JayB

I don't think that the two are entirely analogous to one another, as limiting reportage during an armed conflict is a complex problem. I think most of us want to get an accurate picture of what's going on, but most of us would agree that disclosing the identity of Iraqi's who are infiltrating insurgent groups on our behalf, or disclosing plans for troop movements in Bagdad woiuld be a bad idea. Sometimes there's a fine line to be toed, and the perogatives of minimizing the threats to troops in the field and the kind of disclosure that most people think is important in a democracy conflict with one another. I don't think the photos of the coverage qualify under this category. The publication Abu Ghraib photos probably made things quite a bit harder for the troops on the ground, but one could potentially argue that by curtailing the abuses early on, the coverage prevented a further crisis later. I think the case of the cartoons differs from the situations that you mentioned because the decisions are largely in the hands of elected officials acting within a framework erected by Congress, and are subject to revision and modification by people who are ultimately answerable to the public - and so far as I know no editor has been forced into hiding in perpetuity for making the decision to publish them. In the case of the cartoons, the principle difference, other than the death-threats - is that there's no such mechanism in place to regulate the proclamations of the mullahs or their followers. To paraphrase Kissinger, "When I want to talk to Islam - who do I call?" Who do people in non-Islamic countries go to if they wish to determine what is and what is not permissible behavior, where does it end, and who makes that call?

The question wasn't who would cheer for you, but which of the two you'd choose. The fact that you won't answer is answer enough.

Carryon lumping all of Islam into one boat as the opposition - you're giving the radical fringe of Islam exactly what they want, a Holy War. Perhaps you'll argue that because good portions of the Islamic world are sympathetic to the radical cause that is acceptable - why then is not acceptable to lump the radical Christian fringe with the Republicans sympathetic to them (as W is)? So which one would you choose? The Vatican or Mecca? There's a wide spectrum of fanaticism present in most major religions, and the degree of fanaticism present tends to vary with the percieved grievances of the underlying population. However, even when we take that into account, I can guarantee you that if Christians millitants started snatching Arabs of the street and sawing their heads off with swords, there wouldn't be too many congregations where the footage was viewed as an appropriate manifestation of divine justice. I actually think that you could pretty much get just the opposite of what we've seen in the Islamic world recently - the political equivalent of a "What are you gonna do?" shrug when confronted with cartoons that weren't terribly flattering to Christianity, and widespread revulsion and outrage at the head-severings.

We are? So you'd just as soon stand outside the Vatican and slag on Jesus as stand outside a Mecca and shout obscenities about Muhammad?

Yeah I'd be fine with leaving some room for judicial discretion here with regards to sentencing, as the nuances are important. If someone randomly attacks someone because they don't like the color of their skin, this strikes me as different than an attack that it carried out as a part of an orchestrated effort by a group to terrorize a community and deny them constitutionally protected liberties. It seems to me that existing statutes give them the leeway that they need to do this without anyone drafting hate-crime legislation, or granting judges blanket authority to outlaw bigotry. I'm definitely against blanket statutes that give anyone with a badge discretion to make this kind of determination on their own. I think the last speeding ticket I got had a pre-printed box that a policeman could check for "Hate Crime," which makes me a bit afraid that we're already a ways down this road, at least in certain states. I'm honestly not trying to pick a fight here Matt, but didn't you say that you thought that Bush's refusal to push hate-crimes legislation through the Texas legislature was on of the things that made you think that he was, or at least his policies were, racist?

I think one of the main reasons for this is that religious violence is futile and self-defeating in a population that has a plurality of religious beliefs. I think that Jay, Madison, and Hamilton covered the reasons this pretty well in the Federalist Papers. The relative quiescence of Christians for the past 100 years or so, at least in the West, is more a credit to the political systems of the countries that they inhabit than any superior virtue on their part IMO.

I'm against any law that attempts to regulate which beliefs are acceptable and which are not. This goes for flag-burning, people hoisting Nazi flags in their yards, laws against hate-speech, and even hate-crimes. I don't find many people outside of the libertarian fringe who agree with me on the last one, but I don't think that there should be broad statutes that impose extra-penalties for the impulses that motivate a crime, be they racism, greed, revenge, etc - but that's a different discussion. Once one particular set of beliefs is criminalized, ever other set is at risk - and I'm much more comfortable with the "Give Them Enough Rope to Hang Themselves," approach.

I'm actually agnostic, and have been for about 20 years. The only reason I brought up Christianity, rather than say Zoroastrianism - is that it's the prevailing faith in the West at the moment, and they seemed to have learned to handle affronts to their religion in a manner that doesn't involved detonating themselves at amongst civilians or other such atrocities. Took an eon or two, but we're there. My point was that most people that purport to care about freedom of expression, separation of Church and State, would be outraged if a Televangelist's flock engaged in murder and mayhem over a few relatively mild cartoons poking fun at the manner in which they misused their religion to inspire - murder and mayhem, and created a climate of fear where anyone who dared publish them was literally risking his life. Yet for some reason, when a band of religious fanatics does this very thing in Europe, all of a sudden religious sensitivity trumps all other values. Very odd.

