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J Dilla
Oh my. Just got an email about the death of J Dilla (a.k.a. Jay Dee), one of the world’s great hip-hop producers. I mentioned him and even linked to a sound clip in this article I did for Slate. At this point I know nothing about the cause of death. He had to have been really young. From a March
Unacceptable
Since I cited Andrew Sullivan in my last post, now I need to cry foul. Here he quotes a reader email as follows: “I’m honestly starting to suspect that, before this is over, European nations are going to have exactly four choices in dealing with their entire Moslem populations — for elementary safety’s sake: (1) Capitulate totally to them and
The Egyptian wrinkle
One more comment, from Andrew Sullivan, and then it’s time to move on from this cartoon business: So we now discover that the hideously offensive and blasphemous cartoons – so blasphemous that CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, won’t publish them … were reprinted last October. In Egypt. On the front frigging page. No one rioted. No
Enraged?
Reza Aslan writes in Slate that he’s “enraged” by the Danish cartoons. “No one doubts that the press should be free to satirize,” he says. (Actually, plenty of people seem to doubt it.) “But freedom of the press cannot excuse the promotion of noxious stereotypes,” he continues. That’s a fair point, but the printing of cartoons also cannot excuse thuggish
Johann Hari nails it
…The image of Mohammed’s turban containing a bomb implies that all Muslims are violent maniacs – an untrue and dangerous nonsense. But free speech is not the freedom to be nice. It is the freedom to be offensive, foolish or even racist, or it is nothing. Yet many of my friends and political allies were not reacting by stating these
And another thing
In this piece for ZNet, referred to me by reader Pat, Omar Barghouti asks: To put it bluntly, would the west accept or tolerate cartoons which are anti-Semitic, novels which deny the Holocaust, or poetry which favorably evokes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? This from Jason Zengerle at TNR’s “The Plank” includes the following rundown from the Jerusalem
More on the cartoons
Rami G. Khouri has a spectacularly evasive editorial in Lebanon’s Daily Star. Read it here. Khouri writes: The current wave of intense protests was sparked when half a dozen other newspapers throughout Europe provocatively reprinted the cartoons last month. This was coupled with European political and press leaders flat out telling the Islamic world that Western freedom of press was
Discs I’m filing through…
Catoire, Piano Trio/Piano Quartet/Room-Music (Hyperion) Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Live at the BBC (Castle Music) Ahmad Jamal, The Legendary Okeh & Epic Recordings (Epic/Legacy) Ilona Knopfler, Live the Life (Mack Avenue) Mike Marshall & Chris Thile, Into the Cauldron (Sugar Hill) Dave Holland & Barre Phillips, Music From Two Basses (ECM) Yusef Lateef, The Golden Flute (Impulse!)