After writing my last piece on the Mohammed Cartoon issue, I did promise myself I’d stay off the issue of Middle Eastern regional politics until I’d more clearly formulated my thoughts into an essay on anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and the realpolitik of the region but - and isn’t there inevitably a but - that was before I spotted this post from Adloyada, which quite neatly encapsulates some of the issues I’m trying to get my head around.

As i see it, one of main barriers not just to unpicking the complex political situation in the Middle East but even just to start to understand its complexities is the near persistant demands on all sides that one has to take sides; that one can only come at this issue from either a pro-Western and certainly pro-Israeli perspective or from a pro-Islam point of view - not only is there no middle ground for fence sitters but no acceptance that one can take of view of Middle-Eatern politics as a disinterested observer, nor attempt to find a rational understanding of this issues which sees there to be rights and wrongs on both sides.

In short, the parameters of the general debate follow a pattern of ‘nationalism’ in the broad sense of the term outlined by Orwell in his 1945 essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’ and takes place in context where one can clearly see the characteristic of Nationalism that Orwell identified clearly at work.

To illustrate what I mean here for those who’re unfamiliar with this essay, Orwell identifies three principle characteristics of nationalism which he views as ‘mental habits which are common to all forms of nationalism’ of which two are particularly pertinent to the politics of the region; these being:

Obsession. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything other than the superiority of their own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organisation, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort

And…

Indifference to reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts.

I note this because what ‘attracted’ my attention to Adloyada’s post is the manner in which she takes a fairly straightforward leader from today’s Guardian and introduces her own bias into the interpretation of its meaning as she presents it on her blog; that in it she sees what she expects to see and not what is really there.

I note this as an observation and not a criticism of Adloyada’s views; this is not about trying to prove that she’s wrong or misguided in her comments, it merely serve to demonstrate that as a Jewish blogger addressing a matter in which she has some degree of personal investment she is naturally and quite understandably biased in her opinions in much the same way that a Muslim blogger will naturally exhibit a degree of bias in their assessment of the recent controversy regarding the ‘Mohammed cartoons’. Bias of this kind, is after all, only natural - it’s part of human nature to biased and rarely, if ever, can one approach any political issue in a way that is entirely value-free - what is important is not that one of necessarily free of bias but rather that one is conscious of one’s own biases.

The point of contention on which Adloyada alights in this leader lies in this passage:

At a time of high tension between the western and Muslim worlds over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad - one inflammatory response has been a call for jihad against Israel - cool heads and an attempt to de-escalate would be helpful. Of the many issues where these worlds come into conflict, the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians would be a good place - though not the easiest - to make a start.

…which forms part of a fairly general overview of the current ’state of play’ in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’, the main intention of which is to applaude the decision of interim Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmet, to approve the transfer of monies due to the Palestinian Authority, seeing this a small but important concession to the need to keep some sort of ‘peace process’ on track even in the face of a newly Hamas-controlled Palestinian ‘government’.

And as disinterested observer, this seems an innocuous enough observation.

With tensions running high as a result of the articificially induced furore over the ‘Mohammed Cartoons’, the Guardian puts forward the view that a little of self-restraint on the part of Israel would be welcome in the face of obvious and rather stupid provocation ranging from the near obligatory call for a jihad against Israel which crops any time the West succeeds in pissing off Islamic fundamentalists - whether it has anything to do with Israel or not - to the rather childish response, which the Guardian does not reference in this piece, of Iranian newspapers running a competition for cartoons ’satirising’ the holocaust and, of course, that other favorite of the idiot tendancy, the old ‘Jews are controlling the media’ line.

And to this the Graun adds the time-honoured observation that, in the wider context of Middle-Eastern politics and the multiplicity of tensions that exist between the West and the Islamic world, some small measure of progress and a conscious effort to de-escalate tensions between Israel and the Palestinians would make for staring point for improving the overall situation.

What the Guardian certainly isn’t doing here, to my mind, is ‘[urging the] Jewish state to make amends for Muslim-Christian cartoon furore’, which, with a slight paraphrase there, is the title of Adloyada’s own piece - and on a semantic point, nor does the Guardian makes use of the word ‘Jew’ or any of its derivations or refer to Israel as ‘the Jewish state’.

