Party Vibe

Militant Muslim publications often have similar cartoons about Jews; right-wing publications in Europe have the same cartoons about other ethnic groups. Here in England there are plenty of satirical cartoons about our politicians and royals, even Americans are shocked at how “disrespectful” we are to those in positions of so-called authority.

I think its like anything of this nature; as you said many don’t care; OTOH those who do (on either side) will take the matter to both the parliaments and the streets to fight it out.

Similar things happen in many countries. On a freedom of speech note perhaps the paper had the right to publish it, but that right had an inevitable cost of violence in the streets and the realisation that Muslims have a lot of economic power in Europe and those who were angered but did not want to fight and get arrested would withdraw their money from Denmark.

Free speech has its costs and often these ironically mean extra protection such as police and security services, as age old hatreds never die (at least until our world can share resources better). There is also the risk that by offending people a country will lose investment and business, and in a capitalist society this is a big issue.

Many will never “agree to disagree”, but they will “agree to fight..”

thats a shame but unfortnately for as long as our world has borders, frontiers, barriers and resources are unequally shared that will always happen.

We will all have to carry the “baggage” our nationalities, identities, genders and lifestyles give us.

As my skin colour is not white I used to get a lot of racist hassle when I was a boy, and was constantly in fights because of this. Now as I am not a big guy when you are picked on by people bigger than you you tend to use weapons to equalise things; this of course gave me (and my ethnic group of course) rather a bad reputation at some schools, despite being supposedly intelligent!

It got better in the long run as people became a bit more integrated in the UK; but this is fragile as we found out last July as global conflict was brought back home when 5 angry young British Asian lads blew themselves up in London.

The UK nearly lost 40 years of progress because of this; it is not so bad though, we only lost 20 years of it in the end. (Despite all the problems UK race relations are now no worse than they were in the early 1980s – things could have been way worse..)

but as long as the good people still get together somehow it is not as bad.

not really as your media is supposed to have some independence from the politics otherwise it is not free. AFAIK the editor resigned or something like that which should be enough..

people always try and attack journalists when they report on something they do not like or just for being journalists. Apologising won’t change anything as no one trusts journalists anyway unless they agree with them.

in a country which values freedom of speech its then (other than usual personal safety precautions) its up to the journalists employers and the police/security forces to protect them.