I'd say it was a great success. Here's a few pages with compilations of drawings:
An "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day" page on Facebook has over 100,000 members and sparked such a controversy that Pakistan blocked access to Facebook and You-Tube. Here is an interview with one of the Facebook page's administrators--which I found particularly interesting in that the interviewee, a German, also condemns Germany's anti-Holocaust denial laws. Three cheers for consistency! (NB: The blog for this page appears to have been hacked, as was the reinstated Facebook page.)
Reason Magazine has announced its winner to their Draw Mohammad contest.
There's a nice post and drawing compilation at The Friendly Atheist. Take the time to scroll down through the images. Some are quite clever and funny. None are intentionally hateful or grotesque. Although I strongly defend the right to be blatantly offensive--the benignity of these images highlights the grotesqueness of any attempts at censorship.
If you like animation and film, you can find a large number of You-Tube clips in celebration of this special day. One clip is even of a Muslim inviting Muslims to participate in Draw Mohammad Day to support freedom of speech!
Wikipedia has a page nicely summarizing the event.
And true to form, the current US administration has come out in support of those violating Freedom of Speech:
“Pakistan is wrestling to this issue. We respect any actions that need to be taken under Pakistani law to protect their citizens from offensive speech,” said the US State Department official while rejecting a suggestion from a journalist to condemn Islamabad’s actions...“At the same time, Pakistan has to make sure that in taking any particular action, that you’re not restricting speech." (Dawn.com)
How can you "respect any actions to protect their citizens from offensive speech" and at the same time "make sure...your're not restricting speech"?
You can't.
This is a classic example of Obama's (and his supporters) ability to get away with emphatically stating contradictory statements, even in the same speech! Each statement in itself seems reasonable, but closer inspection reveals that placed together they are self-contradictory--an attempt to have one's cake and eat it too. You can't be credited with supporting freedom of speech while at the same time supporting the violation of freedom of speech. Ever since Aristotle formulated his Law of Identity, there is no excuse those who attempt to inform us that A can be both A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect.
Freedom of speech, rationally understood as a corollary of the individual right to life, can not entail both freedom and censorship. No amount of trying to straddle the issue with one foot on freedom and the other foot on the tenets of tyranny and statism, can avoid the fact that A is A, and censorship is censorship.
Either you are for freedom of speech, or you are for government abridgment of speech.
Obama and his administration, in this issue and in so many others, are clearly on the side of statism.
(Cross-posted in part at Wealth is Not the Problem>)
