15 people were killed yesterday in Nigeria and 11 in Libya during demonstrations against the Mohammad cartoons. In Pakistan a Muslim cleric offered $24,000 dollars reward to anyone who kills the cartoonist. Churches were burned down. Embassies were bombed.

This is not a joke. There are actually people out there that are willing to give their lives and take the lives of others over a bunch of cartoons. Well, not exactly. The real issue is not the Danish cartoonist or the reaction of the Danish prime minister. It is the right to free speech and the fundamentalists’ illusion that they can dictate to us what we can and cannot say. This is not a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between freedom and oppression. It is a clash between religious fundamentalism and secular liberalism. It is a clash between sanity and mass hysteria.

Salman Rushdie (from an interview at reasonnoline.com):

The idea of universal rights—the idea of rights that are universal to all people because they correspond to our natures as human beings, not to where we live or what our cultural background is—is an incredibly important one. This belief is being challenged by apostles of cultural relativism who refuse to accept that such rights exist. If you look at those who employ this idea, it turns out to be Robert Mugabe, the leaders of China, the leaders of Singapore, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini. It is a dangerous belief that everything is relative and therefore these people should be allowed to kill because it’s their culture to kill.
I think we live in a bad age for the free speech argument. Many of us have internalized the censorship argument, which is that it is better to shut people up than to let them say things that we don’t like. This is a dangerous slippery slope, because people of good intentions and high principles can see censorship as a way of advancing their cause and not as a terrible mistake. Yet bad ideas don’t cease to exist by not being expressed. They fester and become more powerful.

To Visit: Washingtonpost.com ‘Cartoon Controversy’