Every culture has sacred cows, symbols or issues that are the third rail of public discourse. To target the sacred cows of a tiny minority in your country doesn't require much bravery and isn't much of a freedom of speech issue. When the whole country agrees with the opinion your espousing and the public cheers you on, you aren't making much of a stand....what you are doing is using the bully pulpit to teach a people of a different and what is perceived to be a lesser culture some abject and condescending lesson in freedom of speech.

I would compare this to going to a turkish neighborhood in the US and burning a turkish flag. It wouldn't mean much if the public sides with you and against the turkish community. Try burning the US flag and see how what happens.

Absurd. There is abundant evidence that a sizable portion of the Muslim community really does desire the deaths of apostates when such "offenses" are commited.As long as they think (in any sizable number) that a resort to violence is the appropriate rebuttal to the publication of a cartoon in a largely Christian nation, then it MOST CERTAINLY is a free speech issue. If people don't feel free to say it out of fear, its not just something that is being unsaid to be polite, its intimidation curbing speech. And that is UNACCEPTABLE in the west. They must not make our countries more like their own on the point of free expression. NEVER. Not even a little.

If the Muslim community in Europe was just your average, run-of-the-mill ethnic/religious minority that was routinely shat upon, you might have a point.

But when you are talking about people who are eager to kill in retaliation over some silly cartoons, then you are not dealing with a run-of-the-mill ethnic/religious minority.

I suspect many Muslims have endured some things in Europe, but if they cannot comprehend the fundamental necessity of free speech, then I can accept this bit of provocation as a relevent protest. If these Muslims had been in Europe 80 years ago they'd be systematically vaporized in Nazi death camps. But because they know such atrocities won't be visited upon them, their murderous threats are little more than just that. Respect for culture does not mean the culture in question should not be expected to assimilate. Free speech shouldn't have any cultural bounds, anyway; it should be seen for what it is, a universal human right.

And what is this "minority" nonsense? Has it escaped your notice that during each of these absurdly exagerrated hissy fits the muslim world throws after the slightest possible offense imaginable, that the most violent reactions take place in places where muslims are 100% of the population? There were actually christians killed over the cartoons in Pakistan, where muslims are not minorities to put it mildly. In fact the most over the top reactiosn come from places where it is ILLEGAL TO BE CHRISTIAN OR JEWISH. Maybe your minority-focus should shift to why there isn't a single Christian church in Saudi Arabia as proscribed by LAW.

Miali:

Every culture has sacred cows, symbols or issues that are the third rail of public discourse. To target the sacred cows of a tiny minority in your country doesn't require much bravery and isn't much of a freedom of speech issue. When the whole country agrees with the opinion your espousing and the public cheers you on, you aren't making much of a stand....what you are doing is using the bully pulpit to teach a people of a different and what is perceived to be a lesser culture some abject and condescending lesson in freedom of speech.

Very well said! I agree whole-heartedly. It takes no courage to put down the 'despised minority' of the moment. It does take courage to speak against the US after 9/11 though. Bill Maher made a joke, and lost his show. Ward Churchill made a speech and lost his job. Sam Al-Arian made a speech and lost his freedom. A bunch of mid-eastern medical students said something-or-other in a diner and lost their admission to the medical school they were heading to. A lot of americans said or wrote the wrong things and found themselves on the No Fly list.

The poor minority you should be feeling for are the Danes, the tiny little generous democracy who all the powerful democracies abandoned by not publishing in sympathy with them and in so doing betrayed their western secular brothers.

Ward Churchill lost his job because he lied on his resume to get the job. Nice try.

If the issue is - The freedom to publish materials in the face of religious intolerance and violence...

Then the danish cartoons were a piss-poor method of going about fighting that battles, precisely because they expressed religious intolerance. If we were talking about an editorial column, or an essay, or some sort of expression that was honest about Islamic violence without being juvenille, then this would have been a more effective (and more principled) way to go about defending free speech.

There was nothing thoughtful or necessary about those cartoons themselves. The specific freedom in question at the time was the freedom to act like a jerk. You can say that these cartoons represented an important issue, which is somewhat true, but the controversy surrounding this case had more to do with the fact that it was ignorance vs. ignorance, so we may as well support our version of ignorance.

Was the publication of the cartoons a victory for freedom of the press? Only on paper.

The cartoons need not be funny or serious or good for their publication without violent reaction to be expected. THERE IS NO RIGHT TO HAVE YOUR RELIGION RESPECTED. I do not respect any religions, they are all absurd, I will NOT BE FORCED to "respect" them. I will only leave them alone, which does NOT include promising I will never make fun of them in a cartoon.

just to clarify, I think those papers had the right to print those cartoons as many times as they wanted. But to look at that dispute and elevate it to the vanguard of contemporary examples of "Free Speech" is overdoing it a bit.

Let's get this straight. Denmark most certainly "tolerates" religions other than Christianity. There are hundreds of mosques in Denmark. The only truly intolerant people any where within a hundred miles of this discussion are the muslims who would have you killed for making fun of their make believe god. There is no religious intolerance in the west, which does not mean we have to pretend to respect or like their religion. We allow them and others to practice it, but not impose their norms on us, such as the depiction of Mohammed. They may not make me practice their religion by telling me I can't draw him.

I'm not going to speak for the other people here, but here is my POV:

- you should be allowed to say or draw whatever you want about whatever religion.

- While enjoying equal protection, Not all expressions of speech are tasteful.

- When engaged in a battle over freedoms of speech, you will be more successful if you don't put distasteful examples of speech at the forefront.

You and I know that there are plenty of less offensive things that could have been said about Islam that still would have provoked an unreasonable reaction. This is a debate that is too important not to win, and that means taking the high road and not making stupid cartoons the center of the debate.

thebin:

Ward Churchill lost his job because he lied on his resume to get the job. Nice try.

Wrong- actually the putative excuse was that he failed to back up certain assertions in his academic publications.

In any event- how many tenured professors have had to have their resumes and publications put on trial like this? This is an outrageous infringement on free speech. To argue otherwise would just make your position vis-a-vis the muslim cartoons hypocritical.

I would not have especially supported the original publication of the cartoons because they didn't seem to be all that interesting. But once puplished, that cat is out of the bag and the only response is to support them with our own publication, showing them that we mean it when we say free speech, like we sure as hell would have had the offended religion been Christian. Once published, there are two choices...submission or standing up for a core belief. Too many have taken the former position.

That was not a speech issue, it was a plagiarism issue.

It certainly takes courage in the United States to despise any minority, and it takes a lot more courage when it's a state-backed "minority" which is actually the mega-majority in many countries and consists mostly of people who want to behead you (yes, *you* honky) with a serrated knife.

I certainly hope we can get a few more Americans to recognize the despeate urgency of not just despising but rolling back the tide of sharia.