From IslamOnline Not good. Reminds me of Churchill's speech after Chamberlain declared "Peace in Our Time." "We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat." Something tells me that the champions of sensitivity on this board would be less than enthusiastic if we were to adopt similar legislation at Pat Robertson's behest. DOHA, February, 15 2006, (IslamOnline.net) – The Norwegian parliament has amended the Penal Code to criminalize blasphemy in the wake of the republication of Danish cartoons that lampooned Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) by a Norwegian magazine, Christian and Muslim leaders in Norway said on Tuesday, February 14. "Law 150-A, which has been approved by parliament, criminalizes blasphemy and clearly prohibits despising others or lampooning religions in any form of expression, including the use of photographs," Norway's Deputy Archbishop Oliva Howika told reporters after a meeting in Doha with Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. Howika was among a Norwegian delegation that also included the chairman of the Supreme Islamic Council in Norway, Mohamed Hamdan. "Under the new law, the crime of blasphemy will be punished either by a fine or imprisonment," Howika said, promising Qaradawi to fax him a copy of the law after being published in the country's official gazette. Hamdan regretted the burning of the Norwegian embassy in the Syrian capital Damascus, but said the government had blamed the magazine for the violent reaction. "The Norwegian government made it clear more than one time that it would not condone blasphemy," he said. Last September, Denmark's mass circulation daily Jyllands-Posten ran 12 cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). One of the photos showed the prophet as wearing a bomb-shaped turban and another showing him as a knife-wielding nomad flanked by shrouded women. Many European newspapers, including the Norwegian Magazinet, reprinted the drawings, triggering an outcry across the Muslim world and calls to boycott Danish products and Norwegian products. Any image of the Prophet -- let alone biting caricatures -- is considered blasphemous under Islam. The editor of the Norwegian magazine at issue apologized to Muslims on February 10, for publishing the cartoons. Vebjoern Selbekk, who initially defended his January 10 publication of the cartoons in his magazine as an expression of press freedom, appeared before TV cameras shaking hands after his apology with Muslim leaders. Apology Accepted Hamdan ® and Howika during the meeting with Qaradawi. The delegation distributed copies of the magazine's apology note to the Muslim minority after the meeting with the prominent Muslim scholar as well as an apology translated into Arabic from the minister of labor. "We accepted the apology in principle," Qaradawi said. "We do appreciate the Norwegian stance which is different from that taken [initially] by Denmark. The Norwegian prime minister has condemned the cartoons at the very outset." The Danish newspaper has apologized for offending Muslims, although not for printing the drawings. Four months after the publication, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Monday, February 13, met with a Muslim group to discuss the fallout from the cartoons crisis. He initially refused to meet ambassadors of Muslim countries to contain the crisis under the pretext of free speech. "Muslims want all people to live in peace, cooperation and love. We don't call for strife. All people are created by God, so there was no need for this strife," Qaradawi told reporters.. "We were deeply hurt by the cartoons. The Danish newspaper could have defused the crisis by offering an immediate apology to the Muslims. Had it apologized, the issue would have been resolved," he said. He pointed out that there is a difference between "freedom of expression" and freedom of insulting" "Freedom of expression is all about expressing an opinion. In the cartoons case, there is no opinion or counter-opinion," he said. Qaradawi called anew on the United Nations to adopt a resolution banning blasphemy to head off similar incidents in the future. He also urged the European Union to criminalize blasphemy against any religion, including pagan religions. The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is pressing for a ban on religious intolerance to be part of the bedrock of a planned new United Nations human rights body. According to the text of an OIC proposal, the new UN body should state clearly that the "defamation of religions and prophets is inconsistent with the right to freedom of expression" and that states, organizations and the media have a "responsibility in promoting tolerance and respect for religious and cultural values."

Something in the Monte Christo Area?

I'm definitely missing the powder and the steeps, but I'm consoling myself in the park these days, so it could be worse. I wasn't trying to be overly dramatic - but if you take a look at the cartoons, and consider how easy it is to whip certain elements in the Middle East into a flag-burning frenzy - it seems clear that any cartoonist who set out to offend Muslims could have done so much more effectively than the guys who sent in their cartoons to the Jyllands-Posten. The fact that a planeload full of imams with powerpoint presentations had to hold seminars that they jazzed up with a few forged slides, and explain point-by-point exactly how the cartoons were offensive, why Muslims who had previously shrugged them off should in fact be offended, and the manner in which they should express their outrage also suggests that the cartoonist's point was something other than simple agitation. Some of the cartoonists actually seem to be making fun of the premise that the call for submissions was based upon:

If it's blasphemous to depict Muhammad, they'd have quite a number of their own heretics to dispatch in the middle east. If the intent was to provoke, rather than to criticize those who use Islam to justify suicide bombings and beheadings - then it would have been pretty easy to cook up scenarios involving pork, sodomy, and alcohol that would have done a much better job. If these cartoons were calculated to give offense, then they did an awefully bad job of it, seeing as how it took four months and lots of coordinated agitation by a select cadre of governments and mullah's to generate the said offense.

