The Turkish broadcasters of the endlessly fascinating Simpsons cartoon – surely one of the most brilliant creations of the age – have been fined for blasphemy.

Blasphemy! Well done, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie!

This is from ANSAmed:

Just about everything that could be said and written about the super-popular cartoon ‘The Simpsons’ had been, except that it was blasphemous. Now even that ”milestone” has been reached, thanks to the watchdogs of Turkey’s television stations under the Islamic-leaning government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to the newspaper Hurriyet, Ankara’s Council of Radio and Television (RTUK) has handed down a TRY 52,951 fine (about 23,000 euros) to the private broadcaster CNBC-E for having broadcast an episode of the cartoon in which ”God is mocked”. In the episode, God goes so far as to offer coffee to the devil. In the eyes of RTUK, this ”can be considered an insult” of a blasphemous nature, and the cartoon was held to encourage young people ”to drink alcohol during New Year’s celebrations in New York City”. What’s more, ”one of the characters insults the religious beliefs of another to induce him to commit murder”, ”the Bible is burnt in public” and ” God and the devil are represented in human form”. ”In a country in which the head of the government thinks that a TV series must be historical documentation, it is entirely normal that the RTUK fails to understand the jokes in a cartoon,” said Hurriyet op-ed writer Mehmet Yilmaz.

Remember the Ayatollah Khomeini said “There are no jokes in Islam.”

As well as the death of freedom, and the death of music, the rise of Islam spells the death of laughter. Those gone, could anything worse happen to humankind?

Let’s blaspheme while we may.

And let those who object accept Bart Simpson’s repeated invitation to his enemies: “Eat my shorts!”