Anger grows over Muhammad cartoon
Dear Head of Caliphate (or can I call you Caliph? Cal?)
I realise it is presumptious of me to speak on behalf of Europe, but I have a wonderful suggestion to make. I am all for negotiation and compromise, and meeting people in the middle. And I am sure many Europeans will join with me.
If you stop treating women as inferior to men we might consider not satirising your religion.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai also strongly condemned their publication, saying it was "an affront... for hundreds of millions of people".
Coincidentally, the systematic endemic oppression, rape and killing of women throughout the Moslem world - and elsewhere - is an affront for hundreds of millions of people.
Oh dear, your belief system got insulted. Does it not occur to you that if your oppressive mumbo-jumbo is insufficiently robust to withstand criticism it might just be because it's an indefensible heap of mumbo-jumbo?
I know how much you hate the materialism of the West, and, if the truth be told, there are many people in the West who have concerns about the more damaging aspects of undiluted materialism. But we had an Enlightenment a few centuries ago, and we began to develop a capacity to understand that the world isn't binary but nuanced with infinite shades of grey.
We also developed the concept of Free Speech. Imperfect in concept and imperfect in execution, but the key to developing all those technological goodies you seem very keen on, oh you know, those guns with which you surrounded the EU office in Gaza, and all that technology that allowed you to spread your message throughout the entire world. I expect you probably used cars or other motorised vehicles to get to your protests. Were there many women on those protests? I expect not, because you instruct your unthinking followers to grind women into the dust, to subjugate them, to treat them as less worthy of respect than you, to repeatedly rape them, to kill them.
In that context it almost seems embarrassing to be uptight about a couple of cartoons.
After all, people choose whether to follow a religion, and to the extent that they follow it. They don't get to choose their gender. So, while I agree that there is no justification for attacking someone just because they choose to follow a religion, it is rather marvellous that this issue can be raised, in the West, and our elected representatives demonstrate that Free Speech is precious.
So, Great Caliph, what are you doing to protect women from random and repeated hate-filled attacks, in the name of religion?
