Oddly, given how appropriate it would be in the article, they don't mention one of the several other times Hart's been in the news for apparently slamming non-Christians -- the supercessionist Easter strip in which the menorah morphed into a cross as the lights winked out in sync to JC's dying words.

This one, if it's intentional, isn't nearly as obvious, but certainly Hart falls under suspicion more frequently because he just keeps doing this.

Erm.

that said, i wouldn't be surprised in the least if he decided to blatantly bash islam, but this time it strikes me as digging something out that really isn't there.

i love how the semiotics professor COMPLETELY misses the fact that it's a caveman using the outhouse, thus making "slam" an appropriate effect.

doesn't hart write "the wizard of id"? i don't recall any christian references ever turning up in that one.

I've also realized how much I've changed in the past five years in part due to the fact that I now loathe Zippy the Pinhead. It's not that I don't "get it". I just get it and hate it. Wow, the common American is interested in awful, low culture! Thank you Bill Griffith!

OH NO YOU DIDN'T!!!

http://www.base58.com/~meowsy/theyellowkid.jpg

in other words, what exactly is the problem with making fun of islam?

I'm actually more surprised he'd make a fart joke than that he'd be sending secret messages to fellow wackos.

i'd still like to think that saying "islam is stupid" (or whatever) is no different than attacking any other ideology.

if that outhouse had a swastika on it that would certainly be ok right? if it had a democratic donkey or republican elephant on it it would be ok right? (correct me if im wrong here-i dont want to create a straw man)

so why are people's political beliefs fair game but not their religious beliefs?

ie the insult doesn't require the elaboration to make it insulting (i mean unless he did another strip w.a cross on the door and someone saying "however in here it smells nice oddly enough")

ie if it IS abt islam i don't get it

(i think you are possibly misreading my general distaste for ALL religious belief as "muslims are terrorists")

or maybe it does and i just dont understand how.

like think of the christian virgin "blood libel" that still being passed around today, you could hardly say that was an innocent attack on jewish beliefs w/o any ill intent on the jewish people themselves

(oops xpost!)

(ie the degree to which it's racist depends on the degree to which a recognisable valuing of "race" is actually built into the faith in question, and this isn't the same in all faiths)

(i actually suspect that this valuing has in practice changed a lot anyway, in the sense that religions of yore, ancestors of religions today, really were way more tribal, and that all of them became in practice more "racially inclusive" as they spread beyond the region they first arose in)

(which in the case of judaism, xtianity and islam = very nearly the same region anyway, come to think of it!)

slutsky, are you making a distinction between what a person believes and how a person acts? (it's certainly ok to criticize someone for what they do--but if certain beliefs tend to result in certain actions then why cant we attack their beliefs?)

are not christianity and islam are intended as belief systems that transcend culture and race?

(x-post)

my point is it's hard to attack a religion independent of its believers without stirring up (or at least implying) race hate, regardless of whether the intent and criticism is morally defensible and OK--it's a matter of theory vs. practice i guess

which means that slutsky is right, the "valuing of race" thus associated with judaism possibly actually arises much more out of the xtian - outsider - self-definition-by-distancing, than it is an authentic valuation necessary to judaism's self-definition

It's sort of both. On the one hand, long before there was any such thing as Judaism, there were the followers of "the god of Abraham, the god of Jacob" (Isaac is quite possibly a character invented to link these two cultural heroes, btw, but I'm trying to keep my tangents to a minimum ... and have failed already!) -- a clan/tribal/family designation attached to one of many gods, who eventually became or was combined with the chosen god of the monotheistic Jewish-Canaanites by the time they came to power.

But it was very much a cultural, biological, heredity-obsessed designation, as were the early myths which explained tribal and national rivalries as originating from family conflicts.

