45 year-old Ali Charaf Damache is in prison in County Cork, Ireland, awaiting trial on a charge of making a telephoned death threat. (He’s accused of making the death threat to an American in Detroit who had publicly claimed that most Muslims didn’t support terrorism such as the attempted Christmas Day bombing of 2009. Feel free to read that sentence twice.)
He is described in this story from the Irish Sunday Business Post Online as “a devout Muslim” and he is complaining that conditions in the prison are “in breach of his rights to practice his religion.” Specifically:
Today his solicitor Caroline Egan said that her client had been subject to insults and abuse by fellow inmates and prison staff and a drawing of a cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammed in an insulting manner was left in his cell.
Well. I don’t know about you, but should the marshal ever catch up with me and I end up someday behind bars, I do pray, fervently, that my fellow inmates will choose to terrorize me by means of cartoons.
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Ah, Ireland; the Land of Saints of Scholars. That green and erudite island of Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde and Pierce Brosnan. In any other nation, consigned to the dank confines of some lousy prison cell, one might well fear beating, sexual violation, and bloody injury or death at the hands of an inmate armed with a lethally sharpened shiv. But in the Emerald Isle, it is not such lowbrow and uncouth behavior that one must fear. Instead it is the well-honed caricature which awaits to demoralize the helpless prisoner.
The screams must be horrible, but no doubt the heartless and hardened wardens ignore them. “No! … no! … no more cartoooooooooons!”
When I have information on Mr. Ali Charaf Damache’s legal defense fund, I’ll be sure to post it.