BBC News: Middle East: Iran paper seeks cartoon revenge
The difference between publishing cartoons with the face of Muhammad on them and publishing cartoons about the Holocaust is that Holocaust denial is a big pack of lies, whereas printing a picture of someone's face is an artistic interpretation of their face. Also there's nothing remotely funny about millions of people being sent to the gas chambers.
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And oddly enough there wasn't an international uproar or burning of buildings when Art Spiegelman chose to interpret the Holocaust through the superlative Maus comic/graphic novel. Obviously I am biased since I make a lot of my living selling graphic novels and books but I tend to think the medium of cartoons and comics offers unique ways to explore all sorts of events, from the personal to the large scale. Or to combine the personal with the large scale so we can identify with the events more easily. But if one sector of our world population want to avoid certain cartoons, that's up to them...
Actually, you're splitting hairs.
The cartoons - correct me if I'm wrong - showed Mohammed dressed as a suicide bomber, complaining there are not enough virgins to be suicide bombers, and welcoming suicide bombers in heaven. It was not just a case of 'showing his face'.
If it would be wrong to print lies about the Holocaust, whether or not in cartoon form (and I personally think that it would be) then surely it is equally wrong to print lies about some religion's beloved Prophet! I am not saying the reaction is justified, but I AM saying that the cartoon was seriously offensive and obviously timed to really annoy a huge amount of people.
Unfortunately, due perhaps to the vociferous nature of the response, few newspapers I have read see fit to explain what the cartoons were actually about - all they said was that the cartoons 'depicted Mohammed', not even describing whether this depiction was positive or negative! Bias...?
I realise it sounded as though I was spltting hairs, however, as far as I could tell the offence was caused by showing his face, not the actual content of the cartoons.
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