To use Ken’s metaphor it’s like the Imams followed him into a toilet cubicle and then complained when he farts, or put their nostrils right up into his mouth first thing in the morning (after he’s had a night on the turps) and then complain that his breath smells bad.

Or like a Hindu walking into an abbotoir through the lobby, signing in as a guest vistor, down the stairs past the safety signs warning about what is going on inside, putting on a uniform, donning a hard hat, speaking to the manager about what is going on in there and then being outraged at the slaughter of cows.

Here are some other things that Europeans do that Fundamentalist Muslims find offensive. I’d like to get an understanding on whether they should no longer engage in these activities in order that they stop being ‘provocative’:

1. The Sun newspaper publishing Page 3 Girls
2. Berlin’s love parade
3. Octoberfest
4. Topless sunbathing at Cannes
5. Proscuitto
6. Hairy armpits on French chicks

Actually if the Imams could please start the outrage with 6, I’d be extremely grateful. I’ve found hairy armpits on French chicks extremely offensive for many years but have had no luck in changing the culture there.

If only I had grabbed some gasoline, a French flag and headed down to the embassy maybe things would have changed.

On the plus side, if we enacted this maxim, we’d never have to hear from Paris Hilton ever again……on the con side we’d have to have an incredibly busy committee to screen for non-substantive material purporting to be free speech. Ileana Ceausescu used to do this all by herself in Romania but she eventually got shot by people who questioned her critical assessment. It’s a dangerous job, Ken.

The fundamental problem remains: in Denmark, it’s not a crime to publish something within legal parameters that might give religious or cultural offence.

I think our agreement is “in principle”, that it is tacky to go past some (undefined) point in putting shit on other people’s religions.

In this particular instance I don’t think the pictures were published to confront, merely to show a degree of consistency with the common practice of lampooning mainstream western religions (and only two or three were even lampooning). This could be wrong but it is my understanding and I have posted to that effect on the site of a person of Middle-Eastern sounding name who thought that confrontation was the intention.

72 chilled raisins huh?

No wonder those oil-rich Arab states have such currant account surpluses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons

To me, the one of Mohammed with a bomb for a turban would be offensive. But that too is a political statement about the hijacking of a religion which is now being used to justify violence.

In fact as we’ve seen even the Imams thought that these cartoons were not offensive enough, so they added very offensive cartoons (in particular the one of Mohammed with a pig snout) to the portfolio so they could whip up a frenzy in the middle east.

I’m getting the impression that it’s your belief that merely publishing an image of Mohammed in Cartoon form is considered highly offensive and is analogous to calling Chopper Reid a stinking pedophile to his face.

Please tell me I’m wrong.

Have you actually spent anytime looking at the cartoons? Or do you just assume that they are somehow outrageously offensive.

I suggest you take a visit to your old mate Tim Blair’s blog and take another look at them:

http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/media_told/

In particular I would draw your attention to cartoons 6, 7, 8, 10 and 12.

All of these have political content about how the artists feel that they are being intimidated by Muslim extremists.

In particular look at cartoon 7. It’s of an artist drawing Mohammed. He’s looking over his shoulder with his hat jumping off his head. He’s sweating. He’s obviously afraid of the knock he just heard at the door.

I don’t know how you find that offensive, but I think the message that it is sending is very clear – the artist feels that by drawing the image of Mohammed he is putting his physical safety in jeopardy.

That’s not spin mate.

My guess is that this a desperate attempt by some apologist academics to, in some strange way, extenuate the motivation of a suicide bomber who exterminates the juvenile clientele of a pizza parlour or frags a funeral procession of co-religionists. “Hey it’s cool, he only wanted the raisins not the virgins.”

We are tying ourselves in knots trying to explain why the middle east is such a mess.

The images are not inherently offensive to any great degree. If they were as grossly offensive as you claim, why was there no protest when they were published in the Muslim country of Egypt four months ago? Why did the Imams who stirred up the trouble need to pad out their portfolio with fake images?

Clearly, if the newspaper’s intention was to offend Muslims, it wasn’t trying very hard. The reaction has served a very useful purpose, in alerting the world to a real and growing threat — possibly at the cost of the cartoonists’ and editors’ lives. They are heroes of democracy, and deserve to be recognised as such.

The story as I understand it is that the publisher of the Danish newspaper looking to recruit an illustrator for a book about Mohammed. During his search he was suprised to find that a lot of illustrators did not want to take on the job as they were afraid of the reprucussions of drawing Mohammed (eg. look at what happened to Theo Van Geogh).

He thought this fear was a matter of freedom of expression and freedom of the press, so he called for cartoons expressing this view.

The cartoons were not published as a gratuitous attempt to offend Muslims as you claim, but as an exercise in establishing whether or not free speech was being suppressed by fear of violent extremism. This exercise has thoroughly demonstrated that this is indeed the case, and anyone who cares about freedom and democracy should be very concerned indeed.

