Turkey’s AKP, Denmark’s AFR, and NATO

Danish Mohammed cartoons fallout continues . . .

Marko Attila Hoare writes, Turkey:  Time for Erdogan and the AKP to go, plus more snippets on prime ministers, prophets, cartoonists and the BBC from Mick Hartley, and more comment from Francis Sedgemore.

On this blog, earlier posts on Denmark’s proud tradition of blasphemous cartoons, and on the BBC’s cautious coverage of the Mohammed cartoons story. (You can still bypass such caution by way of Zombietime’s Mohammed Image Archive.)

Update 21 April: Christopher Hitchens on Turkey, NATO, the EU, and Bernard Kouchner.

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I can’t let this post go by without any illustrations. As linked to above, I wrote earlier about the late great Danish cartoonist Claus Deleuran and his wonderful book Rejsen til Saturn, which includes a very funny depiction of Jesus. His unfinished masterpiece however, running to nine volumes, was the Illustreret Danmarks Historie for Folket series, a history of Denmark and the World in comics. I have the first six volumes, 286 pages of densely packed comic strips which take the story as far as the 9th Century.

Volume 4, published in 1991, covers the emergence of Christianity amongst other things. Above is a very small extract showing Jesus and John the Baptist. There is a lot more of Jesus in action in the book, along with discussion of  miracles and the methods of healing used by witch doctors in Western Canada, and also the role of Mithraism in the forming of Christian belief.

Volume 5, from 1992, gives an account of the life of Mohammed and the rise of Islam. The picture below, showing his ascent to Heaven from Jerusalem, has the footnote, “actually one may not depict the face of the prophet, but it looks so dumb without it.”

Images copyright © the estate of Claus Deleuran.