There's also the fact that had the paper's only goal been to give offense to Muslims, I suspect that the images would have been rather less mild than the cartoons in question. What I haven't been able to gather from my reading is a coherent explanation of what - in particular - is so offensive to Muslims. This business about all portrayals of Mohammed (hopefully I can leave out the customary PBUH without harming anyone's tender sensibilities here) being an affront to Islam seem to be inconsistent with the scores of pictures of Mohammed that people have documented all over the Islamic World. Was it the connection they were purporting to show between Islam and terrorism? Seems to me that if the silent majority of Muslims really did object to their brethren sawing off heads and detonating themselves in markets, discos, etc - while chanting "Allah Akbar!," they'd welcome a bit of criticism directed against the fanatics who are giving their religion a bad name - or at least stop a tad short of burning down embassies. Which brings me to another point - perhaps part of the dialogue that people are calling for should involve asking how it is that beheading civilians, slaughtering wedding-parties, etc in the name of Allah elicit nothing more than a shrug, but a few relatively mild cartoons published thousands of miles away, in a language that none of them can understand constitute an unpardonable affront to their religion that must be avenged?

This made me recall the time I sat at a dinner-table with someone who went to high-school with Dick Cheney, but I got so drunk that I can't remember what the person looked like, or when or where the dinner took place. Seems like this connection between Dick Cheney an drinking might really have some legs - he could even achieve something like Kevin Bacon status in the world of alchoholic beverages.

Just saying the context is critical to understanding the difference between the publication of the cartoons targeting people who use Islam to inspire violence and terrorism, and whatever the cartoon involving Jesus was supposed to accomplish. I'm not sure how far you're willing to go to demonstrate your sensitivity here, but given your comments, it seems as though you haven't actually taken a good look at them, so perhaps you are preemptively censoring your own reading to avoid giving offense?

That's part of it - the other part being that part of what motivated the publication of these cartoons was the editor's sense that the death threats and assasinations that had been directed at anyone critical of Islam in the previous months and years had created an unhealthy climate of fear, where people were reluctant to criticize even the most objectionable behavior amongst the Islamists. This includes not only the terrorist attacks, but also the threats and violence directed towards public figures critical of Islam, and the ongoing contravention the law with respect to honor killings, gang-rapes of women who refuse to cover their hair, being pressed into arranged marriages, etc. I think that there was a widespread conviction that excercising self-censorship out of fear would only make matters worse, and this contributed to the publication of the cartoons. After the uproar, I think that the other newspapers which had been worried about the same issue took note of the violent reaction, had their fears concerning the danger of remaining silent confirmed, and published the cartoons in an effort to demonstrate that they would not allow anyone to use threats and violence to determine what they could and could not publish. There was no such climate of fear surrounding the publication of any cartoons critical of Christianity, because there was nothing to fear - ergo the difference between one and two.

The distinction between 1 and 2 still has you stumped, eh? Do you find yourself immersed in the depths of an equally unfathomable conundrum when you have to distinguish the person that accosts you on the street and asks you for a donation, and the person that demands it at knifepoint?

Word. You can actually hang onto them for the full trip if you want though, as looking at them just makes me depressed. I thought I was going to break down and cry when I watched a program on "The Rocky Mountain Amtrak Tour" on New Hampshire Public TV the other night.

I believe he was referring to this mechanism. Yup. I wouldn't call any of the private universities in the entire Western US elite either, with the exceptions of Caltech and Stanford. There might be some local advantage with Alumni, but that's about it. No one in the rest of the country has ever heard of any of the private universities in the PNW.

I'll mail you my Stewart Green guidebook if you'll mail it back when you are done. You can actually borrow all of my Colorado Guidebooks. How soon do you need them? It might be at least 2-3 days before I could get them in the mail.

Careful there JayB, that kind of wealth envy is very Democratic... Meritocracy in action, baby. I'm all for the transfer of productive capacity into more capable hands. The "Tuition Cow" phenomenon has got to be one of the best mechanisms I've ever seen for achieving this.

Thanks for the reply SC, I'll try to answer later.

I think it may be my single favorite spot in Colorado, and I'm sad I didn't manage to get there for more than a single outing. The camping is Garden of Eden quality, the scenery is stunning, the approach is just long enough to weed out the crowds, and the climbing is just incredible. Mostly grade-IIIish choose-your-own adventure type climbing. If I get a second I''ll scan and post some old pics.

Oh come one now Porter. It's not the education I'm poking fun at, it's the price you pay for what you get. Thankfully most of these schools operate on a two-track system, where 1/2 of the students are mediocre rich kids that pay full tuition and subsidize the bright half that attend the schools on scholarships and grants - so the only people that should take offense are those that forked over the full 30g's a year for the privilege of attending Whitworth et al.

"haahah! While my unique angle as a mediocre PNW climber-nerd with expensive liberal arts degrees certainly qualifies me to provide a solution, I think I'll pass." Maybe you can derive an equation which quantifies the relationship between tuition and retorts. It'd be interesting to see which local institution offering catering to WSU caliber students at Harvard-level prices produced the most favorable jab-per-thousand metrics.