OK, give my favorite candidate the finger. Print a cartoon with someone I love and cherish being defiled, disrespected, disrobed even. Put a show on Comedy Central that makes fun of my mother. Have your local newspaper print editorials calling me immature names. What. Ever.

I might write back. I may stop speaking with you. I'll certainly boycott any products that sponsor you and I'll ask my friends to do the same. But your cartoons, your articles, your TV shows can't shake my love for my family or my beliefs in my cause. Not now, not ever. And should you unearth some gem that causes me to reconsider a blind faith in something I believe...well, thank you. You have done me a service, not an insult. (For instance, Bill Clinton should never have been impeached. But he should have resigned, because he brought tremendous shame and disrespect to the Office of the Presidency. George Bush, on the other hand, must be impeached, and the sooner the better. And he should rot in jail for his crimes against our Constitution.)

I am a ACLU supporter and a Liberal and even a bleeding heart one at that. But you don't get to kill me because I made fun of your beliefs. You don't get to cut off my hand because I wrote something you disagree with. You don't get to slice off a reporter's head because he dared print the truth. We don't even need to get to the atrocities any group of fundamentalists have committed--present or past--to claim some sort of divine 'even-ing up of the score.' Please, my fellow Liberal friends. Stand up and be counted. There comes a point where it must be stopped in its tracks. Hitler, Milosovic, bin Laden.....

I don't care that the Muslim world regularly prints hooked-nosed caricatures of Jews. I don't care that the Danes print inflammatory pictures of Mohammed. I don't care that Mapplethorpe or whomever did "Piss Christ" and tried to pass it off as art. Get over yourselves. And if you can't, then keep it to yourselves. And if you won't, then your ass is mine. Push will come to shove. And that doesn't stop me from being a Liberal.

Oh sigh... Yes, I think it is important to respect and be sensitive to other peoples belief systems. That said, as an atheist, I've encountered discrimination too; some of it really, really strange. Like, I'm wihout deity, therefore I'm in league with Satan - I mean for crying out loud! I don't believe in that either for "heavens" sake. One co-worker is so filled with fear of me because of my atheism, this co-worker has subjected me to some pretty un-christian behavior. Go figure that one out.

When you look at so many issues today, most of them have religion at its base and this is profoundly tragic; because tomorrow the real issue is going to be access to potable water and gobal warming; and all this stuff going on today is going to look pretty small by comparison. It's like my favorite bumper sticker: "I'm a militant agnostic. I don't know and neither do you."

Sick 'n tired of religion...

Conor Ryan

It is remarkable that so few writers seem to be aware of the circumstances provoking the publication of the cartoons in the first place. Gretchen ("Some context is needed here") is the only writer who pointed out that these cartoons were published after an author of a children's book failed to find an illustrator. No artists would participate in the well-intentioned project because such a contribution would risk physical, if not capital, retribution. The cartoons were meant to lambast a religious construct (not a religion) that would value pen and ink scratchings above human life. As has been noted repeatedly the cartoons are peurile, propagate a stereotype and are offensive. The ensuing condemnation of the cartoons, however, should also include a re-evaluation of the Islamic hair trigger response to criticism. The kindly faces of Islam (Tariq Ramadan et al) declare childish scribblings offensive but raise nary a sweat at the offense of life after life taken by suicide bombers, murderers who behead schoolgirls in Indonesia, and perpetuate cruelty to young women as a matter of course. These are bad cartoons but if they make the Islamists think a little harder about the value of life, that is a good thing.

Talk about a short trip.

You got to admit though that if these cartoons were drawn about Jews or Catholics they would have even gotten published. And if they had been there would been universal outrage, and a week of collective European navel gazing and allusions to the rise of Hitler throughout the Continent.

The only different is that the ADL and Catholic League wouldn't be calling in bomb threats and kidnapping Dutch tourists. At least not openly.

I like freedom of expression and I want to keep it.

By the way, it's a myth that bullies have low self esteem. Research published in the last couple of years has shown that they actually feel quite good about themselves.

Finally we get to see these cartoons. They are offensive and I see no useful point made by them. They are designed to offend and inflame the Muslim community. If cartoons depicting Jews, Blacks, Homosexuals in a similar manner had been published the creators would be publicly lynched for

'hate speech'. Oh holier than thou self righteous hypocrites with your so called 'diversity' (ie respect for your ways but no others), you're getting what you deserved and may you be so lucky as to only have your embassies closed and your products boycotted.

I have been pondering some of the comments here and must support the observation that the current violence and diplomatic posturing seems to pour forth almost exclusively from Muslim men. The Press and others have depicted this out-pouring of rage as a matter of the principle of aniconism, the non-portryal of living things, especially human, more especially Mohammed himself, in Islamic art. This fails I believe to really grasp what is at stake here for the Muslim, particularly Arab world.

The image of Mohammed goes straight to the core identity of most Muslim men. Rather than the programme of Islam (submission) laid forth in the Qur'an, many, many Muslims have turned Islam into a 'cult of the perfect man' centred of course around Mohammed. Just read an orthodox biography (e.g. Martin Lings) and see how a believer defends many of Mohammed's 'problematic' (to use academia's favourite term) actions. Karen Armstrong also dabbled in this, trying to convince readers that the Qurayza massacre had to be read in some sort of justifiable context.

My suspicion is that the author(s) of the Qur'an wrote the work/formed the religion in response to the veneration of Jesus in place of God (the doctrinal trick of the Trinity not withstanding). Wearing a beard for men, wearing the hijab for women, getting circumcised, etc, none of these things are necessarily Qur'anic and in fact circumcision quite definitely violates the Qur'an's claim that Allah created the human body perfect. The point is that these are practised based on the example of Mohammed and that is considered a valid justification by almost all branches of the faith. The Qur'an says at numerous points, however, that it is the ONLY source of law for Muslims and that The Prophets ONLY job is to deliver the recitation (the literal meaning of al Qur'an). Thus basing Islamic practice on Mohammed's life becomes drawing belief from the Prophet and not god, which if you have ever read the Qur'an is bad, very bad, hell-fire eternity bad.

Thus Islam has become exactly what it was probably not intended to be. It is not a mistake that it has been called Mohammedanism by early scholars. To provide an example within Islam itself, the Salafists (Wahhabis) have made celebration of Mohammed's birthday illegal in Saudi Arabia for many years (although now it is no longer enforced) and once in an infamous incident from the 1920's sought to destroy the Prophet's (alleged) tomb (they did destroy many other ancient graves which were believed to be linked to Mohammed's family and early followers) so as to prevent idolatrous reverence towards Mohammed himself. Again the fundmentalists in Islam are practising the most doctrinally-defensible version.

I am not a Muslim and the Qur'an alone is enough to make me wary of Islam in general, but a Qur'an-only Muslim (a rare, rare thing in the current Islamic cultural and religious climate) is infinitely more reasonable and, to be honest, good-hearted a person in my experience (see submission.org). They have had enough critical thought to dump a thousand years of non-Qur'anic religious practices and thus end up being far more liberal-minded usually than the religious text which they claim to follow. These protester make me wish Qur'an-only Muslims were the majority and not the 'tiny, minority of extremists' which they are.