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Doug found himself blasted by the Council on American Islamic
Relations (CAIR) in an e-mail Jihad when he drew a cartoon with
the caption, "What Would Muhammad Drive?" The drawing
showed a man wearing Arab headdress and driving a Ryder truck
(a reference to Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh). It became
one of Doug's most famous cartoons and inspired thousands of
angry, threatening e-mails.
Doug wrote, "I was used to negative reactions from religious
interest groups, but not the kind of sustained violent intensity
of the Islamic threats. The nihilism and culture of death of
a religion that sanctions suicide bombers, and issues fatwas
on people who draw funny pictures, is certainly of a different
order and fanatical magnitude than the protests of our home-grown
religious true believers."
Marlette continued, "As
a child of the segregated South, I am quite familiar with the
damage done to the "good religious people" of my region
when the Ku Klux Klan acted in our name. The CAIR organization
that led the assault (on me), describes itself as a civil rights
advocacy group. Among those whose "civil rights" they
advocated were the convicted bombers of the World Trade Center
in 1993. They cannot be taken seriously. For many of those who
protested my cartoon, recent émigrés, many highly
educated, it was obvious that there was not that healthy tradition
of free inquiry, humor and irreverence in their background that
we have in the west. There was no Jefferson, Madison, Adams in
their intellectual tradition. Those who have attacked my work,
whether on the right, the left, Republican or Democrat, conservative
or liberal, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or Muslim, all seem
to experience comic or satirical irreverence as hostility and
hate. When all it is, really, is irreverence. Ink on paper is
only a thought, an idea. Such people fear ideas. Those who mistake
themselves for the God they claim to worship tend to mistake
irreverence for blasphemy."
Doug was well known for many cartoons about civil rights in the
South.
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