It later became less so, in fits and spurts. It's never been clear how "ethnic" Jesus considered his religion -- he would have been controversial either for seeking to redefine what one must do when one is a Jew, or for preaching about a God who was not specifically Jewish, a God who did not necessarily care who your grandparents' grandparents were. Proselytes -- non-ethnic Jews who practice Judaism[1] and might or might not have been circumcised, depending on the region (in most cases, maybe all cases, it was thought they should be; this just wasn't always enforced, and it's very likely that many proselytes simply lied about it, since no extant text speaks of an at-the-door-dickcheck ritual in the synagogues of antiquity) -- anyway, proselytes were not uncommon, especially in urban areas, and the same debates which surrounded them (if one is not a Jew, what must one do to be accepted in the religion of the Jews?) surrounded early Christians: must one become Jewish before one can become Christian? If so, what does that mean? Can non-Semitic people become Christians? Should they be sought?

[1] The obligatory footnote: there isn't a common useful practice to deal with this, because it's just not a large field, but "Judaism" is often not considered an accurate term for the religion of Jews prior to the destruction of the Second Temple -- although some people might shove the date one direction or another, that's a nice landmark -- since the decentralization of the religion changed everything so much that I'm really at a loss to think of a comparison. The closest I can manage is: think of "an American" in 1650 and "an American" in 1850. Neither is more nor less American than the other, but history has been severe enough that the term means very different things, once you peel down deeper than the simple geographical tag.

Anyway, onward. Christianity's self-identity was strengthened somewhat when the Jews strengthened theirs in order to exclude Christian practices, definitively stating, "If you are a Christian, you are not a Jew [or at least you can't come to synagogue]." That not only helped Christians define themselves and find themselves, but it informed their definition of Jewishness, their conception of what it meant to be non-Christian and yet not exactly pagan, either. (This is a complicated thing that takes many shapes for the next few hundred years, because Constantine notwithstanding, Christianity takes a very long time to become adept at centralization, and in the meanwhile Jews have pretty much given up on the idea altogether.)

In the Middle Ages, when the relationship between Church and states becomes such that "Christendom" is spoken of rather than simply "Europe" or "large tracts of land" or whatnot, we get into the period that I think is especially relevant here, because it's when historians are (supposed to be) careful to differentiate between anti-Judaism -- the many laws that were passed, repealed, passed again, bitched about, nostalgized over, remixed and remodeled for a few centuries, dealing with the forced conversion of Jews or the forbiddance of Jewish practices -- and anti-Semitism, which focuses on ethnic identity, not on practice, and which doesn't give a good goddamn how many communions you've been to or how many generations it's been since your family converted, it's going to hate you anyway.

And you pretty much know where things went from there, of course.

This input window is small enough that I don't remember if I said the things I'd meant to say before I started typing in the background stuff that seemed to be necessary to make them make sense.

To invoke racism when Islam is criticised seem to me a, perhaps mildy, racist impulse itself: "This is their culture, they can't help themselves". Particluarly given non-homogeneity of Islamic culture and race.

Is it okay, for instance, to say that the jewish bible is a better literary work than the christian addenda, and that both are stupidly superior to the mealy-mouthed koran?

(There's a huge post just appeared; I'm gonna read it after I press submit again.)

Evengelical Christians are highly attuned to any even incidental use of religious symbolism. I've no doubt that this was a conscious diss (like many say, the joke doesn't make sense otherwise), and I'm kind of impressed by how subtle and coded it is.

I think it's safe to put down the thesaurus.

I'd hope Muslims are more offended by "jihad" being used as a justification for killing school children, decapitating reporters, etc, then anything in this thread.

xpost: Casuistry
Yeah, I saw it. Excellent if slightly predictable dis/response between the mormon kid and Cartman. I like that nothing's sacred at SP, but the whole "dum da-dum dum" bit was pretty tedious.

I suspect Hart knew what he was doing.

