Wow. Looks like yesterday’s entry title was more accurate than I initially intended. Get a load of this little snippet, courtesy of the World Socialist Website:
The events that have led up to the present confrontation make it clear that the publication of the cartoons was a political provocation. The Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, which first published twelve caricatures of Mohammad on September 30, supports the right-wing government headed by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen–a government that includes in its coalition a rabidly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim party.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Jyllands-Posten was infamous for its affinity for Italian fascism and the German Nazi dictatorship. In 1933, it argued for the introduction of a dictatorship in Denmark.
Last September, the newspaper asked forty cartoonists to draw images of the Prophet Muhammad, something that is proscribed by Islamic law as blasphemous. Spelling out the provocative and inflammatory aim of this exercise, the chief editor said its purpose was "to examine whether people would succumb to self-censorship, as we have seen in other cases when it comes to Muslim issues."
Well, well. A paper with pro-fascist leanings, both past and present, daring to pontificate and deliberately provoke outrage on “self-censorship when it comes to Muslim issues”? It’s more than a little ironic when you consider that yesterday’s entry dealt with their own self-censorship when it comes to, you guessed it, Christian issues. Selective inattention is a hypocrite’s best friend.
But then again, isn’t this just like fascists. They want “freedom of speech” for themselves (and no one else, it seems), but they don’t want to acknowledge the ugly consequences of just shooting off their mouths. And they sure as hell don’t want to see the finger of blame pointing back at them–which it’s bound to do threefold, as the old Buddhist parable holds, when they dare to point their own at someone else.