The Globe and Mail's Marcus Gee rips Western governments for their timid response to the Muslim world's reaction to the Muhammad cartoons.

Some excerpts:

Only Nicholas Sarkozy, the French Interior Minister and potential successor to Mr. Chirac (Jacques Chirac, France's president), got it right when he said he preferred "an excess of cartooning to an excess of censorship."

That, of course, is the choice. Once societies start controlling one sort of speech or another on the grounds that it is excessive or hurtful, the chill on free expression starts to set in. Europeans are already starting to feel it. It was precisely because many journalists and illustrators feel intimidated by the rise of radical Islam that the Danish newspaper (Jyllands-Posten) decided to publish the offending cartoons. ...

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the Jyllands-Posten was right to publish or whether it showed bad judgment and poor taste when it made the decision in September. But that was then. Today, the newspaper and those others that republished the cartoons out of solidarity are under attack. The very least that democratic leaders should have done was assert, clearly and forcefully, that the right to free speech is a cardinal virtue of an open society. We respect your religion, they might have said, and we are sorry you feel offended, but, in our part of the world, newspapers can publish what they like (unless they break the laws against defamation, obscenity or violation of privacy).

Gee said the grovelling responses of Western governments showed they didn't understand they were are in a war of ideas with radical Islamists.

(The Islamist militants') plain-as-day strategy is to convince Muslims that they are victims of a conspiracy  to opporess and colonize the Islamic countries -- and that Islamic rule is the only way to fight back.

Islamic militants helped whip up the cartoon crisis precisely because it helped them play on the sense of victimization in the Islamic world. Their call for tolerance for Islamic teachings is not just hypocritical (for Islamism is notoriously intolerant of "infidel" faiths); it is designed deliberately to intimidate and incite.

You can't defeat that strategy by saying, "Gosh, we're sorry. That Danish newspaper was wrong to publish. Please don't get mad." In any battle of ideas, you have to assert the rightness of your own. One of the central values of the democratic world is that people should be free to express their opinions without fear of retribution or violence. When that right is under attack, as it is now, the only choice for democratic leaders is to defend it to the hilt.

A few notes:

Sarkozy is the same fellow credited with pouring gas on the fires of the French riots when he called the hooligans racaille, or rabble -- a not-particularly-judicious exercise of his right to free speech. :)

Gee does admit that there are some controls on free speech -- "defamation, obscenity or violation of privacy" -- but he didn't specifically mention hate speech. That's not insignificant, for Muslims are generally complaining the cartoons were hate speech as well as violating Islamic rules against depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The prohibition, according to some informed observers, is mainly followed by the very orthodox followers of the Arabic strain of Islam and isn't universal to all schools of the religion. However, it's also been noted that even more moderate Muslims wouldn't appreciate nasty depictions of their prophet.

In general, I agree with what I suspect is Gee's interpretation; that just because a cartoon offends or causes hurt feelings doesn't mean it constitutes hate speech.

If I were the judge of these particular cartoons, I would not declare them to be in violation of Canada's hate laws.

But as a citizen, I would also say Muslims and their supporters have every right to peacefully assemble and loudly protest the cartoons, which is what many in Canada's Muslim community have done.

Where Gee makes an error is in only talking about "militant Islamists."

There are moderate Muslims who were offended by the cartoons too.

Where I think Western society might be making an error is by looking at the cartoons in isolation.One might consider them differently if one links them to what could be seen as anti-Muslim policies in other areas, such as the invasion of Iraq, the essentially free pass given Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians and Western support for despotic Middle Eastern and Central Asian governments. And how about those new Abu Ghraib photos? :(

If newspaper cartoonists and other commentator also continually play up negative stereotypes of Muslims, but never find anything positive to say about them, then even the moderate Muslim community might see a pattern emerging.

In Denmark, two elected members of the right-wing Danish People's Party have described, in Parliament, Islam as a cancer on Danish society (from that pulpit, they are immune to the country's hate speech laws). I can't think of one Canadian politician who's made an equivalent statement.

Since the cartoon controversy, however, support for that party among Danes has reportedly gone up.

If moderate Muslims also feel under seige there and never see "free expression" working to their benefit, perhaps their moderation will erode as a result.

While I don't think the West should allow itself to be bullied by theocratic, fascistic Islamists, a healthy society shows some sensitivity and accomodation to new members while respectfully educating them about existing traditions and values. One of those values is the freedom to mock authority figures and symbols, be they political or religious.

To a certain extent, you have to roll with such behaviour in this society.

Again, if a group only sees itself being portrayed negatively, perhaps the wider society in which that group exists needs to examine why its freedom of expression skews in a certain direction.