BANNED IN WASHINGTON
THE SCRAPBOOK seldom takes notice one way or the other of "Opus," the strikingly unfunny comic strip written and drawn by Berkeley Breathed, of "Bloom County" fame. But the August 26 installment was missing from the pages of our Washington Post. And while this was not necessarily a calamity, we admit to curiosity about why "Opus" failed to appear in our Sunday paper.
As we soon discovered, both the August 26 and September 2 episodes of "Opus" poke fun--exceedingly mild fun, in our view--at Islamic fundamentalists. (The August 26 can be viewed here.)
Well, here's a chance for readers to pretend they're editors at the Washington Post. Bearing in mind that "Opus" featured a strip, two weeks ago, which wondered whether the late Rev. Jerry Falwell is in heaven (he is, but God is "annoyed eternally" about it), imagine you now find yourself staring at the new installment, wherein the spiritual quester Lola Granola (a recurring "Opus" character) tries to persuade her boyfriend of the advantages of her embrace of radical Islamism: "You're not getting a girlfriend blathering about 'American Idol.' And you're not getting a girlfriend who resists a man's rightful place." And so on.
What to do? Well, according to Catherine Donaldson-Evans of Fox News, Post editors showed the strip to Muslim staffers at the paper, who reacted "emotionally" to the spectacle of Lola Granola, now styling herself "Fatima Struggle" and "dressed in traditional Muslim garb and espousing conservative Islamic views." And this strip and the one
scheduled for September 2 were pulled from the Washington Post.
In THE SCRAPBOOK's considered opinion, the insult to Islam in this strip is pretty benign, and in its fear of giving offense, the Post overreacted. But that's not the point. The point is, why would editors have felt constrained to solicit the views of Muslim staffers?
Were all the Baptists in the Post newsroom consulted about the Jerry Falwell joke? Is "Doonesbury" shown in advance to all the Republicans in the Post newsroom? Oh, wait a minute...
HOLLYWOOD HATES THE TROOPS
"We've killed over 400,000 of their citizens." That's what actor Tim Robbins thinks U.S. troops have been doing in Iraq. He made the claim last week in an appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.
He's wrong, of course. American soldiers have not been slaughtering 300 Iraqis a day for the last four years. Even for one of Hollywood's most feculent personalities, this is an appalling slander of U.S. troops.
The Iraq Body Count is an antiwar website that tallies all civilian deaths in Iraq as reported in the news media. Theirs is a comprehensive count that seeks to hold the United States and Britain accountable for a wide range of civilian deaths. As explained at iraqbodycount.org: "The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion."
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