The director of a UK group called MediaWise penned a column a few days ago on the cartoons controversy. I address some holes in it.

An excerpt from Mike Jempson's effort:

Speaking long before the current controversy broke, Danish media analyst and anti-racist campaigner Bashy Quraishy said: "The media don't just communicate a reality; they participate in the conceptualization and creation of that reality. Therefore, they have an enormous responsibility for the consequences."

Much of the current crisis revolves around perceptions rather than realities. How many people know the full story behind the current furore?

Quraishy, a Humanist, rightly insists that context and motive are crucial. He claims that anti-immigrant feeling and Islamophobia in Denmark has been fuelled by the editorial stance of Jyllands-Posten which once refused to publish cartoons of Jesus Christ on the grounds that they might "cause an uproar" among Christian readers.
 
He says the newspaper rejected cautionary advice from an eminent religious scholar at Syd Dansk University, Odense, and went ahead with publication of the Muhammad pictures. However Quraishy maintains the situation could have been defused almost at once had the editor responded swiftly to peaceful protests, and had the Danish Prime Minister acceded to requests for a meeting with ambassadors from 11 Islamic countries last October.

A few counter-points:

The column doesn't mention how in Iran, a speaker at one demonstration thundered that these cartoons were part of a "Zionist conspiracy."

It doesn't mention how text messages were sent from Europe to the Middle East saying right-wing Danes were going to burn copies of the Koran on Feb. 4 (the day the Danish and Norwegian embassies were trashed and burned in Damascus, Syria; the Koran burnings never happened).

It doesn't mention how the media in Egypt reported that right-wing Danes were trying to censor the Koran -- another untruth.

It doesn't mention how the Danish imams who travelled to the Middle East also showed some cartoons that were considerably more vile than those published in Jyllens-Posten -- and that those are the cartoons being highlighted in the Middle East.

On the Jesus cartoons, Jyllens-Posten has said those cartoons were voluntarily submitted, not commissioned like the Muhammad ones, and they didn't find them very funny. The paper said it rejects about 90 to 95 per cent of voluntarily submitted material -- a figure I find to be credible.

In terms of defusing the situation, Jempson should consider the implications of this statement by Shaikh Faiz Siddiqi of the newly-formed Muslim Action Council:

"We are likely to ask the media to refrain from all depictions of the Prophet," he says. "We are not saying they must abide by the rules of Islam but by the rules of common civility, and avoid deliberate acts of provocation that cause insult to millions of Muslims."

Personally, I think that's asking too much. No other religious group asks for a ban on the depiction of their leading figures. And if they did, the media should push back.

When Bashy Quraishy says the situation could have been resolved peacefully, would that be by the paper not only apologizing, but agreeing never again to depict Muhammad in a cartoon or otherwise completely acceding to Muslim demands? And to have the Danish prime minister pass a law making it illegal to depict the prophet? From where I sit, that's a high price to pay. Actually, it's too high.

Jempson says the UK media should "the use of racist stereotyping and inflammatory headlines." Sounds fine by me.

This is important:

Most important of all, as we have urged before, it must act quickly to bring greater diversity into its newsrooms. There are plenty of ready recruits. Many members of the Exiled Journalists Network are Muslims from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who could add a depth of knowledge that is singularly lacking from local and national newsrooms.

Diversity, to me, should mean more than skin colour. Mainstream news organizations should have people in them with a diversity of religious and socio-economic backgrounds too.

One could probably also ask the media to guard against perceived or real double standards in the treatment of Muslims with respects to other religions.

Finally, when we're talking about the roots of this conflict, why does no media critic bring up the case of Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker murdered in November 2004 after his film Submission was screened on Dutch TV.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somalia-born Dutch politician and Muslim who fled an arranged marriage in her homeland. She wrote the script for Submission, which looks at violence against women under Islam.

A "direct threat" against her was penned to Van Gogh's body with a knife by his killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, a born-and-raised Dutch citizen of Moroccan ancestry.

Bouyeri shot Van Gogh seven times and then slit his throat as the dying man begged for mercy.

""The law compels me to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet," Bouyeri said at his July 26, 2005 sentencing, holding a copy of the Koran as he did so (from the BBC).

Against this background we have a Danish author looking for someone to illustrate a children's book on the life of Muhammad and finding no takers.

If you care to check a map, Denmark isn't that far from the Netherlands.

In response to that, Jyllands-Posten asked 40 cartoonists to submit cartoons about what they thought Muhammad looked like, leading to the current firestorm.

There may be a silver lining in this ugly cloud of conflict. Read this BBC story to see what I mean.

A big missing part of the debate here is what do moderate Muslims in Western countries want. Are they comfortable with secular societies that put a high value on liberal values like freedom of expression?

How do they feel about this quote by novelist Salman Rushdie: "What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."

Can they accept that at some point, some tenets and symbols of their faith might come under satiric treatment? Do they think their right to not be offended trumps all other rights?

At the same time, since the news media does play a role in shaping public opinion, is it doing an adequate job of putting the Muslim communities within their cities and countries into proper context, or do they fall back on stereotypes and loud-mouthed but unrepresentative sources to put out cheap-to-produce but ultimately uninformative stories?

And finally, since the exercising of freedom of expression can lead to either deliberate or unintended offence, the news organization should, in the former, ask itself if offence is possible. Having a diverse newsroom and actually using that diversity would improve the news organization's ability to detect potential problems before they start.

Deliberate offence should be avoided, unless there's some clear public good that would result from a controversy-generating treatment.

Minority communities should be treated respectfully and fairly, but that doesn't mean uncritically.

As I always, I welcome thoughts on my thoughts. :)