DFW chapter of CAIR alerts members about rising row over Danish Mohammed cartoons

DallasBlog.com | Trey Garrison:

“Violence, threats and protests by Muslims have erupted from Europe to southwest Asia, while on the other side a number of Western newspapers in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany have reprinted the cartoons as an act of free speech solidarity.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

This conflict arises from different cultures wanting to live by different rules. The West wants to live by rules that respect freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The Muslim world wants to live by rules dictated by the word of God. Blasphemy is a crime under Islamic law. Blasphemy is not a crime under the West's secular laws.

For Muslims to tolerate these cartoons, they would first have to surrender their beliefs that the world should be ruled by Islamic Law. Perhaps that will happen in some distant future, just like medieval Christians eventually relegated canon law to church life. The epic struggle playing out today is not so much a battle between Islam and Christianity, as it is a battle between Islam and liberal democracy. We in the West can fervently hope that liberal democracy triumphs, but, in the meantime, we need to be prepared for a long-term war of ideas that sometimes might flare up into physical violence.