Muslim convert Nancy Hottel claims that if "the situation were reversed, if this had been someone outside the religion making jokes about Judaism? You better bet there would have been the same reaction."

Really? Would Jews be out in the street, burning buildings and calling for the extermination of those who had offended Judaism? I seriously doubt it. Can Ms. Hottel back that up with any examples of Jews going on rampages when thier sensibilities are offended by non-Jews? Maybe a sternly-worded letter from ADL, but killings and burnings?

'"Not funny, is it?" says Hottel. "I was deeply offended just to hear it cast as an example. Well, that's roughly the effect on Muslims of these cartoons. And can you imagine if the situation were reversed, if this had been someone outside the religion making jokes about Judaism? You better bet there would have been the same reaction."'

Um, no. If a left-wing pseudo-secular newspaper made an off-color joke about Jesus, I can see no scenario where you'd have a bunch of Pentecostals (not sure which Christian sub-set most closely approximates radical Islamists, but let just assume that we're talking about some serious "Red State, Right Wing, Evangelicals") lining up outside to burn the place down and calling for the beheadings of the editorial staff.

Same thing for a group of Lubavich Hasidm reacting to an article openly denying the Holocaust. Just not going to happen.

Sorry, but the people rioting in the streets are typifying exactly the behavior that the cartoon depicts. The problem is that "Western" people don't have anything like the same world-view as radical Islamists do.. it isn't "apples and oranges", it is "apples and hockey sticks".

Maybe the people who want to turn this around into a backhanded assault on Jew and make this into an antisemitic diatribe are right. And by that I mean maybe we should burn down the Syrian embassy in London and turn over police cars in Paris. Maybe we Jews should start to beat people down in the street for the crime of offending us. Maybe it's really time for that. What are they going to do? Tell us they hate us? Maybe the dumbest thing of all is for us to claim we're not offended and how evolved we are, unlike them. I say if thine eye offends ME I pluck it the fuck out. It's time for Jewhad!

I apologize ahead of time if this is over some people's head or comes across as too offbase to be accurate.

But this situation really reminds me of the situation in the mid to late 90's with the supposed "East Coast West Coast" beef in the rap industry. I remember that nothing had actually had "happened" to start or legitimize the feud, a part from a couple of songs. However, there were numerous people capitalistic and opportunistic enough to turn this into a full scale battle. Soon enough, there were reports on MTV and covers on Rolling Stone and Source detailing the supposed East West feud. People profited from the facade, but they weren't the artists or people on the front line, but the record executives and magazine publishers. But as the people who profited from this situation perpetuated it to almost an absurd level, the facade evolved into reality, and both Tupac and Notorious BIG would end up murdered less than one year apart from one another.

A quote from this article reinforces this metaphor: "I hope this type of incident may help people reconsider who think there is no war of civilizations," Ksikes continues. "It has dramatized what could become a reality, if more and more extremists determine the political agenda." It seems that he is aware that extremists benefit from this kind of situation, yet unaware that they may be the one's to provoke, promote, and perpetuate the 'war of civilizations' he seems to think is evident. The people who are benefiting from a dramatized clash are also the one's that are pushing it. Clerics and hard-liners in the Middle East seeking to gain or maintain power, and military and media entities that sell Americans and the West an image of suicide bombings and a militant religion.

As an onlooker who has READ ALL articles and news reports on this subject I'm only mollified by one thing. Discussion about Islam and the West is again taking place.

You're all right in taking the author to task for suggesting the religious communities in this country would do anything so violent if their beliefs are offended. You'd think that somewhere in America there were people assasinating abortion doctors or bombing abortion clinics and set up web sites exhorting people to do more of it.

I'm sure it'd be laughable to think Christian groups would try to deny rights to people because of their sexual orientatation, make up statistics about how horrible they are, pretend it is science and demonize them in public. Surely no-one would attack people in a bar witih a hatchet because of such things.

Christian groups certainly wouldn't scream and yell and demonstrate because a movie depicted Jesus in a way they didn't like, or because a TV show portrayed someone conversing with Jesus, or because a pop star pretended to be a TV Christian offering cooking tips on how to make "cruci-fixin's".

I'm certain that here in the enlightened West, these things could never happen.

How many buildings have the "Christian Right" burned down?

How many newspaper editors have been thrown in jail for publishing an article?

How many Jewish Rabbis have published religious edicts demanding the assasination of Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei?

How many of the Saudi embassies in "The West" have been burned down for their nations habit of burning bibles and imprisoning missionaries?

Answer: Zero.

Sorry.

Flitting from site to site over the past few days, I have been dismayed and undone by the commentary over the "Cartoon brouhaha nee kerfluffle. From National Review to The New Republic to Little Green Footballs to Salon, the commentariat have shown remarkably little variance in substance. Rather, they differ in form. Clearly, the erudition of a typical Salon commenter is light years beyond the neanderthals at Little Green Footballs, but even here the comments are tinged with not a little bit of xenophobia.

Lest I be harangued, please let me make it clear that I am not advocating the kind of intellectually slothful multiculturalism that excuses violence perpetrated in the name of garnering respect for the prophet just because it is a passionately held belief in another culture. Many things are inexcusable, and even a committed multiculturalist and relativist should be willing to call a spade a spade. The important thing is to realize why you are doing so - to stop pretending that cultural observations are anything but subjective, are viewed from anything other than a lens warped by our own upbringing, culture, and religion (or lack thereof).

It is this appalling lack of insight that links the disparate commenters and would-be editorialists (such as myself) from site to site. Even in an article about the remarkably peaceful protests in Morocco, the commenters find things they disagree with - such as a demand for respect for their religious taboos - and present them as backwards thinking that is objectively wrongheaded. Such thinking is inherently biased, even orthodox, in form and substance.

Many commenters have expressed the need for fundamentalist (or even mainstream) Muslims to respect that a secular or even non-Muslim society believes it has the right to mock, caricature, or comment about any religious figure. This is correct, but the vast majority of these same commenters seem to feel that this right abrogates any responsibility from the non-Muslims. It is as if the right to mock supersedes the human responsibility to consider one's actions and to be respectful of others. Fundamentalist Muslims have been equally orthodox and unwavering in proclaiming their right not to be offended, demanding, as the orthodox of all creeds (liberal, conservative, religious, secular) that all people subjugate to their "right" to not be offended. Both sides, in this case, are equally in the wrong. Both sides have a responsibility to be respectful of the other.

But instead, all I see is xenophobia and cultural triumphalism. All I see is utterly subjective opinion presented as blanket fact. All I see, frankly, is little difference between conservative and liberal when it comes to addressing differences with other cultures. All I see is the childlike insistence that Muslims "do as we say, not as we do."