No, if you want the real deal, you should ask the Danes. *cough*

In 1993 the late Danish filmmaker and provocateur extraordinaire Jens Jørgen Thorsen finally made his movie “The love affairs of Jesus Christ” after a 16 year long court battle to secure the equivalent of €500,000 in public funding for the project. I will not even begin to descibe what happens in it, except to say that some scenes takes place in a bathroom. The movie was later shown in theaters all over Denmark, and at the time got a fair bit of attention in the local media.

The movie was intended to be the final straw to break the camels back in a decade long anti-Christianity campaign in Denmark, sponsored by the Danish neo-nazi government (at the time headed by the self proclaimed ‘social democrats’ (HA!) party) and their labdogs-on-a-leash in the state owned press and media. The intention was to marginalize, humiliate and eventually ban the spreading of the Christian message among the population. This way huge sums of public spending, previously used for churches, cemetaries, the education of priests and the printing of relevant religious books, could be used to expand the Nuclear strike capability of the Royal Danish Air Force.

For the sarcasm impaired: The previous paragraph is pure fiction, the one about Jens Jørgen Thorsen’s movie is not.

First, the reaction in the West is not, in my opinion, that Muslims should not be offended by the Danish cartoons. Even in the secular West (and much moreso in the religious United States), people object all the time when one religion or another is satirized, mocked, or even just depicted in a way that offends one believer or another.

The West is, however, reacting to several of the means by which some Muslims are expressing their outrage at having been offended. We’re not for burning embassies. This is especially the case when it is quite obvious that the government in Syria could have prevented the burning of the embassies in Damascus (it protected the American and French embassies, not wanting to give those countries a casus belli, and sent the mob down the street to burn the Danes and the Norwegians). Many of us suspect that the embassy attacks were essentially engineered to send a message: “Stop putting pressure on the Assad regime, because Syria is a bomb ready to explode and only Ba’athist oppression can prevent it from going off.”

We also object strongly to demands from Muslims that the government take action. We have worked long and hard in the West to prevent government from regulating free speech, and we react badly to the idea that such regulation might return just because a few people are offended. True, some Western governments, particularly in Europe, can limit the free press for some purposes, but we view this fact as a “bug,” not a “feature.”

Now, what is the right of free speech all about? It is the right to offend people. As I wrote in a post yesterday, “the right of free speech is an entirely meaningless construct for speakers and writers who do not offend people. Popular speech that offends nobody needs no right to protect it. The right of free speech is only important for people who speak and write unpopular or offensive things. In a world of free people governed by laws, the only legitimate “consequences of exercising that right of free expression” are that sometimes the reaction to unpopular speech will be such that the speaker needs to be defended. That is why we have police, courts and, yes, sometimes armies.”

The problem, of course, is if large numbers of Muslims do not subscribe to this basic idea — that the right to free speech exists precisely to protect unpopular people and offensive ideas — then we can see at least two troubling consequences. First, genuine democracy stands no chance in the Muslim world, for the right of free speech is essential to the proper functioning of a democracy. How can there be a loyal opposition if the government can suppress unpopular or objectionable speech? The first application of that power will be against the government’s opponents. Second, how does the West deal with the Muslim world if its leaders reach in and demand that we extinguish one of our most cherished rights just because it is offensive to them?

Now, if you were to say that the West has been messing around in the Arab and Muslim world for two hundred years and that we are hypocrits for objecting so loudly when Arabs and Muslims reach try to dictate how our countries will be governed (which is what the activists are trying to do), you would be right. Unfortunately, resting on the idea that there is something historically just in the Muslim reaction is no way to avoid a clash of civilizations that will be painful for everybody but devestating for the Muslim world.