If there's anything the leader of Al-Qaeda hates more than infidels, it's cartoons of his Prophet. Osama bin Laden responded with a cartoon threat of his own: a spear piercing a red map of Europe with blood coming out of it. Talk about low budget. As someone who's done video production work before, I take offense to this shitty cartoon. Al-Qaeda keeps talking about religious values, clearly production values are beyond them.

Bin Laden has threatened Europe because the Danish republished the Muhammad cartoons from 2005. Is he a collector trying to keep the price of his originals up? It'd be one thing if they were new cartoons, but it's a reissue, old news. If that's all it takes to get bin Laden to threaten a continent, Bush could easily scrounge some approval ratings by sending the cartoon out in the White House News Letter. Give it a few weeks and we'll get a crappy animation of a spear piercing the U.S. that ought to drum up some patriotism.

The Vatican has also dismissed bin Laden's claim that Pope Benedict is behind a new crusade which involved the republishing of the cartoon. And for some reason, I believe the pope. I just don't think he has the time to orchestrate a cartoon war in the midst of trying to rebuild confidence in the Church after all those priests got caught raping little boys.

I also think it's funny that the original cartoon ordeal stemmed from depicting Muhammad, but grew to its full scale because it depicted him as an instigator of violence, and bin Laden's response in cartoon form (originally a YouTube video response?) was a threat of violence on a massive scale. Seems counterintuitive. This does not mean that Islam is an inherently violent religion, (the last thing I need is to get some whack job on my case), but it does show that bin Laden is an inherently violent father fucker (read up on what members of the Mujahideen used to do to captured Soviet soldiers. Let's just say rape was involved).

But then again, for all I know, this message of hope Drew showed me yesterday is true, and "God Hates the World and All Its People." And if that's the case, then all religions are violent.