…Me Mi Mohamed
Some things to think about:
1. How many people would have ever seen the cartoons if there hadn’t been any protests? How many people have seen them precisely because of the protests? Was this the intended effect? (here are some of the offending cartoons, if you haven’t seen them)
2. What’s the threshold for igniting this kind of outrage in the Muslim world? These cartoons were first published five months ago in a Danish newspaper with a circulation of 150,000. What if they had first been published on my blog, circulation 17? Is there a magic number of people a cartoon has to reach before it sets off a violent reaction?
3. According to NPR, Danish companies affected by the boycotts in Saudi Arabia and Iran have had to lay off hundreds of workers. What degree of culpability to those workers have in the publishing of these cartoons? Could they have done anyting about it?
4. When Muslims protesting the publication of the cartoons turn violent (attacking the Danish embassy in Iran, for example), doesn’t that reinforce the stereotypes depicted in the cartoons? Counterproductive, perhaps?
5. How have half a dozen cartoons turned into a Global Crisis? Is it a slow week for global crises? Is this all because there was no SuperBowl wardrobe malfunction to distract people?
6. Of course, the Zionists must be behind this somehow, says the leader of a country of 68 million people. That’s about 5 times the number of Jewish people there are in the whole world (I think it’s right to assume Mr. Khameni means Jews when he says “Zionists”).