Debt On

Controversy surrounding a Danish cartoon has ballooned into a diplomatic nightmare for Denmark with death threats made on Danish citizens at home and abroad, relations breaking down between Denmark and many Arab countries, and Danish goods being hurt by Arab boycotts.

The cartoons, in my opinion, are inappropriate and offensive. They have the right to exist, but they are horribly inflammatory and provoke the notion that Muslims are a violent people with a violent deity.

While the Danish paper had every right to print the cartoons originally, European papers scrambling to reprint the cartoons now in a show of defiance is tasteless and unnecessary. To do so undermines Denmark’s attempts at reconciliation and suggests that Europe is complicit in the image of a Muslim prophet as a ticking time bomb.

This is particularly dangerous considering the internal problems with Muslim communities prevalent in much of Western Europe, acutely demonstrated by the rioting outside of Paris several weeks ago. It’s my opinion that you have the right to say anything, and sometimes you may say something just to say it. But when you repeat it again and again “just for the sake of saying it,” it’s probably your own opinion.

In Berlin, the prominent daily Die Welt ran a front-page caricature of the prophet wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb.

The paper argued there was a right to blaspheme in the West, and asked whether Islam was capable of coping with satire.

“The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical,” it wrote in an editorial.
– BBC

The arrogance is palpable.

I’m really bothered by the world’s reaction to the recent elections in Palestine. I’m sure most know by now that the political movement Hamas, notorious for its confrontational and violent attitude toward Israel, won an overwhelming majority of the Palestinian Parliament.

The opposition, which has held power in Palestine for decades, as well as leaders of the European Union and our own George W. Bush, are having trouble accepting the election results. As soon as Hamas was elected, demands were made by world leaders that Hamas either renounce violence or risk losing foreign aid.

Several days after the election, Fatah activists and police stormed Parlaiment and occupied the building for twenty minutes, firing guns into the air. This is the peaceful party that the rest of the world is yearning to work with?

I think the rest of the world — particularly one country that aspires to remake the Middle East as a thriving democracy — needs to have more respect for the decisions of the Palestinian people. To outright refuse to work with this new government shows contempt for democracy.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who monitored the elections in Palestine, suggests that it may be possible to work with Hamas, and if not, that the United States should find other ways to give to the suffering Palestinian people:

“If there are prohibitions — like, for instance, in the United States, against giving any money to a government that is controlled by Hamas — then the United States could channel the same amount of money to the Palestinian people through the United Nations, through the refugee fund, through UNICEF, things of that kind,”

Or is it all an excuse to cut a little money going to brown people with no oil?