Everybody Draw Mohammed Day 2018

The Mohammed drawing will continue until it’s safe to draw Mohammed.

Ex-Muslims of North America (Facebook, Twitter) have a number of offerings to mark the occasion:

Have a Happy #DrawMohammedDay!

(It’s not clear how many of these are new or original to them, but I hadn’t seen most of them before; so I’m counting them.)

The classic depiction from back when South Park was allowed to depict Mohammed…

Mohammed rides the Flying Spaghetti Monster

For the more philosophically inclined, a Mohammedan koan to contemplate:

Finally, they also include a detailed drawing that is, despite their no doubt educational historical gloss, “NSFW”.

Also via Ex-Muslims of North America, this article from 2015 discusses the nature and rationale of the taboo on drawing Mohammed, accompanied by this illustration (dunking on Mohammed?):

The awesome Bosch Fawstin has probably contributed more to past years’ Everybody Draw Mohammed Days than any other single person.  This year, Twitter is trying to shut him down, but he’s still drawing—in fact, he’s now offering a whole book of his Mohammed drawings, to come out sometime this month in honor of Draw Mohammed Day ($25 including shipping, or $27 for a signed copy).

Finally, Boston Becket has a vaguely Calvin & Hobbes-looking cartoon of little Mohammed, or “Li’l Mo’”:

Why we draw Mohammed

Some of our left-leaning friends get confused about this; so let me explain.

This is nothing against all Muslims.  This is a rebuke and a protest against that smaller subset* (whatever you care to call them) who try to kill non-Muslims for drawing Mohammed.  In effect, these killers are imposing an added law from outside of our democratic system, using a murderer’s veto to censor our speech, even here in the West.

(* Hereinafter “Subset”, for want of any better convenient shorthand.)

I understand that many (not all, though that’s irrelevant for purposes of this discussion) Muslims believe that their religion prohibits them from drawing Mohammed, for whatever reason.  Obviously I have nothing but respect for their right to follow their religion and to refrain from drawing Mohammed.  The problem is when members of this Subset try to enforce (again, extrajudicially) that religious command on the rest of us, on pain of death.  Can you imagine if I as a Christian claimed the right to be offended when Muslims on the other side of the world don’t follow, say, Christianity’s commands against lust, or polygamy, or revenge?  They’re not Christians, you wouldn’t expect them to know or obey the commandments of Christianity.  Can you imagine if I claimed the right to kill them for it?  Again, not even to make a law against such things and prosecute them under the law—that would be a different thing—but to go with goons and murder them.

Or can you imagine if Americans had a tradition that no one is allowed to write the name of our country?  Can you imagine if we claimed a right to be offended when people of other countries wrote “United States” or “America” in their atlases and newspapers?

I’m not Muslim.  If the Subset want to make me submit to the rules of their religion at the point of a sword, “bullying” is about the kindest word I can think of for what they’re trying to do.

And yet in recent years these bullies have largely succeeded.  In 2005, a Danish newspaper published some Mohammed cartoons in a statement about freedom of expression.  Other newspapers across the West largely avoided showing any of the cartoons in their news coverage of the sequence of events; self-censorship out of fear of murderers was already well advanced.  When Yale published a book about this sequence of events, the author was not allowed to include the cartoons the book was about.  In 2015, French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had been fearless about depicting Mohammed (it had a proud tradition of irreverently cartooning and lampooning everyone and everything), was attacked by terrorists who managed to kill a significant number of the cartoonists there.  The world largely failed to side with the victims or take up their fight for freedom; eventually even the man at Charlie Hebdo who had drawn the iconic Mohammed images decided to give it up.

In other words, thanks to the murderers’ veto and the associated self-censorship, the West already largely lives under the enforcement of this command from a religion we do not belong to, this law that was never passed by our legislatures; with respect to Mohammed, the West has already been significantly deprived of freedom of expression.

That’s nuts, and I say nuts to that.  The Mohammed drawing will continue until it’s safe to draw Mohammed.

The origin of “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”

In 2010, a quirky cartoonist in Seattle, Molly Norris, proposed an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” and offered whimsical drawings of Mohammed as a spool of thread and a box of pasta.  Mark Steyn reminds us what happened next:  After a wave of death threats from Islamist thugs, she changed her name and went into hiding, and has not been heard from since.

Remember Molly Norris.  Let her not be erased from the world.

Your drawing here

Above I’ve included and linked to the people I was aware of who observed Everybody Draw Mohammed Day this year, but if I missed you, it’s never too late to join in!  Send me a drawing or a link to your post (use the contact page above or the comment form below, your choice—let me know if you want the comment not to be public or if you want to maintain any other level of anonymity), and I’ll add it (unless I think it’s gross).