What bother's me about the cartoons that are causing riots in Europe and the Muslem world right now, is not so much the issue of freedom of the press. There's a another, more sinister, issue at hand. I call it the stupidity of the press. Make no mistake that I fully believe in and support the freedom of the press. I'd really like it if they brought it back to the United States, but that's another issue. But the stupidity of the press is pretty rampant these days. I can't speak for the European press as a whole, as I don't read it on a daily basis to really be informed on it. But from the info we have here on the cartoon that was initially printed in a Danish paper, I've got to say - uh, what were you thinking?
That said, yes the Danish paper should have the freedom to print whatever they want. However, with freedom come responsibility. If you insult an entire group of people that span many countries, you might want to think about the repercussions and how it will affect everyone involved. Depicting a sacred symbol of a religion as a terrorist in this day and age is nothing less than wreckless endangerment. It's not just a silly cartoon - it's a political cartoon with several dangerous messages. 1) Because it targets an entire religion rather than just a radical fringe group, it illustrates that ALL Muslims are to be feared because that's what the Prophet teaches. 2) It takes their holiest figure and paints him as a terrorist and trite. 3) It disrespects Islam by ignoring the religious law that forbids iconography or any pictorial depiction of the religion.
These riots are not over a cartoon. These riots are the preverbial last straw in a cumulation of events. In history there are a lot of dangerous last straws. WWI did not errupt because the Archduke Ferdidnand and his wife were assasinated. It was the last straw. In a time with so many sparks flying amuck, we don't really need to start flinging gasoline.
Okay, freedom of the press is also the freedom to be a dipshit if one must. But there is such a thing as justifiable anger in response to dipshits. Unfortunately such things tend to escalate. What the press needs to bear in mind is whether or not insulting an entire religion was a good way to illustrate terror attacks that usually come from fringe organizations. The press was not reporting on a story in which facts were in danger of being covered up. It seems a political cartoon with an agenda geered at pointing the finger of blame at millions of people who aren't invovled in such things.
I don't know the true intentions of the artist or the newspaper. Perhaps they didn't mean to come across as they did. But like it or not, that's the perception now. And what it teaches is how little the West understands the Muslim world. They obviously don't know us very well either, as we're pretty used to political cartoons attacking and making fun of every political, religious and social movement. It's not so much an issue for us. There is a clash of cultures and the inability for either side to understand where the other one is coming from. But now that we've been made aware of their feelings toward how the Prophet is depicted, or not depicted in this case, maybe, just MAYBE, we could apologize for the misunderstanding rather than reprinting the thing all over the world and crying FREEDOM OF THE PRESS! The issue isn't freedom, it's stupidity and it's lack of imagination.
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