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Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: twmoore who wrote (8248)	2/15/2006 12:29:23 PM
From: Ichy Smith	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 37324

It Seems to me that under the swastika Millions of Jews were sent to their deaths in ovens, along with several other million people of various ethnicities and beliefs. So the Swastika is perhaps not an appropriate symbol, since it immediately suggests a return to those practices. A caricature of Mohammed with a bomb in his hat is unfortunately how many people are coming to see Muslims in general. Perhaps not a good thing, perhaps not even a valid comparison, but considering the actions of some Muslims, not to be unexpected.

To: twmoore who wrote (8248)	2/15/2006 6:07:46 PM
From: Stephen O	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37324

Marcus tells it like it is. I think every newspaper in the Western World should have published the cartoons on the same day, IOW given the finger, of your left hand, to the radical Islamists. Oh how the West is grovelling MARCUS GEE Faced with the noisiest assault on free speech in recent memory, the leaders of the democratic world have responded with a craven whimper. As Western embassies are being attacked and Western flags are being burned around the world, their main response to the attackers and burners is to say, "We feel your pain." British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called the publication of the Danish cartoons "unnecessary," "insensitive," "disrespectful" and "wrong." Former U.S. president Bill Clinton called the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed "appalling" and "totally outrageous." French President Jacques Chirac said freedom of expression must come with "a sense of responsibility," and condemned "all manifest provocation that might dangerously fan passions." Peter MacKay, in his first test as Foreign Affairs Minister, put out what the Toronto Star aptly called "an exquisitely careful on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand statement." While condemning the violent protests, he insisted that freedom of expression "must be exercised responsibly" and called for "a better understanding of Islam." Prime Minister Stephen Harper has just chimed in by regretting the republication of the cartoons in some Canadian outlets. European Union foreign-policy chief Javier Solana, arriving in Saudi Arabia for talks with the Organization of the Islamic Conference, even seemed to suggest that the EU might back the OIC's call for restrictions on blasphemy in the principles of a new United Nations human-rights body. Only Nicolas Sarkozy, the French Interior Minister and potential successor to Mr. Chirac, got it right when he said he preferred "an excess of cartooning to an excess of censorship." That, of course, is the choice. Once societies start controlling one sort of speech or another on the grounds that it is excessive or hurtful, the chill on free expression starts to set in. Europeans are already starting to feel it. It was precisely because many journalists and illustrators feel intimidated by the rise of radical Islam that the Danish newspaper decided to publish the offending cartoons. The paper's office has received bomb threats, and its editors are on guard against assault. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the Jyllands-Posten was right to publish or whether it showed bad judgment and poor taste when it made the decision in September. But that was then. Today, the newspaper and those others that republished the cartoons out of solidarity are under attack. The very least that democratic leaders should have done was to assert, clearly and forcefully, that the right to free speech is a cardinal virtue of an open society. We respect your religion, they might have said, and we are sorry you feel offended, but, in our part of the world, newspapers can publish what they like (unless they break the laws against defamation, obscenity or violation of privacy). Instead, they grovelled. That showed a profound lack of understanding of the struggle that the democratic world is facing. It is, in large part, a war of ideas. Its foe in that war is the radical Islamist movement that seeks to gain control of the Islamic world. Its plain-as-day strategy is to convince Muslims that they are victims of a conspiracy by Western countries to oppress and colonize the Islamic countries -- and that Islamic rule is the only way to fight back. Islamic militants helped whip up the cartoon crisis precisely because it helped them play on the sense of victimization in the Islamic world. Their call for tolerance for Islamic teachings is not just hypocritical (for Islamism is notoriously intolerant of "infidel" faiths); it is designed deliberately to intimidate and incite. You can't defeat that strategy by saying, "Gosh, we're sorry. That Danish newspaper was wrong to publish. Please don't get mad." In any battle of ideas, you have to assert the rightness of your own. One of the central values of the democratic world is that people should be free to express their opinions without fear of retribution or violence. When that right is under attack, as it is now, the only choice for democratic leaders is to defend it to the hilt. mgee@globeandmail.ca