Cartoon Saga Continues: More countries get into the act

From the BBC:

Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage.

France Soir, Germany's Die Welt, La Stampa in Italy and El Periodico in Spain all carried some of the drawings . . .

In Berlin, the prominent daily Die Welt ran a front-page caricature of the prophet wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb. The paper argued there was a right to blaspheme in the West, and asked whether Islam was capable of coping with satire.

I'm starting to not like the sound of this:

France Soir said it had reprinted the full set to show that "religious dogma" had no place in a secular society.

Under the headline "Yes, we have the right to caricature God", the daily carried a front-page cartoon of Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim and Christian gods floating on a cloud.

Jews, Muslims, and Christians all have different "gods"? Blasphemy is bad, by the way. It is one of the prohibitions of the Seven Noachide laws. We religious righties should be careful, as this story continues to unfold, not to express any solidarity with real blasphemy. I don't know if the France Soir cartoon is blasphemous or not, but it is a point worth mentioning. The newspaper articles that explain Muslim offense at the Mohammed cartoons all explain that the prohibition of depicting the Prophet is meant to prevent idolatry. That seems to suggest that such representations are actually not blasphemy to Muslims, sacrilegious and insulting though they may be. This has been an unfortunate result all along of the current confrontation of Islam and the West: normal, sane religion is often the collateral damage of the backlash. Am I exhibiting a double-standard here?

Tags: Denmark, prophet-cartoons, cartoons, France, Germany, blasphemy