Those Damn Cartoons

Personally, I think it was stupid for the European papers to have printed them because it was so predictable that there would be violent protests. I think it was especially stupid for French papers to publish them because of the recent protests in Paris.

And all this talk about it being a "Freedom of Expression" issue just feels moot to me because no government has tried to stop the printing of these comics. There was no coercion.

I guess I can see some issue of self-censorship and some degree of "coercion" in that not printing them would have avoided violence, but. . .on the flipside, I think it would have been more productive for these newspapers to try printing something more constructive and creative to help resolve all the tension rather than incite it more for some kind of fundamentalist expression of "Freedom of Expression."

In the end, I think it falls back onto an editorial decision of each and every newspaper that printed the cartoons, and I, personally, think it was a bad decision because other than the violence incited by them or the intent to poke fun and reject, there really wasn't much point to printing them.

Yet. . .I don't support the violence of the protests, even if it was predictable.