This is getting out of hand
Every day I pull up Yahoo! News, BBC News, and other sources just to see more headlines that another group of Muslims have protested or rioted and injured or killed someone because of some editorial cartoons published over a year ago in an obscure newspaper from tiny Denmark.
A couple Muslims saw the cartoons and notified a newspaper in Egypt which promptly published the exact same cartoons. No reaction. The same men then started spreading the cartoons across the Middle East and reaction was still minimal. Then a few other newspapers in Europe decided to cover the story of the, well, lack of story.
Then events started to move because the same men who "told the world" of the blasphemy perpetrated a year earlier had become rampant hatred.
Okay, that last sentence isn't exactly the truth, but anyone who has played the "telephone" game as a kid knows that information become distorted the more it is repeated, especially over distance, of only from omission. For example, one of the men who created a briefing book about the first publication of the cartoons to notify the Egyptian press was recently interviewed on NPR's morning program where he repeated dodged the question that some of the cartoons he circulated had been manipulated or outright falsified to create a more lurid image of events. Can I assume something from this? Certainly. And without direct quotation or citation (you will note that nothing in this post has been cited yet) the mere facts of the event can be interpreted with quite some latitude.
Clearly this is getting out of hand to the extent that I didn't even bother to find out which American newspaper from somewhere west of the Mississippi River recently published the cartoons as rioters had already started attacking American embassies and citizens at least a week prior. Nor did I even wonder why Saudi embassies haven't been attacked despite a newspaper in that nation publishing copies of the cartoons in just the last few days.
At this point I'm just going to sit back and watch the reputation of the Muslim community be ruined by a few who seem to have no concept of the teachings found in the Qu'ran. Let peace, tolerance, and wisdom be washed away in the madness if that is what they wish. But just once I would appreciate someone pointing out to the Muslim community the Golden Rule is an idea right out of their culture. Be careful, effendi, for you shall reap what you doth sow.
