Lessons in Democracy, Part I: The Cartoon Controversy

WHEN DEMOCRACY GOES TOO FAR...
Someone managed to forward the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed (sw) to me and I thought, you know, if this had meant to depict their version of the average Muslim instead of the Prophet (SW) himself, the world would be a more peaceful place and some of those cartoons may actually have been quite funny. There's one where a stream of suicide bombers are walking up a cloud into heaven where a man bearing a turban and a beard yells "Stop! Stop! We've run out of virgins!" I thought that was pretty funny, except for the part that the man on top of the cloud is meant to be the Prophet Muhammed (SW). I laugh because I wonder if some of those who persist in their violent "jihad" and vow to die for the cause would want to continue if the lure of the 70 virgins was non existent. I laugh because I understand the absurdity of allegedly fighting for a religious cause not because they comprehend the resulting rewards and ultimate goodness of the act itself that will please God and thus lead them into a higher status in heaven with greater rewards; but because their small minds, warped by desires of the flesh, are seduced by a seemingly physically enticing reward that isn't meant to be as such and, in fact, cannot be, since we understand in religion that we will leave our bodies and thus all of it's desires behind in this world. If only Jyllands-Posten's journalists/illustrators had had the brains to respect the religious boundaries of the people they wished to freely comment on, they might have had better luck getting their perspective across. I'm all for democratic freedom, but there has to be a limit to how far a person can practice this democratic freedom. We wouldn't want to allow child pornography or pedophelia even if that's what the majority wanted (and if you have any of those "barely legal" or "catholic schoolgirl" fantasy-peddeling sites/magazines to go by, I'd say there probably is quite a silent majority out there for it), just as we wouldn't want to allow people to freely damage property during a protest. There is a point where freedom turns to anarchy. Civillization exists on rules, limitations, norms and regulations. If we can expect people to respect the boundaries of cultural norms, asking them to consider the religious limits of a group isn't too much.

... THEN GOES EVEN FURTHER
So here I am shaking my head at the idiots burning down the Danish and Norwegian embassies just about everywhere... and killing a few of their own, boycotting danish products without thinking of the innocent shopkeepers who are of their own who will suffer losses on products they can't sell or return, or the muslim workers who earn an honest living working in the danish factories, because, as our driver put it, "For the greater cause some people must be sacrificed."

So let me get this straight, a cartoon illustration of the Prophet Muhammed (SW) is an insult to him and our religion (Islam is interpretted to forbid any visual illustration of the Prophet Muhammed (sw) for fear they could lead to idolatory, although you can find numerous portrayals of the Prophet (SW) in medieval Afghan, Uzbek, Ottoman and especially Islamic Persian Art), but these violent acts of destruction and killing are not? Rather than try to purge the image that the Danes have illustrated, raging mad Muslims all over the world indulging in violent protests are doing a better job than the cartoons themselves of fuelling the negative perception that most non-muslims have of Islam, giving them all the reasons to defend their illustratios as a true depiction of the religion. Well done! Do they not realize that while they blame the Danes and other Europeans of going too far with freedom and democracy, they themselves have plunged right past the boundaries of freedom into the chaos of anarchy, and do they even see that they protest under the same umbrella of democratic freedom (even though most live in countries where personal freedom is a myth) that the Danes published their cartoons under? Most of all, how can they expect those who do not understand Islam to respect it or their Prophet when those who proclaim to be it's representatives can't respect their own religion or Prophet enough to realize the limits of protesting?

LESSON 1: Democracy and it's freedom comes with the burden of appreciating the dangers that lie at it's extremities. Without that burden, it is no more than politically endorsed anarchy.