The International Incident of the Political Cartoon

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.

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