I like the way Josh Marshall formulated his view of the current storm of controversy over the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad at his Talking Points Memo blog in this 02/03/06 entry:
In isolation, in the abstract, it's certainly a taboo [the Muslim prohibition on artistic representations of Muhammad] I'd want to respect, or at least not needlessly offend.
But all of that is beside the point. An open society, a secular society can't exist if mob violence is the cost of giving offense. And that does seem like what's on offer here. That's the crux of this issue - that the response is threatened violence and more practical demands that such outrages must end. It's back to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses (which, if you're only familiar with it as a 'controversy' is a marvelously good book) - if on a less literary and more amorphous level.
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