On the subject of the offending cartoons I want to half agree and half disagree with the line of thought floated by Brownie in a brief post (and some additional comments on the appended thread) yesterday. The half I agree with is Brownie's argument that one shouldn't go out of one's way needlessly to offend the religious, or for that matter other, sensibilities of people. Within the limits laid down by laws against incitement to racial hatred, violence, and so forth, anyone is entitled, of course, to offend others; they have the right to offend them, entailed by rights of free expression. But to believe this - and also that the right is one of fundamental importance, not to be compromised lightly - in no way implies that giving offence is generally a good thing, much less that it is any sort of obligation. (The fact that there will be cases of doubt as to which side of the line between offence, on the one hand, and racial hatred, incitement, etc., on the other, a particular speech-act or published item falls on, doesn't affect this basic point. That is in the nature of many types of distinction and of the world. The task of assigning such ambiguous and difficult cases comes within the province of legal interpretation and judgement.)
From this part of Brownie's line of thought, if I haven't misunderstood him, it follows that the Danish newspaper would have done better not to publish cartoons showing the Prophet Muhammad, even though it had a right to. That, in any event, is my view. Where I differ with Brownie is over his argument that, once the cartoons had been published, leading to the volume of outrage they did, the other European newspapers should not have followed suit by printing the cartoons in their turn. For, if there is giving offence, there is also taking offence, and there are ways and ways of doing this. Most people are offended from time to time, either mildly or deeply, by some of what comes their way in speech, opinion, pictorial representation, film. They are offended, they state their view (or sometimes don't bother) and move on. Where, on the other hand, some person or institution becomes the focus of concentrated and sustained outrage, and an act of free expression becomes the occasion of threats, then it seems to me there is a case for the press, amongst other institutions in a free society, to respond by saying: 'No, we draw the line here. Offended you may be, and there are legitimate ways of expressing that, but the newspaper had the right to print what it did (or the novelist to write, or the person to say, what they did).' In this case, reprinting the same cartoons is an act of solidarity and an affirmation of the right of free expression of a much stronger and more persuasive kind than affirming it by merely saying 'We affirm it.'
There is, in principle, another way of bringing this vexed issue to a resolution, and it would be well, both for the Muslim populations of European societies and for the host societies, if it could be achieved. But it requires some give and take - though not now in the meaning of giving and taking offence. Whether it states a realistic prospect right now I'd be hesitant to say; possibly not. Anyway it would involve, on one side, a clear recognition of the norm in secular democratic societies that there is (in effect and within the constraints I've already cited) a right to give offence. It would involve, on the other side, encouraging as wide as possible an understanding of what sorts of activity do give offence to different religious and ethnic communities, and encouragement throughout the public domain towards avoiding them. There is a tension here, no question about it, but it is one that needs to be negotiated and lived with in the interests of social peace.