LETTER: Violent reaction by Muslims is hypocritical

Editor,

As I write, much of the Muslim world is enraged by a series of political cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper and recently reprinted in a French newspaper.

The editors of these newspapers left themselves open for criticism through their ethnic and religious insensitivityto Muslims, but the widespread, extremely violent reactions and escalating threats of even greater violence by Muslims are not acceptable responses. Muslims have the right to be offended and to protest; they do not have the right to respond with violence and threats.

But there is also a hypocrisy behind the Muslim reaction that has gone largely unnoticed: newspapers throughout the Arab world publish ugly, despicable anti-Jewish cartoons on a daily basis. They use disgusting stereotypes and false anti-Jewish libels, they defame Jewish religious symbols, and they recycle Nazi-era anti-Jewish images that would make Hitler glad.

(For samples from a wide range of Arab newspapers, go to http://www.adl.org/main_Arab_World/asam_july_dec_intro_2005.htm.)

Throughout the Middle East, Arab newspapers incite Arabs and Muslims against Jews, stoking the fires of hate every day with images that are at least as objectionable as those that Muslims find so offensive in Denmark and France.

When the United States and Jewish organizations appeal to these Arab countries to cease producing such hateful and hate-producing caricatures, Arab leaders defend what is produced in the name of “freedom of the press.

Such hypocrisy and self-righteousness has to change if we are to make any progress in understanding between different peoples in a fast-shrinking world.

There must be room for freedom of the press, and there must also be respect for different religious and ethnic groups.

But not just for some groups, for all of them, everywhere.

Steve Siporin