No Anti-Muslim Cartoons on this Blog

I have decided not to publish the anti-Muslim cartoons that have been in the news lately. Actually, it never occurred to me to publish them in the first place. It’s not that I am insufficiently committed to free speech; it’s just that I can’t think of any useful or appropriate purpose to publish them. My imaginary readership is sophisticated enough to find and view the offending cartoons if they wish, and they certainly don’t come here for news.

I don’t know enough about Islam to judge intelligently the degree of offensiveness of the cartoons. I am also not arrogant enough to believe that I have a right to tell other people when they ought to take offense. Presumably, a number of people were sufficiently offended that they reacted violently.

I condemn the violence, of course. I can’t work up hatred for Muslims, however, nor am I willing to attribute the violence to some aspect of Islam, especially since I don’t know much about the religion. I suspect that there are a number of disparate interpretations and strains of Islam and that it has different meanings to differently situated people. Some of them may find justifications for violence in the religion, but that does not mean that the religion is inherently violent. After all, the vast majority of Muslims have not engaged in violence.

Imagine if I took the teachings of various warmongering televangelists and extrapolated from them that Christianity was a religion of war. If I note that the men who dropped atom bombs on Japan were almost all Christians, does this entitle me to conclude that Christianity is a religion of mass murder?

Imagine how Christians must seem to people in the Muslim world. Our government bombs neighborhoods in Baghdad and elsewhere and shrugs off tens of thousands of civilian dead as “collateral damage”. Our right wing media spews out anti-Muslim venom. Our government picks up Muslim people in sweeps and imprisons and tortures them. It must be hard for them to see how superior Christianity is when we are so un-Christ-like.