It isn’t free speech that’s the issue. Hatred inspires hatred. In refusing to acknowledge the obvious goal of Flemming Rose and Jyllands-Posten’s attack on a minority group that has already been held victim to a number of injustices in Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, caricatured above, indicated his true goal—to anger a picked on minority enough to start a fight, and to prove that there might be some fundamental difference in thought between this minority and the average human being. In publishing the Mohammed Cartoons in the Icelandic paper DV, that local media furthered a right wing agenda without critical perspective, just as DV’s counterparts, the right wing France Soir, Sweden Expressen and Magazenit in Norway, did. Together, they hoped to incite a race riot—or, as in Iceland, to inspire a fear of race riots on the continent. That Muslims outside of Europe allowed themselves to be bated is unfortunate. That journalists in Europe and the US present this issue as a matter of free speech and don’t identify it as abject racism is inexcusable. Let’s see, when have the right wing publications of Norway, Sweden, France, Denmark and Iceland gotten together to demean one specific culture before? What happened then? The conduct of these papers, and publications like them, was inexcusable 60 years ago. This ain’t about free speech. Nowhere near it.
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Bart Cameron and the Grapevine Editorial Staff.
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