Does the right to freedom of speech justify printing the Danish cartoons?

I've been thinking a lot about this issue, unsurprisingly; I bet you have too. Anyway, Matt Stone picked up my earlier posting on the matter, and there was a comment in that pointing out that we should recognise the global power issues and the actual discrimmination against Muslims in the west. This is a fair point, though we should be careful to distinguish between the experience of Muslims in minority situations and those in majority situations. As Philip Hensher and Gary Younge say in the cited article:

The cartoons almost certainly look very different to a Muslim living in a western democracy and to someone in the Muslim world -the map of where pictures have been published and of where the gravest protests have taken place tells an interesting story. It's easy to sympathise with a Muslim living in Denmark, who would feel directly persecuted by these images. The Copenhagen Muslim interviewed in yesterday's Guardian certainly had a point when he compared them to the comments of a Danish MP who apparently called Muslims "a cancer in Denmark". Many people in his situation live difficult lives, and such images won't improve matters much.

But along with the sympathy one has to feel for people in that beleaguered situation, the uses that the Danish cartoons have been put to in the Muslim world must be challenged. Around the world, the anti-Danish campaign is being used by Islamist political groups to rally support for extreme causes. The aim of many such groups is, through pressure, to limit free speech on religious matters in the west, and entirely suppress it at home.

Behind what I was saying in the earlier post, is the experience I have listened to of Christians in majority Islamic countries [mainly Pakistan], where it is Christians who are in the analogous position of discrimination and they are somewhat pessimistic about the the face of Islam they see and the resources for understanding Islam which are made available which tend to supply fuel for discrimination and violent response rather than those which would act the other way and delegitimise the responses that do not promote the common [global] good. Now that is to generalise, but Christians who have lived in majority Muslim countries do seem to me to be very wary of Islam and cagey about protestations of its eirenic and pluralist credentials.

I don't want to get into counter-victimage, I do recognise that the global situation does have a bearing on the matter and I do think that we should be aware of the matter of 'which Muslims are we talking about?'. That said, it is still important for the way that things can develop, to identify whether Islam as a system is an implacable enemy of religious neighbourliness or if it has 'resources' that mean that it can be a good neighbour in global terms and delegitimise violent and repressive reactions.

I hope and think that maybe it does, but I fear that those who control information on such matters may not have agendas that make it easy to bring out the treasure. And some of those who wish to bypas the gatekeepers of such information have an even more extreme agenda...
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Philip Hensher and Gary Younge: Does the right to freedom of speech justify printing the Danish cartoons?:
Filed in: Islam, blasphemy, free-speech
The cartoons can be viewed here, make up your own mind. In providing the link I am not endorsing the cartoons which I think to be a mixed bunch from quite insightful to pretty puerile and offensive.