We all know that this is about more than some drawings. It’s actually about a concept we’re familiar with to an extent in the US: the idea that religious belief requires you to enforce your values on people who do not follow it. The ones raising a stink aren’t just “offended”, they don’t merely have hurt feelings. They’re effectively saying “How DARE you operate by rules other than those of Allah!”. Note the assumption central to this view:

Saudi Arabia’s top cleric called on the world’s Muslims to reject apologies for the “slanderous” caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed and demanded the authors and publishers of the cartoons be tried and punished, Saudi newspapers reported Saturday….

Speaking to hundreds of faithful at his Friday sermon, Sheik Abdul Rahman al-Seedes, the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, called on the international community to enact laws that condemn insults against the prophet and holy sites.

“Where is the world with all its agencies and organizations? Is there only freedom of expression when it involves insults to Muslims? With one voice…we will reject the apology and demand a trial,” Al Riyad, a Saudi daily newspaper, quoted al-Seedes as saying. (emphasis mine)

This guy & his followers have a completely different interpretation of human rights than anyone of the West does. We’ve known that rights aren’t things that are granted to us from above by government, but abilities inherent by nature, & that the SOLE arguement for force if deemed necessary is to defend the use of those abilities. The “sheik” believes that there is no natural state of freedom, only rules & regulations that us infidels arbitrarily throw together in denial.

Oddly enough, this type of outburst actually shows how large of a gulf we’re being expected to cross by our neo-imperialist spreading-democracy-by-the-sword leaders. Here, only the lunatic fringe would call for legislation against some type of drawing, & our religious nuts even have a different arguement: rather than saying outright that freedom of speech doesn’t exist, they just have an extremely narrow definition of “speech”. To the popular way of looking at society in the middle east, most of our nuts are downright “moderate”.

This is undeniable: any movement towards political reform in the muslim world MUST take into account the degree to which religion & rights cross paths, or it will fail no matter what. A society in which a majority of people favor death for a drawing is not a democracy worth constructing.

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