Yesterdays I heard controversial news that made Muslims throughout the world cried out. The news was Everybody Draws Mohammed Day contest a.k.a EDMD appeared on Facebook as a page. And it had more than 65,000 who liked it.
Molly Norris, a cartoonist of Seattle, USA was the first who blew this idea regarding a broadcaster’s censorship of an episode of South Park, the satirical animated television series, which depicted Muhammad in a bear suit. On seattletimes.com stated that she had drawn her cartoon to support the creator of South Park. Norris said it would sent bad message to the country if they did a censorship. "I just felt so strongly — I just felt they sent a really fearful negative message to the country: It could be a slippery slope toward censorship in America," she said.
But Norris’ idea had suggested some strangers to make the EDMD real on facebook. Two graduate students from Europe started a facebook page in supporting EDMD on May 20 and they also started wordpress as well where they said they would post submitted drawings. Another woman started the same page as well. And it also had many members who supported that page. And this drew heat in Muslims. They made a movement to against EDMD. In Indonesia where the first large number Muslims stay, people fulminated EDMD and it creators. Even in Pakistan, the government ordered the internet provider service to block facebook until May 31.
Regarding this situation, Norris disavowed that she’d ever started EDMD facebook page. She also posted apologize statement on her blog, mollynorris.com. She said, “I never started a facebook page; I never set up any place for peole to send drawings to and I never received any drawings (I see that two European graduate students and another woman started the facebook pages). … I apologize to people of Muslim faith and ask that this 'day' be called off.”
For Muslims, Mohammed the prophet is the most perfect man in the world from time to time. It is forbidden to us to depict his face. On Hadith, it’s said that to discourage depictions of any living creature. So that’s why Muslims against any depictions for their prophet.
From this situation, we can learn that we must realize we’re living in one place with people from various race, custom, manner, tradition, religion, etc. So that we should be careful with what things we gonna speak to others. A blog commentator said that Freedom of Speech (FoS) doesn’t mean hurting someone’s or religion’s integrity. You can see what has happened with Norris after she expressed support drawing for South Park. It drew heat and cried out from Muslims. Then, now on we must do care our mistakes and learn from them to discourage negative reaction from others and we can live in harmony.
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