there.

Several newspapers are rejecting this Sunday’s strip in advance.

What’s so offensive about it?

[It] depicts a lazy, sunny park scene with the caption, “Picture book title voted least likely to ever find a publisher… ‘Where’s Muhammad?’” Characters in the park are buying ice cream, fishing, roller skating, etc. No character is depicted as even Middle Eastern.

So that’s where we’re at now. Some papers are scared shitless because someone is simply implying the existence of a drawing of Muhammad.

Miller was equally disturbed:

“[T]he irony of editors being afraid to run even such a tame cartoon as this that satirizes the blinding fear in media regarding anything surrounding Islam sadly speaks for itself. Indeed, the terrorists have won.”

They have, haven’t they?

When the comic shows up on his syndicate’s website this weekend, please post it wherever you can.

(via New Humanist)

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VXbinaca

Well the comic will be everywhere, while Mohammed is nowhere because he doesn’t exist, and neither does god or yahweh or any of that other silly nonsense.

I’ll be sure to post this all over but honestly I don’t know any Muslims so I don’t see how the exercise accomplishes anything. But I’m game, why not.
JoshBA

Well the comic will be everywhere, while Mohammed is nowhere because he doesn’t exist, and neither does god or yahweh or any of that other silly nonsense.

Correct me if I m wrong but… I am pretty positive that Muhammad existed.
VXbinaca

I’ve had a long day and in a moment of weakness confused Mohammed and Allah. Yes, I was wrong.

Thanks, Josh.
bigjohn756

The fact that the terrorists had won was made very clear to me the first time I had to fly after September 11, 2001. Standing in line for hours made me realize that the terror instilled in the American people, and their government, by this event was deep. The cost of the billions of man hours squandered in airports alone by this panic since then, just to give the illusion of safety, is immense. Add to that the trillion dollars spent on the wars in the Middle East, which have done little or nothing to assuage the threat, and it becomes very clear that the terrorists achieved their goal.

Franklin had it right. “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Mark Johnston

I think Wiley Miller managed to one-up the champion of the everyone draw mohammed contest. Wonderful job! Man, I hope he doesn’t have to go into hiding for making people think that he maybe thought about almost drawing mohammed.
Prince of Pithy

I get the Sunday comics on Saturday – it’s a special comic page which I assume they print up early and don’t want to store for a day – and I didn’t know what you were talking about. There was a Non Sequitur comic in it with “Obviousman.” But looking closer, it has a copyright date of ’06, so I guess they just ran an old one.
Hitch

Luckily we have “interfaith leaders” who in these situations speak up for sanity… oh wait.

To them Wiley Miller is probably a Nazi racist and his insinuating that there might be a depiction of Muhammad is like insinuating that people should look at and enjoy books full of swastikas!

And thus have we made a peaceful, pluralistic, tolerant world… through bad-mouthing and character assassination and relentless (though peaceful!) demands for compliance.

And the culture of fear is diffused by completely agreeing with the goals of those who perpetuate violence and that is: Don’t draw it (or even think about doing it!)

Ah isn’t bridge-building lovely?

Alright, sarcasm vented. Apologies.
Jeff P

O|-<

That's what I think.
WMDKitty

…the fuck is wrong with these people? The morons in charge of this decision need to grow some balls and stop kissing the asses of the overly-sensitive.
AxeGrrl

Mark Johntson wrote:

I think Wiley Miller managed to one-up the champion of the everyone draw mohammed contest. Wonderful job! Man, I hope he doesn’t have to go into hiding for making people think that he maybe thought about almost drawing mohammed.

Thanks, that’s precisely what I was going to say 🙂
Joe Zamecki

Three words can explain this censorship:

Koran burning backlash.

One form of free speech that bothers people is related to another form of free speech that bothers people. Where the grey area in civil rights begins, free speech ends.

Remember that your left foot is often so close to your right foot, that sometimes, neither of them allow each other to move. It’s just too easy for one to step on the other, with the best of intentions. Think about it!
Greg

Correct me if I m wrong but… I am pretty positive that Muhammad existed.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but he doesn’t exist now, however?

The statement was that Muhammad doesn’t exist, not didn’t exist, which unless you are a theist and believe in an afterlife, is strictly speaking true! 😉

(And yes, I know I’m just being pernickety… It’s fun! :P)
MH

Greg, same thought occurred to me when I read that line as well.
Stephen P

Correct me if I’m wrong but… I am pretty positive that Muhammad existed.

That’s generally considered to be the case, but it’s not by any means as certain as most people suppose: see the work of Professor Muhammad Sven Kalisch. I’ve only managed to find his work online in the original German, but if you can read German it’s worth digging into. It’s much the same story as with Jesus: the first concrete references to him date from decades after he supposedly lived.

For an intro see this WSJ article.
Don Rose

Muhammad existed? I’ll need to see some drawings of him before I believe that. ;P
Hugh Kramer

Just to add a little perspective here, Non-Sequitur is syndicated in over 700 newspapers and just over 20 refused to publish the strip. That’s under 3% of Non-Sequitur‘s subscribers.

I suppose it depends on how you look at things. You can regard the glass as 3% empty or 97% full. If that’s a victory for the terrorists, it’s a pretty small one.
Kaleena

Here’s the comic: “Where’s Muhammad”
muggle

Hugh, it’s good that it’s so few. Bad that it happened at all.
Anonymous Atheist

Hugh – Thanks for the numbers. But quite a few newspapers run fewer comics on Sunday than the rest of the week, because the Sunday ones are in color and printed in larger sizes (fewer fit per page), so many of those 700 newspapers may have not run today’s by default because they never run Non Sequitur on Sundays, without having to actually ‘refuse’ this specific strip.
steve jaubert

Its like the ‘n’ word only worse. I don’t want to go around calling anybody anything derogatory but the minute you tell me I can’t say this or draw that then you eliminate my freedom of choice trying to regulate my free will and that can only be done under threat of force and at that is not going to stop information leaks through other media so essentially the papers that choose to do this are working themselves out of a job. So bravo all the stupid ‘papers of appeasement’ for you are showing how you are threats to free thought and I hope the public rewards you justly with no purchases. Perhaps then you can join the ranks again of what a paper is supposed to stand for in a free country if you still are existing assuming you continue such idiotic censoring.