I Know You Are But What Am I?

In a throwback to schoolyard days, an Iranian paper is going to solicit tasteless cartoons about the Holocaust in an attempt to goad the West into hypocrisy.

My prediction: It won't work. Come on Persia, the Jews have been persecuted for centuries. Do you really think they are gullible enough to fall for this little ploy. Sensible heads, more of which exist in the West than in the Middle East, will call this childish and crude, but no embassies will be burned or cartoonists threatened.

If you are offended by someone's depiction of your religion, protest, peacefully, and boycott and make your displeasure known. This is how the fanatical Christians in the U.S. do it. No one stormed the offices of NBC or threatened the producers of Will and Grace with death. Instead, they applied the economic and political pressure and got something they wanted.

Sure, there was a time when Christians burned heretics (real or otherwise) at the stake for saying or writing things considered to be blasphemy, but we've grown up and understand that the best way to validate a belief is to challenge it. If it stands up for 2000 years, it's probably a pretty solid belief.

Whether this was the right thing to do for NBC is a separate debate, but it shows a nice contrast of how Christianity is about 700 years ahead of Islam in terms of a civilized religion.