There is increasing violence and noise over the so-called Muhammed cartoons, and more and more world leaders are asking people to calm down.
What needs to happen, is this: Political leaders in Muslim countries need to explain this to their citizens, that in Denmark, Norway, France, and all other countries that have published this cartoons, there is freedom of speech. Which is to say - what gets published in newspapers can not be assumed to reflect the government's policy. And it would be helpful if pulpit imams explained the same thing.
Which will inevitably raise an interesting but uncomfortable question: if there is free and independent press in Europe, why isn't the press free in Muslim countries also free?
I realize the probability is low, but there is a chance that this question may put more wind in the sails of the democracy movements in these countries.
Iran wants to publish cartoons making fun of the Holocaust. I'm not even going to get into the differences between making fun of people's suffering and their beliefs (it should be self-evident), but they'll quickly find out that nobody will be attacking and burning Iran's embassies because of such cartoons, no ambassadors will be sent packing, there will be no ultimatums put to the Iranian government, though clearly there the government does control the press.
There will be name-calling and renunciations, as their damn well should be. But if Iranian cartoonists want to expose themselves as despicable bigots, they are certainly entitled to do that. Very few think that the editors of Jyllands-Posten or Magazinet have good judgment, taste, or deserve anything approaching an award for religious tolerance and sensitivity, but the truth is their actions speak for themselves.
But it might be a novel idea in a lot of countries in the world that it is possible to defend oneself against offensive speech by speaking back, rather than killing the offender.
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