Islamic Fire
Those Danish cartoons keep firing up the Muslims. Then again, pretty much anything fires up the Muslims.
A reader writes:
Anonymous post for your blog (because my husband does not want me to write or say anything in public about the great, peaceful religion of Islam):
On January 31st NPR reported that a Danish newspaper had apologized, in response to protests of Muslims, for publishing a cartoon 4 months ago showing the prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban.
When the cartoon was republished in a Norwegian newspaper, the protests, which began with street demonstrations, flag burnings, death threats, and bomb scares, escalated into an international incident; a consumer boycott of Danish goods by businesses in several Gulf states, and Libya, Syria, and Saudi Arabia withdrawing their ambassadors from Denmark.
Since NPR ran the story, other European newspapers have decided to publish the cartoon, so we can expect the ruckus to spread.
NPR followed their news report with a commentary by Shibley Telhami, a Government and Politics professor at the University of Maryland. Telhami's comments were for the most part reasonable, but contained this stunning assertion: “Had anti-Semitic or anti-Christian cartoons been published in major American newspapers, reactions of Christians and Jews would have been strong and angry and demands on politicians to express condemnation would have been possibly just as great.”
Uh”¦ no.
I note the softening “possibly,” but really have to wonder under which rock in the United States this man lives that he does not recognize that secular insults to Christians, especially Catholics, are ubiquitous through all forms of the media. Yes, we sometimes express anger about it and we may decide to boycott a particular product. But we understand that in free societies people have the civil liberty to be obnoxious and it wouldn't occur to us to attempt to harm the economy of an entire country because of one cartoonist's insulting drawing or one filmmaker's offensive movie. And as for flag-burning's and death threats and bomb scares, well”¦ what we call that sort of thing is “un-Christian,” Mr. Telhami. Too bad it isn't “un-Muslim” as well.
