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• Thursday, February 9, 2006 08:14 AM

  The press as a bad little boy...

  What struck me about the article was the analogy of the Government as a father, and the press as a bad little boy that ruins the neighbourhood. Personally, I believe in the liberal ideal, that it should be the other way around - the government is the bad little boy who ruins the neighbourhood and its up to the press to watch and call them them on it. This is a fundamentally different viewpoint and I suspect it is the main reason for all the misunderstanding, offence and violence. It seems that many Muslims simply cannot understand WHY the governments of the West can't stop or punish the media involved, and simply cannot accept that governments would not be behind it in some way. The notion of a free press and a more open market of ideas and opinions (not wholly free or open I grant you) that western democracies enjoy is still a strange idea to them.

  The headline also bothered me; "No to violence, no to Western disrespect"... It still seems to be the policy of Salon to conflate the printing of the cartoons and the violent reaction as somehow being morally equivalent. Like the brilliant (and brilliantly infuriating) Independent writer, Robert Fisk, the run of articles that Salon has published on this is squarely on the side of this sort of cultural relativist hogwash. For a magazine which has published eloquent defences of freedom of the press and freedom of speech on issues in its own country (as well as much material which could be described as harsh and offensive to Rublicans, Scientologists and Fundamentalist Christians) I would have expected a more balanced outlook.

  —IanIRL Read IanIRL's other letters
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