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As most of you already know, those days there’s been a global cultural clash due to some satiric Mahomma cartoons publication. The pictures where first published in several newspapers in Denmark, and later in Norway and some other european countries. Later publications have been found in Usa and Venezuela.

I have to say I hadn’t seen the cartoons, but an acquantaince at work sent me a link of a blog of many of them showing the pictures. I got astounded: All this mess because of that??? The cartoons looked just boring to me. When they talk about lack of respect I supposed it was something really serious.

The worst of all was the violent reactions I saw on TV, in which there’s been even casualties.

Regardless it was a lack of respect, this reaction is absolutely unjustified. There are several things to take into account people who behaved in this way:

1. Cartoons where originally published by radical-left catholic newspapers, and they represent only a minority within that country.
2. In fact, they had already been published previously, last year (2005). Why there where such protests then?
3. The best they could do, was to ignore the caricatures. Now they have more popularity than ever.
4. The worst: That violent overreaction gives the reason to some cartoons.
5. In western societies, it’s usual to pict God. Newspapers have carcaturized catholic God many times and with more ofensive jokes. Nobody has died, nothing was burnt. That’s freedom of speech. And if someone gets offended, he/she can sue newspapers on court (being free to publish what you want does not imply implies you’re also responsible for it).
6. Religious groups from foreign countries don’t have the right to tell a sovereign country what to do referring to cultural matters (for example whether to caricaturize a Deity is bad or not). They already have their own government for that.
7. Many western people (me included) find violent behaviour offensive, as offensive as the way women are treated in many arabian countries, and overall, terrorist acts like those happened on 11S in USA or 11M in Madrid. But nonetheless, my country (for Madrid) didn’t take vengueance for that: we went to pacific demonstrations to condemn the violence. We didn’t burn any arabian embassy, not only because we knew it was caused by a few and it’s wrong to blame an entire culture for that, but also because doing that would make us to become what whe hate.

To kill people or to break things for a small thing like this, shows little esteem for life, in my honest opinion, and that there really are people who waste their time in things that don’t worth the hassle. To fight that way for a cartoon like this is a stupidity.

Fortunately, on the other side (if there is any), it also begins to appear voices of common sense.

Related posts:

1. Carnival of Tenerif 2006
2. Passing the baton
3. What matters in the end