We've had the Life of Brian but we won't be getting The Life of Mohammed

Monty Python original, Terry Jones, has stated, very firmly, that there will not be a re-make of The Life of Brian parody of Christianity.
Speculation was that the Python team were planning to do a Muslim version but now Jones has said in answer to the question:

"Probably not - looking at Salman Rushdie I suppose people would be frightened"

What a perceptive man this is. He has managed to work out that while Christians were incensed at The Life of Brian, Muslims would certainly issue a Fatwa on all and sundry if they parodied Mohammed in the same way and the Monty Python team would be picked off one by one.

Speaking about the original version, Jones rather pompously says:

"I took the view it wasn't blasphemous...at the time religion seemed to be on the backburner...."

Now let me try to get this straight in my poor befuddled brain. The Life of Brian wasn't (in his view) blasphemous but, the making of a Muslim version would be?

Terry Jones is puzzled by the uproar caused by the film:

"We're still discussing it now" he said. "And I don't know why"

Cue for graphic of an enormous clucking chicken......




Not a little chicken...a big chicken!

 And now for something completely different.....this is fellow Python, Terry Gilliam, giving an interview in 2006:-

Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director Terry Gilliam, the former political cartoonist and satirist, has stepped gingerly into the Prophet Muhammad cartoon wars, asserting that someone “from within” Islam needs to take on the fundamentalists in the way that he and his Monty Python colleagues lampooned abuses of Christianity in their 1979 film Life of Brian … Gilliam recalled that the Monty Python team “knew what we were doing” when they set out to satirize Christianity in Life of Brian, a movie that was banned in parts of the UK, Ireland, the US Bible Belt and elsewhere. “We were pissed off at organized religion. We weren’t going to take on Christ, so Christ was treated with respect. But the whole idea of what religion is about and how it works… the sex, the heresy, the persecutions. We knew what we were doing and that was what was so exciting about it.” “Our triumph,’ he said, “was that in Variety magazine, the trade paper, there it was: A whole page devoted to us. Two columns, the Protestants protesting. Two columns, the Catholics protesting. Two columns the Jews protesting. We got everybody evenly.” Still, he noted, the Monty Python team had had the good sense not to lampoon the Islamists. “We didn’t go for the Muslims, did we?” he said, a little self-deprecatingly. “We were smart.”

For "smart" read "cowardly"

We're still waiting Terry Gilliam....looking forward to the premiere!

Burning the Koran was wrong, very wrong

I doubt that anyone who reads this blog would disagree with my headline; I intensely dislike the extremes of Islam, I believe it to be a harsh and brutal faith but I believe that it was wrong of Pastor Terry Jones to burn a copy of the Koran. We owe respect to all faiths and should indulge in debate rather than abuse.
Pastor Jones (I hope he's not of Welsh extraction) has done what he has been threatening to do for a long time. This week he held a mock "trial", dressed himself up as a judge and declared the Muslim Faith guilty of crimes against humanity. The sentence of burning was then carried out.

Photo: CBS News

Terry Jones has offended Muslims and
condemned Christians to more persecutions

One cannot help but feel that it was the media attention that fed this bizarre character to the extent that he finally carried out what he has been threatening for many months. What result has it produced? So far 12 plus innocent people have been blown up by a bomber in Afghanistan, you can be sure that there will be more to come. Pastor Jones will accept no responsibility.
How fragile our existence appears to be when one man with a following of around 50 people can set in motion a sequence of events that will result in an increase in the persecution and even death of Christians in Muslim countries.

Fundamentalist Muslims around the world seem beyond the law and appear to act violently towards the west as the mood takes them. I use the word "Fundamentalist" when speaking about the Islamic minority that surface at times such as these, but I fear the Pastor's actions will make fundamentalists out of many erstwhile ordinary Muslims - all will respond with anger and violence to the burning. Pity their poor Christian neighbours who will suffer the result of bigotry and crass stupidity.