A suicide bomber in Afghanistan killed the mayor of Kandahar city by hiding the explosive device under his turban. The tactic is reminiscent of the Kurt Westergaard caricature of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban that incited protests and rioting that left over a 100 people dead.
Adopting turban bomb as weapon by anti-government militants in the conflict-ridden Afghanistan where a majority of its inhabitants often wear turban would add to the challenges of security forces.
In Kandahar, the birthplace of Taliban fighters where a vast majority of its male residents wear turban as man fashion, is very difficult for security forces to check everyone and curb possible terror attacks.
Kandahar has been the scene of increasing militancy over the past few years.
I’m not sure I understand why this is on here. The connection to comics seems rather flimsy.
Maybe Alan and I share a flimsy train of thought, because it was the first thing I thought of.
@Ed – I added a picture to help make the connection.
I still don’t get it. A crackpot killing people with a turban bomb and the prophet of a religion being drawn with a bomb as a turban. That’s pretty flimsy still. But, okay. Whatever.
Have these people lost thier minds?! Wait a minute…..did I just say that?
What he’s saying is that Kurt Westergaard is to blame for the death of the mayor of Kandahar because he gave the bomber an idea of how to pull it off.
Okay, I know that’s not it.
Upon further reflection, there’s probably no connection at all. The guy can’t be the first — or by this reckoning, the second — person to hide stuff in his turban. I’ll bet that, if Dennis Mitchell were “Dennis bar Henry,” the loveable little Pushtun rascal, we’d see cartoons of his mother standing over the washer and recoiling from finding a lizard in the turban she was about to wash.
In any case, if the guy really walked into the mayor’s office with a lit fuse poking out of his turban, I’d say the Afghan security forces aren’t quite ready for us to leave yet …
This site is still about cartoonists, their concerns and their impact on the culture, right? So, it’s no John Lassiter hugging the help but if you deal in irony…
Here’s 4/19/11 DC post:
https://dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2011/04/19/westergaard-trial-in-jordan-begins-next-week/
I sent this to Alan for what I thought were obvious reasons: rarely if ever have cartoonists -of all people, been the catalyst for an international incident, riots and deaths but the ‘religion of peace’ proved nobody gets out alive. And the refusal of American newspapers to publish said cartoons was viewed by many to be a whale dung low in what once was journalism.
This homicidal faux ‘religious’ murderer probably never saw Westergaard’s bomb in a turban cartoon but that only underlines the irony. At least Hinckley saw “Taxi Driver”.
(Molly Norris (aka?), Theo Van Gogh unavailable for comment.)
When a political murder is carried out in a country in Southwest Asia, I really have trouble connecting it to a cartoon intended to insult religious people in Scandinavia, even though the assassin in Kandahar hid a weapon in his turban and the offensive cartoon depicted the Prophet wearing a bomb on his head.
People sometimes insult Arabs by calling them towel heads, and President McKinley’s assassin wrapped a towel around his hand to conceal his gun. Coincidence? Um … well, yeah, probably. But if he’d been a Muslim, it would have been a scary, creepy coincidence!
(On the other hand, you might be able to draw a disquieting connection between a Scandinavian magazine that goes out of its way to purposely insult Muslims and a Scandinavian madman who murders a lot of people because he, too, hates Muslims.)
“The tactic is reminiscent of the Kurt Westergaard caricature of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban that incited protests and rioting that left over a 100 people dead.”
This is not quite accurate. There were 12 cartoons in the original group that were published. Then three more were added by a couple of Imams, to help themselves in their efforts to incite a reaction. The three they added were far worse than those published.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy