A big reason that I started blogging was to push back against the effort to strip religion from the public square.
Another big reason was an effort to muzzle free speech.
A third reason was to better understand Islam and pass along that understanding to others.
So an article entireled “Free Speech and Radical Islam” fits this blog snugly:
At a lunch last year celebrating his 25th anniversary with Jyllands-Posten, Kurt Westergaard told an anecdote. During World War II Pablo Picasso met a German officer in southern France, and they got into a conversation. When the German officer figured out whom he was talking to he said:
“Oh, you are the one who created Guernica?” referring to the famous painting of the German bombing of a Basque town by that name in 1937.
Picasso paused for a second, and replied, “No, it wasn’t me, it was you.”
For the past three months Mr. Westergaard and his wife have been on the run. Mr. Westergaard did the most famous of the 12 Muhammad cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 — the one depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban. The cartoon was a satirical comment on the fact that some Muslims are committing terrorist acts in the name of Islam and the prophet. Tragically, Mr. Westergaard’s fate has proven the point of his cartoon: In the early hours of Tuesday morning Danish police arrested three men who allegedly had been plotting to kill him.
Read the entire article.
The article’s author, Flemming Rose, ends with a call for the European Union to lead an effort to repeal “blasphemy and other insult laws.”
Mr. Rose should not expect much positive response. Government bureaucracies are not made for such heroics. The most likely result of involving government bureaucracy is to impede action.
Do not wait for the government to help. It won’t.
Its very best effort will be too little, too late.
Or worse: too much, too often.
Technorati tags: Freedom of Speech, Islam, Religion in the Publc Square.
Tags: freedom of speech, Islam, religion in the public square