I'm in the boat with Ryan, comparing a criticism of religion to a criticism of republicanism. Unless it's saying, that one sucks, this other religion is clearly superior, and they need to be converted, which would probably be the case with the evangelical Johnny Hart. That's where I would draw the line. If I had respect for any religion. Anyways "racism" can be a very shitty grounds for protecting religion. Most of them are about as innocent as OJ Simpson. Consider how much the "anti-semitic" label is propagandized to protect zionist Israeli warmongering.

That's not to say that I don't think the islam thing in this strip might have been intentional. Johnny Hart is a slimy fuck and I doubt anyone would put it past him.

It's interesting that Trudeau was pretty much the only one unwilling to stick his neck out and call Hart on it.

BC in a nutshell. (That said, there was actually a lovely BC animation adapation in the early eighties -- with the comedy team Bob and Ray as the featured voices of all things! -- that I often saw on HBO. Not one bit of preaching throughout the entire thing -- the plot was more Santa visits the cast and a general enough lesson about the spirit of giving -- except a little bit at the end where one character is woken up by the passing of the three wise men and he steps outside to see the Xmas star. Credits roll and what I remember being a really nice wistful end musical theme plays.)

absolutely not, and i will even say that my argument could far more easily be construed as racist than yours.

i think my initial trollish posts were just an exasperated response the feeling that it's impossible to really discuss these things without being called a racist by someone, somewhere. it's like the trump card in any argument because it can't be disproved.

cultural relativism is nice but it just doesn't work.

also, criticism of a religion is often presented as rational to mask the hateful tendencies beneath; it's just really hard to draw a line.

More generally I wouldn't call any religion shit, but I think they are all nonsense. With the amount of anti-Islamic feeling there is at the moment, I'd be inclined to be extremely cautious about saying anything more than that, whereas where I'm from Christianity is hardly the faith of an oppressed minority, so I'm reasonably happy with digs at that.

http://www.simpleton.com/19980729.html

Islam's god must be sweet ta one.
Islam's best, a god sweet unto me.

"Two wongs don't make a Wright"????

I'd just like to apologize again for this incredibly naiive and non-observant statement.

http://www.comics.com/comics/getfuzzy/archive/images/getfuzzy20041829930129.gif

http://img93.imageshack.us/img93/6010/crbc0604052ee.gif

you would have to be really looking for the racism to find it, and frankly anyone who would equate "stinky" w/ islam and go public with it is guilty of pushing the racist semiotics they are accusing hart of; brilliantly, the strip contains this possibility: "it" (islam) could stink, but it's also possible that it's the observer who stinks

-- Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Sunday, 23 November 2003 15:44 (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

people tracer will play the YOURE OVERANALYZING!!! save-a-hoe move on:

1) bill clinton
2) johny hart

o_O

3)Paul Tibbets

scientific acclaim?

"Yeah you know, like when a scientist makes acclaim"

http://www.jdl.org/images/hart_toon_color.jpg

"subtle"

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y53/Nullifidian/bc_creationism.gif

If that's supposed to be a Channukiah turning into a cross, it isn't one.

If this dude believes in "cave men", and the earth is only 5000 years old or whatever, then where did these guys live? Civilization and agriculture .... oh man, it's impossible to understand what these people think, and yet do they really have as much influence over U.S. politics as it seems?

http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/BCcomics_easter.htm

However, for Easter 2001 Johnny Hart wanted to do something very different and special. He states, "I noticed one day that the center section of the Menorah -- the sacred symbol of Judaism, bore the shape of the cross. I wanted everyone to see the cross in the Menorah. It was a revelation to me, that tied God's chosen people to their spiritual next of kin -- the disciples of the Risen Christ."

Hanukias have 9 candles, but traditional temple menorahs (which Hart is apparently going for) have 7.

true

well, Hart's dead now.

cryingbigbroad.jpg

man i thought this strip was funny when i was a little kid. taht was long before he turned into some zealot asshole though. the BC game for Commodore 64 was excellent!

AND HE DID

the offensiveness of BC lies in the fact that it's painfully unfunny. even moreso than most newspaper comic-strips, which is quite a feat.