In fact, other that in its reference to ‘a time of high tension between the western and Muslim worlds’ and its reference to Hamas as ‘the Islamic Resistance Movement’ which it capitalises to show that this a title adopted by Hamas and not a characterisation of that organisation applied by the newspaper, the Guardian studiously avoids any references to religion, sticking strictly to political nomenclature; i.e. ‘Israel’, ‘Palestinian’, etc.

Straight away, what Adloyada is doing is shifting emphasis and context in order to connect herself - and her views that follow - clearly and uneqivocally with her own ‘power unit’, to use Orwell’s terms.

She is also, by redefining the issue in religious rather than purely geo-political terms, including the vast majority of Jews - nearly two thirds of the global Jewish population - who don’t live in Israel in this discussion. The call she sends out here is not just to that portion of her own power unit that actually lives in Israel and which is, therefore, most intimately connected to the issues that the Guardian raises, but the totality of that power unit as it exists across the globe - quite literally what we have here is ‘one for all and all for one’.

Moving on to her actual comments, she begins by very effectively demonising the point on which she takes issue with the Guardian’s comments:

It was Saddam Hussein who initially, and very successfully, used the strategy of linkage to counter universal hostility to his invasion of Kuwait by gratuitously insisting that any question of withdrawal on Iraq’s part had to be linked to Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories.

Today we have a leader in The Guardian calling for Israel to take responsibility for settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in order to defuse what it calls “high tension between the western and Muslim worlds over cartoons of the prophet Mohammed”.

Now what did the Guardian actually say?

At a time of high tension between the western and Muslim worlds over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad… cool heads and an attempt to de-escalate would be helpful.

In short, things are a bit sticky at the moment so right about now we could do with Israel making an effort not to make things any worse, and…

Of the many issues where these worlds come into conflict, the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians would be a good place - though not the easiest - to make a start.

or… ‘We really quite like Israel to be the good guys here and maybe wave a bit of an olive branch in the general direction of the Palestinians’.

If there is a link here between the two issues - the Mohammed cartoons and the general state of play between Israel and the Palestinians - that link is by no means of a similar character to the kind used by Saddam Hussein to counter hostility towards his invasion of Kuwait.

For one thing, there is a clear inference in the Guardian’s comments that in its estimation of what constitutes ‘them and us’, Israel firmly belongs with ‘us’ as part of the ‘western world’ in this conflict.

Moreover, a call for self-restraint in the face of provocation coupled with the view that some small effort to make progress in finding a peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict falls a hell of long way short of ‘calling for Israel to take responsibility for settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute’ and the juxtaposition of such a comment with a reference to current tensions with the Islamic world arising out of the cartoon issue in no way suggests that Israel should settle its difference specifically “to defuse what it calls “high tension between the western and Muslim worlds over cartoons of the prophet Mohammed”.

Quite why Adloyada should overdramatise the nature of the Guardian’s comments is made clear a little later on in her article, on commenting that:

Whilst helpfully pointing out that “one inflammatory response has been a call for jihad against Israel”, the Guardian doesn’t feel the need to present this as not just inflammatory, but completely gratuitous and irrational. It doesn’t feel the need to point out that the “high tension” is actually a highly organized series of increasingly threatening, vandalistic and even lethal demonstrations and state actions by what are arguably unrepresentative groups of Muslims.

The core of the ‘problem’ here, such as it is, is not that the Guardian is making an unwarranted link between the issue of the ‘Mohammed cartoons’ and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but rather that been neither clear enough nor unequivocal enough in its condemnation of Muslim ‘threats’ against, and insults towards, Israel in the aftermath of the cartoon issue. Within the nationalist mindset there is no such thing as an ‘unbiased’ opinion nor indeed is one permitted to see both sides of the dispute. Neutrality and impartiality are not an option - you are either for them or you are against them and any sign of equivocation, in the worst cases, is taken as siding with ‘the enemy’.

This monochromatic view of the world is most clearly on display in Adloyada’s penultimate comments:

There is no shortage of Muslim bloggers who, while finding the cartoons offensive, have exposed and condemned what they see as opportunist and manufactured rage by unrepresentative groups of extremist Islamists and allied states with agendas.

