Northern Valley Beacon

As more demonstrations are mounted on the pretext of protesting the satirical drawings of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper last September, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes some bloggers are claiming that the protests are being fomented and orchestrated. He also provides a link for a case that the protests proceed out of offense at people who do not take Islamic terrorism seriously as a spiritual state.

The lurking issue for Americans is the violence of the protests and the level of offense. Do satiric drawings compare in magnitude to the atrocities of 9/11 carried out in the name of Allah? What if Americans and Spaniards and British burned the embassies and consulates in their countries of any country that was complicit in the murders against their people? What if the people in countries where Islamic terrorists have struck were to attack and besiege the mosques in their countries?

Can any clerics or Muslim regimes understand what would happen if people took equal offense and action against them for the offenses committed? We really wonder, like many other commentators, if Muslim leaders do not understand what underlies the satirical drawings. They may be offensive, but they also speak to a growing distrust of and sense of betrayal and treachery and of a new holocaust being carried out in the name of religious faith.

The drawings were published in a newspaper over which the Danish government has no control--under the rules of a free press. They do not compare in any way to the thousands of people killed on 9/11 and in the bombings in Madrid, London, and others carried out throughout the world.

We wonder why these questions are not explored in the world press.