Major Disconnect, General Confusion, Private Anguish, Corporal Punishment, Lieutenant Numbwithoutrage

This is what I don't get. At Arab News, they are "numbed with outrage" at the use of freedom of expression to support "the attempted destruction of a people's faith."

Arab News article

Your faith can be destroyed by a cartoon? What a frail and whispy thing your faith must be.

Then, apparently trying to teach us something, the same article says "... that the notion of freedom of expression cannot be translated into unlimited freedom to abuse another's faith is basic common sense."

It is? It's a "common sense" that is beyond me. Free expression -- which is not just a "notion" -- is not even supposed to be polite.

Here, I think, are the major disconnects causing all of this anguish, confusion and everything else:

1) Muslims -- I hear -- are forbidden to portray Mohammed (although, apparently that's not even true and images are sold in open markets in Iran all the time:

Website of Iranian woman selling Mohammed images online

Non-muslims are not forbidden to do so. Why? That's not our law, Achmed. That's your law.

2) Muslims are really, really offended by pictures of Mohammed (except, apparently, the ones who buy them from the lady in Tehran). There's some reason for this that I don't know or care to know. Anyway, they are. Non-muslims are not offended by pictures of Mohammed. Why? Why would we be? Mohammed is not a prophet to us. (He was -- in our view -- an ambitious, blood-thirsty, cruel, yet oddly charismatic tribal warlord. He tried to mimic what he (mis)understood of Judaism, was rejected by the Jews, and hence, after succeeding in a few battles and gaining some power, turned on the Jews and brutally executed hundreds of them, even taking the wife of one of the executed foes into his harem. So ..., ya know, not really a prophet by our standards.)

3) Even the idea of censoring blasphemy has utterly disappeared from the West (thank God)(was that a pun?). On the other hand, they still execute people for it (as well as for being homosexual, practicing Christianity, and other stuff) in several muslim countries including Saudi Arabia.

The result?

Muslims are offended when we do what we're perfectly entitled to do because they believe something we don't, and so they wish to impose their laws on us and force us to conform, in effect, to Islamic law.

I believe we should resist that effort with everything we have.

This was said even better at

New York Sun Editorial