So if they don’t see any need to link this to any issue about Israel, and only Iran and the most extremist Islamist groups do, why does the Guardian feel it needs to do so?

One can almost feel the cognitive disjunction at work here - ‘even Muslims are siding with us on this one, so why are you siding with the enemy? You should be on our side!’.

I really don’t mean any of this to seem disparaging of Adloyada’s views. I don’t accept her interpretation of the Guardian’s leader, clearly, but neither do I condemn her interpretation, wrong though I think it is - she writes from a particular and very specific perspective, one that I can understand even though it is not one that that I share.

Nor indeed am I in any way suggesting that this is somehow a Jewish ‘thing’ - it most certainly isn’t, although I think it fair to say that I pretty much expect to take some flak over this article somewhere along the line on basis that having made use of Adloyada’s comments to illustrate the general point I wanted to make about the nature of ‘nationalistic’ bias, no doubt there will be some ardent supporters of Israel who see that as ’siding with the ememy. One find these same nationalistic biases wherever one looks - in the Islamic world, in politics - the main thread of the pro-war/anti-war left slanging match that’s been going on for at least the last couple of years is almost entirely nationalistic in tone and execution on both sides of the argument.

Orwell defined a problem, sixty years ago, which remains firmly at the heart of the majority of contemporary disputes and which, in turn, remains as unhelpful as it was in his day and for the same basic reason, because nationalism is and always was the enemy of reason and rationality - and without reason and rationality, solutions to conflicts such as that which continues between Israel and the Palestinian and that which is growing between the West and the Islamic world will remain as elusive as ever.

And that, is really the point that I wanted to make.

I’ve drawn a few comments on my posts on the general air of hysteria and hypocrisy surrounding the “Muhammed Cartoons” which, for no better reason that I feel like it, I’ve decided to address openly in a post rather than in the comments.

On Sunday, I made some general observations about the artificiality of this whole issue. My instincts then, and certainly my belief now, is that this is only superfically about freedom of expression and that the real issues lay is asking who benefits from all this and what do they get out of it? who is manipulating this situation for their own ends, or jumping on the bandwagon to make a bit of political capital out of bad situation.

And, for my troubles I was told that I was completely wrong. Well if I am wrong, then how do people account for this:

The British National Party’s newspaper, Freedom, has now launched its ‘May 4th is Referendum Day’ campaign in preparation for this year’s local council elections.

The purpose of the campaign is to give the public a chance to voice their concern over the growth of Islam in Britain. Freedom editor, Martin Wingfield explains:

“We have had suicide bombers in London and we are seeing riots across the Channel.

“However the media and our Government try to cloud the issue by blaming British and French society and not the terrorists and rioters. They deliberately avoid pinpointing the driving force behind these attacks, which is a religion that is alien to these shores and in its latest fundamental form threatens our very way of life.”

I’m sure I’ve no need to point out the source of that and I’m fucked if I’m linking to it.

Or how about this post from the Daily Kos, which is also right on the money…

While it was a minor side story in the western press, the most important of Muslim religious festivals recently took place in Saudi Arabia - called the Hajj. Every able-bodied Muslim is obligated to make a pilgrimage once in their lifetime to Mecca, which is in modern-day Saudi Arabia. This pilgrimage can be done at any time of the year but most pilgrims arrive during the Muslim month known as Dhu al-Hijjah, which follows a lunar calendar that does not exactly match the western Gregorian calendar.

The most recent Hajj occurred during the first half of January 2006, precisely when the “outrage” over the Danish cartoons began in earnest. There were a number of stampedes, called “tragedies” in the press, during the Hajj which killed several hundred pilgrims. I say “tragedies” in quotation marks because there have been similar “tragedies” during the Hajj and each time, the Saudi government promises to improve security and facilitation of movement to avoid these. Over 251 pilgrims were killed during the 2004 Hajj alone in the same area as the one that killed 350 pilgrims in 2006. These were not unavoidable accidents, they were the results of poor planning by the Saudi government.

And while the deaths of these pilgrims was a mere blip on the traditional western media’s radar, it was a huge story in the Muslim world. Most of the pilgrims who were killed came from poorer countries such as Pakistan, where the Hajj is a very big story. Even the most objective news stories were suddenly casting Saudi Arabia in a very bad light and they decided to do something about it.

