Bad Jokes

The bottomline: This Danish journalist, Kare Bluitgen, who's written a biography about Muhammad wanted to write a kid's book about the prophet. Problem is, he couldn't find anyone who'd draw pictures for his book because artists feared violent attacks by extremist Muslims. So Flemming Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, responds by asking 40 artists to draw pictures of the prophet. 12 of the illustrations were published in the newspaper on September 30, 2005.

Note that there have been drawings of Muhammad by Muslim artists before. The problem isn’t particularly with the fact that you’re not supposed to draw God. Its basically because the cartoons seem to imply that all Muslims are terrorists.

From CNN :

In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono denounced the cartoons as insensitive.
But "as religious people, we should accept the apology extended by the Danish government," he added.

Simon Jenkins wrote in the Sunday Times that governments should not be obliged to apologise. Check it out, his writing style is amazing. Many media publications frequently criticise the governments of their countries. This is freedom of speech.

If the government were to take responsibility of everything that was published in the media, this priviledge would cease to exist and censorship would abound. We would all read politically-correct propoganda and use words like: sanitary engineer (one who cleans toilets), deferred success (to fail), womyn (spelling the word 'woman' differently do distance the gender from man), etc.

Barriers are only imposed when people cross the line. By abusing their freedom, the media in in danger of future constraints on this priviledge.