Your spurious gorilla analogy is nothing more than an attempt to blame the victim.

King Kong/Islam as noble, powerful, frightening but misunderstood giant with a heart of gold, but dangerous and uncontrollable when aroused. But you’d have to suspect that the analogy may lose something in the translation for those who haven’t seen Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake recently. As that may well apply to quite a few excitable Islamic persons, I think I’ll pass on your suggestion at least until I’ve checked our fire insurance cover. I’d probably need to consult Dr Troppo if I was tempted to take your advice.

Gay people can get away with telling gay jokes, and calling themselves pooftahs. Straight people doing the same thing are much more likely to cause offence by doing exactly the same thing. There’s a difference between laughing at yourself and having others (especially the dominant social class) laugh at you.

A liberal democratic or social democratic polity legally guarantees its citizens certain rights (freedom of expression, of association, etc.). There is no inconsistency between supporting those rights as general principles, and being critical of the wisdom or the morality of particular instances of the exercise of such rights. Thus I would uphold the right of Australian citizens to form and join a Maoist political party which maintained inter alia that the Cultural Revolution was a good thing and that nobody was killed by the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia. However I would also be very critical of the platform of that party and I would question the wisdom and the moral judgement of people who would form and join such a party.

Similarly, in the case of the Danish cartoons, we can defend the general principle that the artists have the right to create such cartoons and the newspapers have the right to publish them, whilst also being critical of the poor quality, poor taste and discourtesy towards Moslems displayed by those artists and publications.

The issue of freedom of speech arises here only in a very subsidiary sense. That is because, as I understand it, the cartoonists in question didn’t actually have anything in particular that they wanted to say. You can tell this by looking at the cartoons. Their sole (or at least dominant) motivation was to provoke Muslims into a violent reaction by depicting the Prophet, albeit in mostly relatively innocuous poses. They (or rather the Danish journal that commissioned them) achieved exactly what they intended: Muslim hotheads reacted with predictable anger, though only after being further provoked by the actions of a fundie Muslim cleric who was equally motivated – albeit for different reasons – to attempt to orchestrate a violent reaction, and many other people looked at the images and said “Why are these people getting so excited and offended by drawings that are so innocuous?”.

That is why , as Rafe and I agree, the motivations of those professing to be exercising their free speech rights become centrally relevant. They weren’t actually setting out to say anything, they were merely setting out to give Muslims the shits and provoke a violent reaction. So, while Rob is correct that freedom of speech is an issue that doesn’t arise in any real sense until someone is offended and tries to suppress particular speech, in this case the speech and the offence are inextricably interwoven because the very purpose of the speech (and arguably its only purpose) was to cause offence.

An imperfect but apt analogy would be that of a huge gorilla chained up in a suburban street. If an innocent little girl on the way to school got mauled by the gorilla, we would probably insist that it was put down, and we would sympathise deeply with the traumatised child and her family. On the other hand, if a gang of yobbos, well knowing that the gorilla was dangerous, decided to have a bit of sport by throwing stones at it and persecuting it until it reacted violently, we would probably still conclude that the gorilla should be put down, but we would hardly see the yobbos as heroic. The issue of public safety is present in both cases but takes a rather different aspect in the second because of the circumstances. Similarly with the cartoons. The question of freedom of speech is undeniably present and relevant, but the circumstances don’t allow us to see the cartoonists and publishers as in any sense heroic.

There are certainly significant aspects of modern Islam that Muslims themselves need to examine and change IMO. But deliberately creating offence and inflaming hostility by Muslims against the West doesn’t strike me as a very useful way of stimulating change or even constructive dialogue. People who behave in that way are anything but heroes.

Agree, Geoff, but I’d go further, and say that the issue of freedom of speech doesn’t even arise until offence is given.

I don’t usually bother pointing out where I agree with Peter Saunders (CIS) but on the civility issue I do agree with a lot of what he’s saying. If you want a society that guarantees things like freedom of speech you need a robust civil society which exerts social pressure on individuals. Individuals and institutions need to self-regulate.

This isn’t a simple issue. Obviously it’s sometimes a good thing to step up and offend people. If nobody did, then how would things like unjust social norms ever change? Rosa Parks probably offended a lot of white people when she refused to give up her seat, but I’d say it was the social norms that were uncivil, not Rosa Parks.

It seems to me that liberalism is about solving disputes in practice that we can’t solve in theory. We’ll never agree about moral principles but maybe what we can agree on is how to deal with our differences. I’m in favour of methods that don’t involve killing people or setting fire to things.

I agree with Rice and Bush on this, by the way, unlike some right wingers who’ve come out and admitted that it’s not actually about terrorism, it’s about their view of Islam generally and Bush is soft on Islam (see the comments thread as well).