I think there's one or two of the cartoons that I understand can be offensive, one or two I don't get and some of them were pretty amusing. Overall I was rather left with a feeling of "this is what they're burning down our embassies for?"
I've been trying to catch up on facts since they started burning the embassies - the actual printings of the cartoons were in September, so the situation has some build-up.
As far as I understand, a lot of the kerfluffle started with the murder of that Dutch filmmaker. Then a Danish professor was doing a lecture, and was quoting the Qur'an - and wound up getting death threats for this. After that, the community were fairly afraid of what would happen, and so when the children's book author needed illustrations for his book about Muhammed, he had serious trouble finding illustrators who dared do it - and they wound up doing it anonymously. This was the situation Jyllandsposten wanted to prove a point about, by inviting caricaturists to draw these cartoons. Of course, since I don't read arabic, this is a mixture of Danish, Norwegian, British, American newspapers.
Though, Arabic journalists stationed in Norway has stated that they've not reported several errors to their paper regarding who said what, with the result that the head of the press organization in Norway - who was advocating the free press, but not necessarily the drawings, has been portrayed as Editor of Jyllandsposten, and similar errors. The journalists just said that it was something that would sort it self out. (Paraphrasing.)
Then you also come to the part where Denmark's Queen Margrethe is being portrayed as a racist in some of the demonstrations. The reason for that: The Queen's biography was published last year. Parts of it was translated to English. The translator mucked up - and now the Islamic world thinks she's against islam. What she was commenting on was how one should provide alternatives to the very fundamentalistic parts of islam - that might be less violent, instead she was quoted as saying that one should provide opposition to islam. Because of an error in translation. But then again, this whole thing is rather stupid.
I don't think the violence is universal. The media will play things like this up - and relish it for as long as they can. Unfortunately, there are idiots on both sides.
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I've been trying to catch up on facts since they started burning the embassies - the actual printings of the cartoons were in September, so the situation has some build-up.
As far as I understand, a lot of the kerfluffle started with the murder of that Dutch filmmaker. Then a Danish professor was doing a lecture, and was quoting the Qur'an - and wound up getting death threats for this. After that, the community were fairly afraid of what would happen, and so when the children's book author needed illustrations for his book about Muhammed, he had serious trouble finding illustrators who dared do it - and they wound up doing it anonymously. This was the situation Jyllandsposten wanted to prove a point about, by inviting caricaturists to draw these cartoons. Of course, since I don't read arabic, this is a mixture of Danish, Norwegian, British, American newspapers.
Though, Arabic journalists stationed in Norway has stated that they've not reported several errors to their paper regarding who said what, with the result that the head of the press organization in Norway - who was advocating the free press, but not necessarily the drawings, has been portrayed as Editor of Jyllandsposten, and similar errors. The journalists just said that it was something that would sort it self out. (Paraphrasing.)
Then you also come to the part where Denmark's Queen Margrethe is being portrayed as a racist in some of the demonstrations. The reason for that: The Queen's biography was published last year. Parts of it was translated to English. The translator mucked up - and now the Islamic world thinks she's against islam. What she was commenting on was how one should provide alternatives to the very fundamentalistic parts of islam - that might be less violent, instead she was quoted as saying that one should provide opposition to islam. Because of an error in translation. But then again, this whole thing is rather stupid.
I don't think the violence is universal. The media will play things like this up - and relish it for as long as they can. Unfortunately, there are idiots on both sides.