There have been some interesting posts today about the whole cartoon bru-ha-ha.
patgund has an interesting post where he quotes an editorial from the Boston Globe which states:
Hindus consider it sacrilegious to eat meat from cows, so when a Danish supermarket ran a sale on beef and veal last fall, Hindus everywhere reacted with outrage. India recalled its ambassador to Copenhagen, and Danish flags were burned in Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi. A Hindu mob in Sri Lanka severely beat two employees of a Danish-owned firm, and demonstrators in Nepal chanted: ”War on Denmark! Death to Denmark!”In many places, shops selling Dansk china or Lego toys were attacked by rioters, and two Danish embassies were firebombed.
It didn’t happen, of course. Hindus may consider it odious to use cows as food, but they do not resort to boycotts, threats, and violence when non-Hindus eat hamburger or steak. They do not demand that everyone abide by the strictures of Hinduism and avoid words and deeds that Hindus might find upsetting. The same is true of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons: They don’t lash out in violence when their religious sensibilities are offended. They certainly don’t expect their beliefs to be immune from criticism, mockery, or dissent.
But radical Muslims do.
Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, highlights the double standard of the Arab community in her blog, History on Trial (syndicated as historyontrial) when she writes about how on the one hand the radical muslims protest the Danish cartoons, they publish in their own (i.e., Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Syria and Egypt and the Palestinian Authority) papers (examples) cartoons that are unequivocally antisemitic, that drip with hatred and contempt.
I was thinking about this as I rode the van into work. The common Islamic statement is “There is no god but Allah”. This is meant as a broad statement to apply to everyone, and if one thinks about it, it is the basis for the current flames. If there is no god but Allah for everyone, then everyone must respect Allah. This isn’t the attitude of Judaism, which does acknowledge that everyone needn’t be Jewish. I don’t believe it is the attitude of Christianity or many eastern religions.
Yet again this makes me want to reread From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas P. Friedman, which explores how the west doesn’t understand the thinking in the Middle East, and this is a large part of our problems.
