NOT QUITE:

Best of the Web Today - November 21, 2003

The crybabies at the Council on American Islamic Relations say they're being persecuted in the funny papers. At issue is the Nov. 10 B.C. strip, drawn by Johnny Hart. The first panel features a man walking uphill, approaching an outhouse. Then the word SLAM appears, and the second panel shows the outhouse sitting atop the hill. The third panel has a cartoon bubble, as the man inside the outhouse says, "Is it just me, or does it stink in here?"

That's kind of stupid, but why would it be anti-Islamic? The Washington Post explains:

The first public questioning of this cartoon arose in a washingtonpost.com chat Tuesday, when a reader noted that the cartoon seemed to make no sense, except metaphorically. The reader noted that the cartoon contained six crescent moons--three in the sky, and three on the outhouse door--and wondered if this might have been a veiled slur on the world's 1 billion practicing Muslims.

The CAIR e-mail mentioned the moons, and also noted that Hart had drawn a prominent sound effect--"SLAM"--between two frames to accompany the closing of the outhouse door. The SLAM was stacked vertically, in the shape of an I, and could be seen to signify "Islam." The cartoon appeared on the 15th day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.

First they came for B.C., then they came for the Wizard of Id . . .

Like everyone, we're big fans of Best of the Web, but that's just disingenuous. Based on Mr. Hart's own beliefs (see below) it is entirely reasonable to read the strip as a criticism of Islam. The question is whether it's unfair, not whether that's its intent.

MORE:
Johnny Hart: Not Caving In: The cartoon characters of "B.C." reflect their imaginative creator, Johnny Hart. Especially his unapologetic faith in God. (Joe Maxwell, Christian Reader, March/April 1997)

Today, the gray-haired "gag man" (his own description) draws a caveman with ever-growing convictions. Hart believes the Lord put him into the cartooning world for a reason. Every prudent chance he gets, he takes advantage of it.

On Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter—and many days between—Hart's characters offer messages reflecting the cartoonist's own firm belief in the gospel message. "I find myself trying to put the gospel into practically every strip I create without being obvious about it," he says.

Hart says he wants to create a "spasm" in his reader, putting a new twist on an old truth. [...]

In many ways, Hart is a preacher, only his congregation absorbs his message via America's mainstream newspapers as he brings light into the often dark daily news. People who don't read the Bible or attend church services often do read Johnny's comics.

He was gratified when a woman wrote to say that a "Wizard of Id" strip kept her from committing suicide. "The strip had no real mind-jarring message," says Hart, "so I just knew that [it was] God [who] had used it to reach that precious soul."

MORE: (via ef brown):
An open-and-shut case of hypocrisy (Mark Steyn, 25/11/2003, Daily Telegraph)

[W]hile Islamic lobby groups and the most distinguished semiotics professors in America are analysing Johnny Hart's outhouse joke, the European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has decided to shelve its report on the rise of anti-Semitism on the Continent. The problem, as reported in The Telegraph, is that the survey had found that "many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups", and so a "political decision" was taken not to publish it because of "fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims".

Let's go back over that slowly and try not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the uselessness of these thought-police bodies: they're fine for chastising insufficiently guilt-ridden whites in an ongoing reverse-minstrel show of cultural self-abasement, but they don't have the stomach for confronting real racism. A tolerant society is so reluctant to appear intolerant, it would rather tolerate intolerance.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 25, 2003 3:49 PM