Thoughts on 9/11

Today I want to think back on how I remember this date ten years ago. I had just come home from work and had taken a quick nap before a meeting planing the campaign for the upcoming municipal elections. when my clock radio woke me up I heard what was happening. I rushed to the TV and saw the second plane crash live. Knowing that not everyone at the meeting was likely to be up to date I printed out a few pages from a news page, and went on my way.

Already when I saw the broadcast I knew that this was going to change the world permanently, but how was very uncertain, for a brief moment I feared that this would be the start of a third world war between the west and the Muslim world, this was quickly put to rest as I learned about the American response.

However the response seemed a but strange to me. It was like nobody really wanted to admit the reasons for the attack but  just wantet to paint this as an act by a few crazy people when this was clearly not the case.

The motivation for the attack was not that difficult to see.  It was a declaration of war from the Muslim world, to view Islam as just a religion is naive and plainly wrong. Islam is a fundamentalist political movement disguised as a religion. Islam has more to do with communism and Nazism than mainstream religion. The attempts to integrate Islam into a modern society are bound to go wrong and blood will be shed regularlyuntil we adapt to this fact.

However it is also clear that Christianity is some of it’s forms has some of the same traits when I follow the Christian right in the US especially the similarities become eerie. Christians who try to ban  scientific facts from public schools and insist that schools work as institutions of indoctrination not ones of learning are as harmful as terrorist just in a more subtle manner.

So in my opinion the solution worth fighting for is secularism, religion is bad and should be fought in all forms, not because it is harmful in all forms, but because it can morph into fundamentalist political movements  as Islam is and Christianity is becoming in some parts.

We need to insist on the real world and stop treating complete bullshit with kid gloves whenever it is labeled as religion, only then will we have learned the lesson from 9/11

The importance of being art.

I do not have a large experience with the art world. However a while ago I had a bit of cash to spare so I decided to by a painting for my mom for her birthday I got something that I liked and thought she would like too. She did like it, so everyone was happy.

But was the painting really art, did it evoke a sense of the infinite or live up to any other definition. Well I don’t know. What mattered to me was if my mom would like it or not. Any more lofty analysis was not relevant.

This got me thinking about the term art. Why is the term important to have applied to your work. For most artists it is. A large part of modern art uses the limits of art as the main theme. I had that experience when I visited our local art museum. One of the most recognized works was by Pietro Manzoni and was a small tin with the feces of the artist inside. Another by an artist whose name escapes  me was plain pots and cans on shelves.

These works were art. they were being displayed in a very fancy museum and self-important people were drinking latte while keeping each other in check, and  sort of looking at them. But I don’t think they would buy a tin of artist feces for their mom.

However for a museum build mainly for public funds moms does not  matter, someone with a PhD. has to intellectualize spending the money, and then “I like it” does not cut it.It has to be made into something highly important to society if not humanity it has to”Evoke a sense of the infinite”.

And that is the importance of being art , it only really matters if you spend other people’s money.

A set of drawings turns 5

So 5 years ago today. I read my morning paper as usual. I casually looked at some drawings of the prophet Mohammad, made as a reaction to an author of a children’s book about said prophet, not being able to find an illustrator, because of the Korans ban on depicting Mohammad, and a then recent case where a  jewish lecturer had been battered for citing the Koran in class.

The paper Jyllands Posten had speculated that some people would self censor in order not to insult Islamic feelings, and fear retribution, effectively hindering free speech.

As a result the paper had asked a number of Danish cartoonist and illustrators to draw the prophet Mohammad as they saw him

I read the article, but thought nothing more of it, and threw the paper out shortly hereafter.

Then the proverbial shit hit the fan, the Muslim world went berserk, flag burning, several people killed, embassies attacked by Muslim mobs and so on.

The then prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was under international pressure to make an apology, though no-one had done anything wrong, and neither the PM or the government had anything to do with the drawings anyway.

The argument was that in Muslim societies, the concept of a state not being able to censor a paper was incomprehensible and thus he should apologise.

When he then publicly stated that he regretted and people’s feelings had been hurt, Muslims stated that this would not do because Muslim societies to not know the term regret.

All this anyone who bothered to research slightly would find loads of depictions of the prophet Mohammad in Muslim countries, the ban evidently being less than waterproof.

This controversy has now been going on for 5 years, it has involved the series South Park where a depiction of Mohammad was really Santa in a bear costume, making the whole thing extra silly, this did however not stop Islamic nutcases making death threats.

Recently the whole thing took a turn a Florida based Christian group  announced that they would protest an Islamic Mosque and cultural center overlooking Ground Zero in NYC. After much debate and many threats against the group the dropped the plan and announced that they would burn the popular atheist book The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

However in a stark contrast nobody cared, the people who had protested against book burning, saying that it was a wrong to burn books altogether did not utter a word in defense of the Atheist book. Evidently some books are more equal than other books.

This brings us to my point. The conclusion has to be that our society is being threatened.

Those who do not stand up not just to Islam but to all  religious groups who attempt to  limit the rights and freedoms granted to us by a secular society, are allowing the foundation of  the western world to be undermined.

If we by applying humanist ideals to groups who theocratic groups who are the very opposite of humanist, we allow them to gain a devastating foothold. They will continue to be insulted, to play the victim and to demand special consideration until the secular society that has provided us with an unrivaled standard of living  has been defeated Not in a confrontation, but by slowly compromising who we are, and letting theocracy take over.

The solution is clear, freedom of religion is a basic right, anyone should be able to pray to whoever they want, alone or together, but the society has to remain strictly secular, and if the believers of one particular religion, such as Islam, fails to accept this then we should not let them in to our society, a secular society cannot exist in the same space as a theocratic one, and I am not planning on dropping the ball on civilization, are you?