Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update

* if I'm reading articles like this one on the recent elections in Denmark correctly, and I'm probably not, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen won a third term in part on a positive appraisal of his handling of the international political crisis caused by caricatures of Muhammed appearing in the paper Jyllands-Posten in Fall 2005. It looks like by reaching out to the anti-tax, pro-immigration New Alliance to buttress his majority Rasmussen has placed some of the political issues surrounding growing Muslim populations in Europe more clearly on the table for a while.

* according to this article, the Danish Cartoons Controversy may have been the best thing to ever happen to Denmark: no terrorist attacks, limited economic fall-out, no violence against Muslims during that period, reduced influence enjoyed by radical imams, and a much more open dialog.

* this writer believes that the lack of a show of support for the El Jueves cartoonists is a display of some hypocrisy. I hate to harsh this writer's righteousness buzz, and I'm all for international support of Manel Fontdevila and Guillermo Torres, but if the writer's argument is dependent on their having been a worldwide show of support for the Danish Cartoonists by European editors and journalists, I don't really remember that happening.

* one Muslim in Baghdad profiled by the New York Times blames Muslims for using religion to gain secular power more than he does the Danish cartoonists.

* how Swedes avoided a similar crisis.

* the theologian Karen Armstrong says here that the lesson of the Danish Cartoons Controversy wasn't a world divided by a religion, but a world struggling with misplaced feelings of nationalism in the guise of fundamentalism.
 
posted 8:20 pm PST | Permalink
 

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