comments in others' blogs

[scarfman]

athelind is only one of the people on my flist to speak out against Everyone Draw Mohammed Day, but his entry was the one to draw response from me.

This. What I wish I'd said about it.

I put Mohammed in a cartoon once, in the days before Arthur, King of Time and Space (though still a cartoon with Merlin and Arthur in it). It was some years before the hulabaloo over the Danish cartoons, and I remember being confounded at not finding any images of Mohammed at Google.

My initial reaction to the hulabaloo over the Danish cartoons was to feel left out for never having generated any controversy - but then I realized their motivation was very, very different: i.e., to generate controversy.

Later when, as I often do with older gags, I reused the gag for Arthur, King of Time and Space, this time I did it without actually picturing Mohammed, because my intention had never been to show disrespect for Islam or any of its beliefs - but rather, ironically, to poke at the many, many people on both sides who prefer to look at the differences between us instead of the similarities.