It's a bit old-hat, but this whole "cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed" thing has really caused a global shitstorm. Embassies are being busted-into, there's rioting in the streets, and they're burning the flag of Denmark. (Denmark? The ol' Stars-and-Stripes, maybe, but it's not often that a Scandinavian country's colours feel the warm kiss o' the flame.)
There are people on both sides of this issue shouting equally vociferously. On one side are the more obvious "this is awful, let's destroy things and shout Praise Allah" folks, who tend to get a lot of air-time, because hey, violence on the news attracts eyeballs. On the other are the "we should be able to print anything we want, including the blasphemous" people, who are usually doing so in countries which are comfortably distant from people in the former group.
In a way, I agree with both. Let me explain.
It's easy to say to the first group, "Calm down, don't get your undies in a knot," but the fact is that Islam really,
really doesn't take too kindly to graphic portrayals of its Prophets (especially Mohammed, the last one). After asking around, it apparently has to do with them wanting to avoid idolatry; that is, praying to an image (created by man) rather than directly to the Big Guy. (Protestants have a somewhat similar beef with Catholics who sometimes pray directly to certain Saints rather than to God/Jesus.) The fact is, nobody knows what Mohammed looked like, so apparently it's blasphemous to even try to come up with a picture of him.
While I may not understand this point fully, and I may not believe in Islam (or any other organized religion, for that matter), it still behooves me to respect other peoples' beliefs, so long as they don't unduly affect my life... which brings me to my second point.
The folks that say, "We should be able to print anything we want," have to respect that belief system, too. The sole purpose of printing that cartoon — and you'd damn well better believe
someone in all those newspapers knew that any graphic representations of Mohammed would offend a whole lot of people — was to show that they could. Well, yes, technically you can. But, it's kind of like me walking down the middle of my street wearing nothing but the skimpiest of Speedos: technically legal, but not a very good idea.
The media (in the West) have the right to do all these things, but with that right comes the responsibility to not unreasonably offend people. Patrick Martin described it pretty much like that on Studio2 late last week: "We in the West live in an atmosphere of political-correctness. Whether we can publish this or not isn't the question; the question is, was it
right to print this, and my answer is 'no'. So we decided not to print the cartoons."
Let's turn things around a bit. We'll pick a fairly secular primarily-Muslim country (say, Turkey) and say a bunch of newspapers printed a cartoon which was blasphemous towards Christianity... the idea of a drawing showing Jesus getting sodomized while gunning down a group of schoolchildren comes to mind. So long as I didn't show cock-and-balls in the picture, I think it would be technically legal to publish. But, would it be a good idea? Hardly, because what's the journalistic or editorial merit in doing so? Its sole purpose would be to offend Christians. And I'd like to think we (as in, 21st-century humankind) are beyond that sort of thing.