Their plan was to go on a major offensive against the Danish cartoons. The 350 pilgrims were killed on January 12 and soon after, Saudi newspapers (which are all controlled by the state) began running up to 4 articles per day condemning the Danish cartoons. The Saudi government asked for a formal apology from Denmark. When that was not forthcoming, they began calling for world-wide protests. After two weeks of this, the Libyans decided to close their embassy in Denmark. Then there was an attack on the Danish embassy in Indonesia. And that was followed by attacks on the embassies in Syria and then Lebanon.

Actually, I take a pause for thought there, before moving on, and ask is anyone surprised that the Syrian’s failed to prevent protestors from torching a Western embassy, or that it wasn’t long before a similar incident took place in the Lebanon?

Of course this incident prompted a response from the White House:

The Government of Syria’s failure to provide protection to diplomatic premises, in the face of warnings that violence was planned, is inexcusable.

Which is certainly true - it was inexcusable but also entirely understandable given the pressure that the Syrian regime has been under since being implicated and near enough held responsible for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. What better way for Bashar al-Assad to deflect attention away from his own weakening position and stir up a bit of quasi-patriotic fervour amongst the masses - and frighten the crap out of his opponents, of course - that a bit of nicely co-ordinated embassy burning in response to an ‘insult’ from the West.

And what of the Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper which kicked off this whole charade in the first place and is now being lauded in some quarters as a fearless defended of enlightenment values and the freedom of the press?

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have caused a storm of protest throughout the Islamic world, refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ, it has emerged today.

The Danish daily turned down the cartoons of Christ three years ago, on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers and were not funny.

In April 2003, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to Jyllands-Posten.

Zieler received an email back from the paper’s Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them.”

I think Jamie K nicely sums it up, first by reminding us of this newspaper’s original editoral:

The modern, secular society is rejected by some Muslims. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where you must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule.

And then sharply observing that:

A secular society apparently requires the holders of one superstition to be mocked, but allows the holders of another to enjoy “special consideration of their religious feelings�.

And finally, I come to my own observation:

And of course, dear old Jack Straw is pushed out front and centre to make just the right kind of placatory noises to suit the occasion, while, behind the scenes, the spin doctors are already working overtime to figure out just how much political capital they can make out of TV news footage of brown-faced people with placards demanding that those who mock Islam should be ‘butchered’ and chanting about ‘Bin Laden coming’ for the government’s next run at forcing through some more crappy, illiberal, authoritarian anti-terrorist legislation - let’s face it, you can bet your arse that all this is going to come up when the government have to try to get last year’s anti-terrorist legislation, with its appalling ‘control orders’ renewed.

And lo and behold, a little after 3:30pm yesterday, a mere sixteen and half hours after I made that ‘prediction’, up steps Charlie the Safety Elephant to make a statement on the protests over the weekend, during the course of which he says:

The incident illustrates the merits of having all the necessary legislation on the statute book, which includes the offences created by the Terrorism Bill, including the proposed new offences of encouragement and glorification of terrorism, which I hope will now have the support of the whole House.

So I was completely wrong, was I?

Moving on to my other post on this this subject, which is really about trying puncture some of the hypocrisy surrounding this issue as well as expressing my irritation with the banality of much of the ensuing debate, this also drew some interesting comments.

I’ll take B4L first, as this is perhaps the simplest to deal with:

I’m so glad you’ve helped “out” all those Labourites and lefties as closet racists. We thought we were all, to differing degrees, defending our right to free speech, even if sometimes that causes hurt and offence, and even if the tabloid press exploits it for their own purposes, but I guess all the time we’ve been looking for that chance to switch to the BNP without attracting attention.

Funny. I’ve re-read that particular piece several times this morning and nowhere in it do I make specific reference to ‘Labourites and lefties’ as being the source of my comments in reference to the racism of certain, but not all, of the cartoons.

Quite why anyone should assume that I only read or refer to left-wing blogs on here or only even discuss things in the context of the Labour Party rather escapes me, but as the question of closet racism on the left has been raised, perhaps I should address that point specifically.

Do I think that there is, on the left, some measure of closet racism towards Muslims? Yes - it’s maybe not as widespread as it is one the right but in places it is there and always has been there - sorry, but I reall am not about to pretend that the left is entirely free of such things just to fit in with the pretensions of others.

