THE TEMPERATURE RISES

From Conservative Home's coverage of the Muslim extremists' demo in London yesterday:

  The police told The Sunday Telegraph that they made no arrests "because of public order fears". Today's Sunday Express - right - carries a photograph of a Muslim protestor dressed up as a suicide bomber. The police did not, apparently, challenge him.

Appalling, if true. As for whether or not it was right to publish the cartoons in the first place, Roger Scruton is worth listening to:

You must respect other people’s pieties and that means respecting the icons of their faith and the rituals, but that doesn’t mean you can’t criticise the content of the faith.

What we need is more discussion and less mockery. We Christians have had to put up with the most appalling satire of our symbols — it’s the way the world works. I don’t think the Danish cartoons are anything to get as worked up about as all that but I think it’s wrong to publish them.

Similar sentiments from Cambridge don, John Casey:

Have we in the West become so historically ignorant that we forget how closely, within living memory, Christian attitudes to the sacred resembled those of Muslims? The face of Christ was rarely shown by Hollywood until at least the 1960s, because to do that on film seemed disrespectful compared with a stylised representation in painting. There is little doubt that only a generation ago the blasphemy laws would have been used against "Jerry Springer: The Opera".

And a nuanced op-ed from Henry Porter:

There is a difference between a healthy secular state and the blinkered secularism that has grown up since Marx and Freud which denies the existence of God and so neglects the importance of the faith of strangers...

...Was it right to publish those cartoons? Probably not. Was it sensible to republish them? Probably not. We should accept that it has caused deep offence to people whose religion we do not fully comprehend. But, equally, Muslims must allow for the error in a continent of free but flawed societies. They should understand that our societies are not simply based on godless consumption and self-indulgence, but on one or two deeply held convictions.

I find that more helpful than one of Christopher Hitchens' thunderbolts on "the case for mocking religion".