See, this was leading up to something. Bet you wish you would have read all that pope shit.

If you've been following the Scandinavian media in recent days, and even if you haven't, you may be aware of the great debacle currently facing Denmark and to a lesser extent Norway and now even Germany and France.

Last year, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a number of political cartoons, many of which could be characterized as critical of Islamic fundamentalism and two of which explicitly depicted the face of Muhammad, which is considered by Sunni Muslims to constitute blasphemy. This went largely undetected, and earlier this year, the Norwegian magazine Magazinet ("The Magazine"; if you want creativity go to Sweden) reproduced them. The pictures, taken as a whole, are probably as insulting to Muslims and Islam as the majority of American newspaper editorial cartoons are to me and my opinions. They are probably less insulting to Muslims and Islam than 99% of American newspaper editorial cartoons that deal with the subject.

Somehow, quite a while after the fact, these depictions became common knowledge in many Middle Eastern countries and led to widespread public criticism. As it stands now, the people of many Muslim nations are boycotting Danish goods, and many Middle Eastern governments, including those of Libya, Palestine, and Iraq, are calling Danish diplomats to account for what they see as their government's unsatisfactory handling of this problem.

This week a French newspaper reproduced the cartoons, and as part of the apology its managing editor was sacked.

From here out I am going to tread extremely carefully so as to make my intent and my sympathies absolutely clear.

Muslims are angry with the editorial staff of Jyllands-Posten and have demanded an apology; although one appears on the JP webpage in Danish, English, and Arabic, it presumably does not take precisely the tone that Muslims would prefer. More importantly, Muslims are angry with the Danish government for not chastising the newspaper. The Danish government's position on this is that the Danish government has no place interfering with the freedom of the Danish press.

And so the boycotts continue. Now, Indonesian militants have stormed the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Jakarta.

There is a simple reason for this. The people of these countries evidently will only be satisfied when the Danish and Norwegian governments punish the responsible newspapers, which they refuse to do, and rightly so. But why do the people of Indonesia, and Morocco, and Iraq insist that they do?

Because in those places, there is absolutely no cultural expectation that the press be independent of the government. This expectation, on the contrary, is so absent that the people of these countries believe that it is the responsibility of the government when the press "misbehaves". This is the very opposite of one of the primary preconditions for a free and healthy democratic society.

The sentiment being expressed by the Muslim protestors is not an unusual one in our own society. It is in fact espoused by many of the very people who would like to visit Democracy upon them like a cleansing fire. However, in our society it is not so unbridled that one simple disturbance in one newspaper costs the Danish dairy industry US$1.5 million per day. In our society it is thankfully so mitigated that Proctor and Gamble can thrive today, over 25 years after emblazoning its goods with the Number of the Beast.

My point is this: It is not wrong for Muslims to interpret an image of the face of Muhammad as blasphemy; blasphemy is essentially just a violation of religious mores and we can no more expect an about-face on this issue than we can expect Christians to suddenly start lending money at interest in violation of their most deeply-held religious beliefs. It is not wrong for them to feel insulted or put-out by the depictions appearing in the Danish newspaper or express that sentiment to the Danish newspaper itself.

It is ridiculous for them to expect the Danish government to abridge press freedom to protect their feelings, however deeply-held or highly-flown. The fact that they possess this expectation, particularly in Iraq, shows just how far they are, culturally, from being prepared to practice full Western-style democracy. It is not that Islam as a religion is inherently anti-democratic; all religions are anti-democratic, and in order for democracy to function, we must be prepared to abdicate our religious responsibility to fuck with people who disagree with us. The problem furthermore is not just due to strong religious belief.

The problem is that due to generations spent without a completely free press, those engaging in the boycott believe that governments have the right to control the content of newspapers and other media, when in fact this is not the case. This is not the kind of idea that simply takes hold overnight, as for example when the United States invades and proposes to set up a completely free society in less than ten years. This is the kind of idea which must be inculcated at the root of schoolchildrens' psyches, and that is done either by bringing them up to understand the total incompatibility of press and state, or by making them witness the fight to win press freedom.

A place like Iraq or Morocco or the United States where a newspaper faces the threat of victimization from the government or the populace when it prints something that is unpopular or unpleasant or flies in the face of the dominant take on Semitic folklore is a place where civil society itself is in jeopardy. We can see just in our everyday life how everything can take on a religious dimension if we let it, and if we make a religion the absolute arbiter of truth above reason or the arbiter of policy above human accountability then there is no hope for democracy, because we have just completely subtracted human agency from the political equation.