Posted by Jim at February 8th, 2006

On a gut level, the amount of attention paid to the cartoons showing Mohammed as a terrorist surpises me. Unless you’re an expert in Islam, however (and I’m not), your gut instinct is pretty lousy at understanding religion and world politics.

From what I understand, the whole situation comes out of the fact that some Muslims in Denmark found that they couldn’t do anything to the newspaper that printed the cartoons under Danish law. What they then did was to publicize the cartoons in countries with largely Muslim populations. They included two cartoons that were not actually printed in addition to the ones that were. The unprinted cartoons were apparently even more offensive than the ones that were printed.

It would be easy to dismiss the whole thing as having been deliberately created and partially false in the first place if it weren’t for a couple things.

1. Even if the reaction is based on some flawed assumptions, an awful lot of people are very angry.
2. Dismissing the whole thing will just make people angrier.

Personally, I’m inclined to think that the papers have a right to print what they want, but I don’t think it’s as simple as a question of free speech.

As much as it’s true that this whole mess was partially created by the Danish muslims who publicized the cartoons (and by the Danish press which could have apologised before it got this far), it’s not all from that. It was also created by repressive muslim regimes that actively encourage their population to get upset about this sort of thing to distract them from dissatisfaction with their own governments. It was also created by general anger on the part of some muslims about western influence and power over their own countries. It may even be that anger about Iraq and US foriegn policy affect this as well.

In addition, Europe’s own problems in coming to grips with immigration come into play here too.

For me, the question is less about free speech and more a question of how the West should engage with the rest of the world. According to some people, part of the reason for terrorism is that some muslims feel that western culture is overwhelming their own.

When we make no compromises at all, we contribute to that impression. By contrast, if we engage in such a way that the majority of muslims feel that the West is listening, we do ourselves a lot of good.

I don’ t know what will solve the current problem. I see it as a manifestation of several different problems (repressive governments, etc…) that will have to be solved separately.

At the same time, apologies and an attempt to show respect to other people’s beliefs can’t hurt.