Pricey Cartoons

Hard to know what to think of events in the Muslim world.

A Dutch newspaper published some harshly satirical cartoons about Mohammed. Some Norwegian newspapers republished the cartoons and then French newspapers supported the right of Europeans to satirize religious figures of all stripes.

As a result, Islamic militants are threatening to take European hostages in Palestine. Muslim crowds are burning European embassies. People are rioting from Morrocco to Pakistan.

Islamic law bans any depiction of the prophet, and Muslims consider likenesses of Mohammed blasphemous.

Basically, lots of people are destroying things and threatening to kill people because they don't like some drawings on the editorial page in a few European newspapers.

Or maybe it's more involved than that.

Western governments have predictably denounced the insensitivity of the cartoons while supporting freedom of speech.

But more honestly, I would guess a lot of people in the west--including government officials--are now even more convinced that we're dealing with dangerous religious people who can't handle a satirical cartoon in a western newspaper.

Americans and Europeans are used to harsh cartoons about political and religious figures.

From the Muslim point of view, I'm sure this feels like the last straw in a long series of cultural humiliations at the hands of westerners. Insults don't get worse than blasphemy for religious people. So what's happening isn't simple mob violence and thuggery--in part it's principled hostility to the outrageously "other."

I've already tipped my hand with my last post MohammedScape about my thinking on religious satire. In my view, a religion that can't handle satire is a religion with some serious problems.

Certain folks--even some progressives--believe Islam is committed to violence from the get go and should be overcome or transformed rather than tolerated in its present form.

Others think westerners used their unprecedented power over the past centuries to humiliate Muslims. In that view the frustration boiling over among Muslims is understandable.

And some think the real issue is current western--and particularly American--military and economic supremacy. They think power corrupts and that state sponsored violence flows inevitably from elites against the weak, and that the rioting Muslim crowds understand all that intuitively. Because of that take, some people think our present US government has fanned the flames of greater hostility and division.

From a certain point of view, maybe insulting cartoons are just the tip of the iceberg.

Sort of complicated.

I'd love to hear any reflections.