This week when I was blogging with some Christians (who one would think are quite smug and happy about this furor – but are not at all), they were really trying to understand.

Mink, yes, there are stupid people in every society…and it is better to poke fun at ourselves!hey were having a hard time understanding that there are Muslims who are like them, and I’ve been repeating the mantra “go visit Jordanplanet and read their opinions”. So one blog linked Big Pharoah’s Ten Commandments, and they got it!

Can I say that what you wrote – a few weeks ago about the prophet representations through history – was one of the most interesting and actually meaningful things said on this?
I find the cartoon thing depressing, but mainly boring: a chance for the all the world’s cliches and streotypes to go on a rampage. Everybody’s behaving like caricatures, and not funny ones.

Well here’s my comment, maybe you’ll be interested.

In 1997 there was Israeli settler who decided to draw a caricature of the prophet and a pig (riding a pig, eating a pig, dressing up as a pig, can’t remember but extremely offensive) and post them around Hebron/alKhalil.
She and her husband were arrested the next day and sent to prison for two years by the Israeli court. The whole story was condemned by almost everybody, including the right-wing prime-minister Netanyahu. It was very simple, an instinctive reaction: you don’t play with such explosive-offensive stuff. I can’t remember anyone demonstrating for her ‘freedom of speech’.
(see more in the first part of
http://www.tzemachdovid.org/Facts/mufti.shtml

I am writing this not because I want to portray the Israeli authorities as sensitive/humane/nice to muslims/whatever, but to show that even in Israel nobody has been as stupid, insensitive and offensive as some of these Danish cartoonists.

As one Israeli cartoonist wrote last week: it’s very easy to laugh at somebody else, but that’s just cheap and vulgar, and at the end of the day bad cartooning – much more difficult to laugh at yourself.