Have I pointed to anyone in particular and levelled that charge against them? No I haven’t and for good reason. If we’re going to get into the issue of Islamophobia on the left - and I use that terms specifically as its a far more complex issue than simply ‘closet racism’ - then not only is that there but its also perfectly apparent to me who the worst ‘offenders’ are and why. That, however, is a question for another article, actually more of an essay, which I am working on and which I’ll publish when I’m satisified that I have the argument down in a form that I’m satisfied with as it means treading on a few toes to make the point I want to get across.

If I have any specific criticisms of some left-wing commentators, its not that they are closet racists but that they’ve failed to consider that dimension, along with a whole range of other related factor, in their comments on this subject and allowed themselves to be dragged along with the herd in holding forth on the pre-eminence of free expression and the values of the enlightenment without ever really think through either what they’re doing, or more importantly why.

All of which brings to to Neil’s comments:

In this situation the principle has become more important than the artistic value of the cartoons, and for that reason I printed one of the cartoons as a demonstration that I won’t be bullied.

I have been deeply offended by being told I can’t mock Mohammed which has made me more determined to do it.

Why?

I thought I’d explained my views pretty clearly. I’ve seen the cartoons and, to be honest, I don’t see that they have any particular creative merit and one or two I find rather racist in the manner in which they set out to demonise Islam.

I could quite easily republish them, link to them or knock up my own pisstake of Islam, but to what end? What purpose does it serve? What do I gain from it?

Sorry, I’m forty years old in a few months and I really don’t see ther need to go waving my dick in the face of the Islamic world just to prove that I believe in the value of free expression or that I;m prepared to stand up for those beliefs if necessary.

Sorry but if freedom of expression does come under genuine threat in this country it isn’t going to because the Damascus branch of rent-a -wingnut are chucking petrol bombs at embassies, it’ll be because of another raft of shitbox illiberal legislation being forced through in the name of protecting our interests - well bollocks to that I’m a grown man and I can look after myself.

This is all little more than playground politics with each side playing up the prejudices and ignorance of the their supporters/followers to suit their own purposes and I don’t want to play the game. I’m just not stupid enough to sucked into it. On one side you have the hard-line imams waving these cartoons at the faithful and say ‘Look. I told you these Westerners were all a bunch of evil bastards and here’s the prrof!’ and on the other you have the Scum and others putting up photos of wingnuts with placards saying ‘behead those who insult Islam’ and saying near enough the same thing about Muslims. Its a pissing contest and recognising that I’m intent on treating with the contempt that it deserves.

Come on, Neil. Step back and think about this for a second - you put a lot of time and effort into trying to understand the working of the media and how they shape and influence political situations to suit their own prejudices and their own ends, try applying that understanding to this situation but do it evenly and look at how things are being played out on both sides. Can you not see the phoney war that’s being played out on both sides of this issue or how it works to prevent anything approaching rational debate on either side and particular between ourselves and the Islamic world?

I’ve no intention of mocking Mohammed, not because I’m scared of Muslim reprisals but simply because I’ve never felt the need to mock. It’s just not something that’s ever served a purpose for me so why should I somehow feel compelled to participate in what I see as pointless exercise just to prove a point which I don’t need to prove?

Finally I come on to Dave, who I see has managed to collect his thoughts more fully here and to his usual excellent effect, and I want to pick up this point:

I’ve gone on too long already. Much of this is the post in my head I’ve still to write. But I’ll take exception to “As with near enough all our dealings with the Islamic world of late, the idea that we, in the West, may bear some measure of responsibility for our actions when, as in this case, they trigger a violent response from disaffected Muslims is too much for our supposedly civilised and enlightened sensibilities to bear.” No. No. And for good measure, No. The offence was caused by a newspaper editor and some cartoonists in Denmark. I have no “measure of responsibility” for them, just as I have none for Ian Huntley, Fred West, Harold Shipman, the slave trade, Agincourt (actually, if I wasn’t half English — though any relevant ancestor I had was probably still abed — I’d be on the right side of that). And disaffected Muslims? Saudi Arabian Muslims should be disaffected. If they want to know which buildings to burn down, I can give them a list any day. Western embassies are not on it. It’s all mosques and palaces. Vive Denis Diderot!

