My Enemy's Enemy

I’m going to disagree with almost everyone over the Danish cartoons. My enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend. The Danes who drew the cartoons are not religious people, interested in opening a theological dialog with their monotheistic brethren in the Middle East. From the looks of things, they’re just another pack of atheist punks who want to thumb their noses at all the ignorant peasants who believe in that organized religion mumbo-jumbo.

Could you imagine a committed Catholic or Lutheran drawing those cartoons? I doubt it.

So here we have a bunch of disrespectful creeps drawing cartoons that enrage a bunch of fanatical maniacs and we’re supposed to take sides? If, in 1940, Germany had declared war on Japan, just what would we have done? How about nothing at all and let them fight it out. It can’t be anything but good for us. Not every event in the world requires us to take sides.

Yes, the Danes are fighting on our side in Iraq. They have tremendous courage and deserve our total support. However, Danish cartoonists != Danish soldiers. The very same stupidity we detest in the Islamofacists when they equate Danish cartoonists with all Danes, we practice in equating support for Danish cartoonists with the Danish support for our cause.

Now that the Islamofascists have burned embassies, we should support the embassy personnel and the Danish soldiers and their comrades, but supporting a bunch of punks who managed to take time out of their busy day searching for porn on the internet to scribble some lousy cartoons mocking religion seems to be wasted energy.

It’s not a big free speech issue, either. This is not speaking truth to power. A movie describing Islamic fundamentalists murdering their daughters over adultery is speaking truth to power. Drawing a picture of the Prophet with a bomb, just like putting a crucifix in urine, is just swinishness. Not all free speech is worth defending.

One last analogy. If you go to a mall and see some young punk scream obscenities at a middle-aged guy’s wife until she starts crying, will you intervene when the guy turns out to be a kung fu artist and kicks the living daylights out of the punk? What if the middle-aged guy turns out to be a deranged poster on Kos? Whose side do you take? Why take a side at all? It’s free speech, disrespect and violence. What do you do?