Jytte Klausen tells us that the paper that published the offending cartoons “wanted to stir up trouble.” Even if true, that doesn’t strike me as cause for condemnation. In fact, I say good for them. Thomas Paine, John Brown, Margaret Sanger, Ghandi, Martin Luther King – where would be without those who wanted to stir up trouble?

Klausen’s central point, that religious adherents only want to be treated with respect, can be dismissed for what it is, the promulgation of yet another cenosorious guideline. Free speech isn’t chained to respect. Free speech includes the right to be deeply disrespectful and offensive, as long as you’re prepared to face the consequences. Respect is earned, it’s not a right, and I fail to see how the world’s god-based religions have earned any respect whatsoever. Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, may have served to temper a few regrettable human behaviors, but they’ve created even worse behaviors by leading their followers into an intolerant and divisive tribalism that has too often led to savagery. We see the evidence of this unfolding all over the world, day after day. How much longer must we go on caving in to the absurdities and suffering the brutality of these people, besotted by the supernatural and hopelessly lost in their benighted irrationality? These religions have all been dark forests blocking the path to human progress and enlightenment. We need, as never before, to critique and revile these religions, consistently and relentlessly, to do just what the zealots do to those who don’t think like they do. The sooner we bury the god-centered religions in history’s landfill the better off we’ll all be.

This essay is a towering achievement in sloppy thinking. Shukrallah begins by assuring us that the cartoon controversy is not a clash of civilizations, but is in fact a confrontation that somehow serves “powerful forces” on both sides and their “equally repugnant interests.” For this, however, he offers no explanation or proof whatever. Who these powerful forces are and what their interests might be we never learn. Instead, he moves right on to tell us about the offensive speech being flung back and forth between the Western and Islamic worlds. Is it just me, or does that sound like a clash of civilizations?

Then he approvingly quotes an Israeli newspaper columnist who describes the Danish cartoons as “racist and obscene” and who claims that their publication “profanes the right of freedom of speech, distorting it into the freedom to foster hatred.” How many times do we need to go through this? The right of free speech includes the right to foster hatred, and it includes that right without having to be “distorted.” Furthermore, by protecting the right to foster hatred, as distasteful as that can be, we honor the right of free speech rather than “profane” it. The proper rejoinder to speech we find hateful is not rioting or murder of the perpetrators, but counter speech that eloquently denounces and exposes its falsehoods and shamefulness.

Walter Shapiro is a classic windbag, so full of himself he seems unable to resist making proclamations such as the following: “We are ashamed to live in a country that somehow came to accept that torture and prisoner abuse were simply business as usual.” I yield my liberal credentials to no one, but this is precisely the sort of arrogant and overblown nonsense that robs liberals of their credibility. Once again we have a liberal assuming that only he and his ever so sensitive friends are outraged by the crimes at Abu Ghraib, without offering any evidence that the country as a whole accepts such crimes as “business as usual.” Come on, Walter, it’s a big country with lots of decent people in it who were and are outraged by such crimes, including even some members of Congress. And I don’t think Walter needs to feel ashamed of a country where crimes such as these can be exposed and condemned.

Salon, moreover, desperately needs to regain its balance. Not a cartoon in sight, cowering before the Islamofascists, and now these photos, preaching to the liberal choir, hardly an act of courage. You’re all over the crimes of the Bushies and the US military, as you should be, but day after day innocents are murdered by Islamic thugs and we hear not a peep, view nary an image. Get a clue, Salon: crimes are being commited every day by both sides, and both sides need to be condemned with equal fervor. A rigorous intellectual honesty is absolutely necessary to establishing and maintaining the respect and authority that I would hope Salon would seek for itself. Otherwise this publication risks becoming a Fox News-type outlet for liberals and sinking into the insignificance and mockery that Fox News has so richly earned for itself. I’m reminded of the saying that “the fish rots from the head.” Someone at Salon needs to get a grip on the editorial rudder.