As with B4L and Neil on other points, Dave falls into the ‘trap’ of projecting his own concept of ‘responsibility’ onto my comments which, to be fair, is precisely what I intended the piece to do - just as I deliberately didn’t identify from which quarter I see closet racism entering the equation, so I make the point about people retreating into abstractions to avoid any sense of ‘responsibility’ for events as they unfold without ever specifying precisely what I think we/they may be responsible for…

Time for a Voight-Kampff test

You’re in the pub with a group of friend having a quiet drink when you see one of friends getting into an argument with a guy stood at the bar. You get up and with the rest of your friends you go over to see what’s going on. The friends of the bloke your mate’s arguing with do the same and within a few seconds they two guys who’re arguing are surrounded on all sides.

Things are getting heated and look as if they might get out of hand. You think about taking your friend by the arm and trying to pursuade him to walk away - the argument seems trivial and not worth getting into a fight over.

But then the they guy your friend’s arguing with says something that you find offensive and think is completely out of order so, instead, you say to your friend, ‘You’re going to put up with that crap are you’.

A scuffle breaks out, there’s a bit of pushing and shoving at first, then a punch is thrown and a fight kicks off in earnest. You, your friends and the other guy’s friends spread out and form a circle. You start egging your friend on, ‘Go on! Hit him!’.

Before you realise what’s happening, you friend has reached onto the bar, grabbed a glass and smashed it into the other guy’s throat. The glass breaks, becomes a blade. The blade drives into the side of the other guy’s neck, severing the jugular vein and the carotid artery. Blood starts to spurt for his neck and he drops to the floor clutching his throat.

Your friend stands there transfixed, the bloody glass still in his hands. Some people run. Others stand there too shocked to move - so do you. One grabs a towel from behind the bar and forces it against the injured man’s neck to try and stem flow of blood. Another rings 999 and asks for the Ambulance service.

You wait, still too shocked to move, while the guy your friend’s just stabbed bleeds to death on the floor of the pub.

Are you responsible for anything that’s just happened?

You didn’t stab the the dying man yourself; your friend did. You didn’t hand your friend the glass which was used in the stabbing; your friend got that on his own. You certainly didn’t expect your friend to do this; he’s never stabbed anyone before, never been a particularly violent person.

But you could have pursuaded you friend to walk away from the fight - only you didn’t. You stood there with all the rest and egged him on.

You’re certainly not legally responsible for your friends actions, nor is it likely that you’d be considered to be an accessory but are you in some way, some small degree, morally responsible for what’s happened because when you had the chance to stop things, or at least to try, you did nothing, or perhaps because you egged your friend on, encouraged him to get into a fight, never realising for a minute quite what the consequences could be?

How do you react here? Maybe you absolve your self of any responsibility because you were only reacting to a fast-moving situation in which you could be expected to predict what would happen?

Or maybe you retreat into abstractions and take the view that however tragic the outcome, you were still right to encourage your friend to stick up for himself and not let himself be pushed around or brow-beaten by the guy he’s just killed?

Are you responsible..?

You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to - its an empathy test, nothing more than a thought experiment designed to pose a question and make you think. There is no right or wrong answer - not in an empirical sense - only the answer which best suits your beliefs, your values and your conscience. How you respond to that question is a matter of whether you deal with is as human problem or a moral abstraction or maybe something in between - however you look at, its for your to find your own answer.

But enough of thought experiments and morality, I want to end on a purely human note with this comment from a Muslim (didn’t give a name) who commented on my first article:

I really was upset about the cartoons. Why make such cartoons when they are infactual and false?

If people really read about the prophet peace be upon him they would realise he was a mercy to mankind.

Moreover, as Muslims we aren’t allowed to draw pictures of Prophets, furthermore, we aren’t meant to disrespect someone elses religion. We respect all prophets, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, so why not respect our dear Prophet?

Are we now so caught up in abstractions and so convinced of our own superiority and that of our civilisation that we’ve lost the capacity to respond to thing on a purely human level, to empathise with others and to understand that what may, to us, simply be an unfunny joke, is to others a cause of genuine bewilderment and pain?

And if so, just how the hell can we call ourselves civilised and not choke on the word.