--- "www.leninology. blogspot.com" <leninology at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I think, as you may have gathered from other remarks
> of mine, that you are
> missing an important point.
I doubt. I do not think I am missing anything. Au contraire, I am trying to take into consideration as much as possible - instead of sticking to "one and only true" interpretation of a cultural phenomena.
As I see it, any cultural message is created, as it were, twice: first time in the mind of the sender, the second time in the minds of the audience. It is thus quite normal that the two creations differ from one another quite substantially - where one sees an innocent and harmless joke, the other may may see malicious intentions that call for strong actions. What the message thus "says" pretty much depends not just on the contents inserted by sender, the context in which the message was created, the context in which it was received, but also on the contents inserted into it by different audiences.
Any ethnic joke - and there no dearth of those in every single human society and culture - can thus send many very different messages, from crude and thoughtless but malice free entertainment, to legitimate criticism of disagreeable forms of behavior or cultural traits, to belittling a particular person or a group of people, to spreading hatred, and to inciting to violence.
Therefoe, I simply do not know whether all those nasty things that you described in your posings on this subjects were or were not the intention of authors and publishers of the cartoons in question. As I said before, I did not think much of these cartoons. I saw some of them astactless, others as simply dumb and not funny, still others as what I saw as valid criticism of a cultural trait that I find disagreeable (treatement of women in some Islamic societies). I also think that the reaction to these cartoon was grossly blown out of proportion. If Europeans, Americans or Israelis were to react in the same way to the cartoons published by Aljazeera - some of which being good while other dumb or tactless - I am pretty sure most reasonable people would disapprove of such reaction.
Wojtek
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