Generally speaking, Sacred and Sequential does not republish anything that could be construed as hate speech, bigotry, or prejudice. Amplifying these voices tends to work against our interfaith/multicultural efforts and encourage their further ugliness.
In May of 2018, Fawstin was suspended from Twitter due to “hateful conduct,” to which he responded with this piece.
Again, please note that sharing this interview should be in no way understood as an endorsement of Fawstin or The Objective Standard. Even so, if there is any area at all in which our site agrees with Fawstin, it is in terms of the right to free speech. It is good to know, out loud, where he and his supporters stand.
In June, Sacred and Sequential shared reporting from Reuters that the Freedom Party of the Dutch government had announced a new “free-speech event” centered around creating illustrations of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed. Led by politician Geert Wilders, the contest was to be judged by the 2015 Garland, Texas “Draw Mohammed” contest winner, Bosch Fawstin.
Following a peaceful protest march in Islamabad in late August, reports the Associated Press, the planned contest has been canceled. Wilders is quoted by The Telegraphas saying, “To avoid the risk of victims of Islamic violence, I have decided to not let the cartoon contest go ahead.” InfoWars deemphasizes the impact of the 10,000-strong peaceful march, focusing instead on a video death threat Wilders received.
The Freedom Party of Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders will hold a competition of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, it said on Tuesday. The party said the plan to hold the competition in the party’s secure offices in Dutch Parliament had been approved by the Dutch Counter-terrorism Agency NCTV.
This competition is being billed as a “free speech event,” not unlike the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten‘s own 2005 showcase of Mohammed cartoons, similarly resulting in violence.
On a related note, Twitter recently suspended Fawstin’s account following his posting opposing on Marvel Entertainment’s plans for Muslim superheroine Ms. Marvel. This was the latest in his “multiple or repeat violations of the Twitter Rules.”
Part of Rao’s modus operandi is to catch religion and comics stories in the news as they happen and save them to a repository for later re-reading, analysis, and then write up. Of course, while that allows for cautious commentary and limited knee-jerk reaction, it also can cause a back-up of reportable items, sometimes having them fall completely off the radar.
In this case, however, there’s been another intriguing effect to this scheme: The backlog of reportable items is hinting at a trend.
The International Museum of Women featured the work of artist Katie Miranda as part of their “Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices” exhibition. The first part of her story “Tear Gas in the Morning” features semi-autobiographical protagonist “Barbara Silverman, a Jewish-American artist volunteering as an activist and human rights worker in the West Bank […transforming] from a naîve and idealistic volunteer trying to save the world, to a seasoned activist hardened by a year and a half of nonviolent resistance and human rights work in one of the world’s most complex conflict zones.”
PRI’s The World spoke with Israeli cartoonist Uri Fink about the imprisonment of Mohammed Saba’aneh, a cartoonist for Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the Palestian Authority’s official newspaper. According to Cartoon Movement, he was released on July 1st, five months after his arrest and nearly three months after the PRI coverage.
Response to the Burka Avenger is still unfolding, but, unquestionably, it will be met with a steady stream of new news stories on comics engagement with Islam globally, culturally, artistically, and politically. They are everywhere.
Rao wants to know: Does modern Islam have a special relationship with the comics medium?
However, the “background and expert sources” they claim to provide prove sadly lacking; though lengthy and exhaustive-looking, it reads as the result of Google searching and Amazon browsing rather than an actual, knowledgeable resource. Their list of recommended books leaves out any title that isn’t Judeo-Christian, and, similarly, their article list includes one mention of Islam in regards to coverage of The 99; likewise, their manifest of three dozen experts seems to only include one focusing on Arabs (the esteemed Fedwa Malti-Douglas) and one on occult practices (the weirdly unattributed Christopher Knowles). They even get Professor Malti-Douglas’s URL wrong!
