Well, unless you're diabetic. Effin' pancreas. I miss breakfast pastries.

My boyfriend and I spent three days in Denmark last summer. It was lovely, and I recommend it to everyone who's thinking about going to Europe this summer.

In the meantime I'm going to make a list of Danish products folks in Seattle can buy.

The comics aren't even funny, people. Apart from standing up to death threats, there's nothing courageous about unfunny Danes standing behind redneck humor.

My position is consistent.

Too bad about all those non-Western people who still issue boycotts and have symbolic protests (ooooh, burning flags...) in response to a political cartoon: Did we colonize them for nothing? That's not free speech! Send them back to where they're from if they don't like freedom...

... Which in this case, would probably be a US client state like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, where freedom of speech is almost non-existent, democracy is held in check by authoritarian rule, and torture is a necessary part of keeping popular movements critical of the U.S. from gaining power.

Who are those movements that are pushing against corrupt regimes for the freedom to criticize the US (and its Western allies)? Why, they're ISLAMIST movements. Fascist? No. Not one Islamist movement actually espouses a political philosophy that borrows from fascism. I wonder why? Maybe it's because fascism was invented by the WEST?

In fact, the Founding Fathers of Islamofascism, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, borrowed large chunks of their whole program from the same Western philosophical sources Eurofascism did. Islamofascism, or Islamism if you insist, is an ideology predominantly of WESTERN origin -- but, like the Axis kind, it can't take root without a very fertile soil of religious prejudice.

The difference between Hitlerian Fascism and Islamofascism is that the former is exctinct, and whatever the colonial faults of the West, we did go to some bother to get rid of it. Over there, it's spreading like wildfire.

The editor of France Soir, which reprinted the cartoon, has been fired. I hope that doesn't stand unchallenged. I think the Stranger ought to print the cartoon.

And, I'm sorry, but I feel that freedom of speech is the most important right.

And being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Semitic, anti-West, or anti-free speech.

Islamofascism is a chauvanistic and racist term. It's a hypocritical attempt to call people non-Western by associating them with a distinctly Western political philosophy that they don't even espouse.

Invoking Islamofascism also a smokescreen for the denial of democracy: by US client states, by Israel (sorry, 20 percent of the population is Arab and has second class citizenship), and of course by Iraq's puppet government. As if the only anti-democratic forces in the Middle East were Islamicist...

Oh: and who kickstarted the radical movement that eventually became Al-Qaeda? I believe that was the United States, in Afghanistan, in the 1980s. See Richard Dryfuss's new book. But of course they're totally non-Western...

Millions of people around the world wish that the West actually did stand for free speech. But it doesn't and won't so long as the US throws its weight behind neo-colonial occupations, military dictatorships, corrupt cabals, and racist regimes who purport to be democratic.

The Stranger can print some stupid cartoon or not. The effect will be nil. If it wants to promote free speech, it needs to take an regular axe to US foreign policy instead of telling immigrants to go back home to places that the US has made more or less uninhabitable.

You're right that we aided the militant muslim resistance to the Soviets. But what's your point? If we aided bin Laden by helping the Mujahadeen kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan...and then we got out too...that kinda makes bin Laden's rage at us hypocritical...not the other way around.

Extreme right, extreme left -- they always reach around and meet at the back.

Dan was basically responding to intolerance with more intolerance, to cultural chauvinism with more chauvinism. That’s what I was calling out. I wasn't saying that the Danish editor should be fired or subjected to death threats. Saying that does not make me anti-West. Nor does it make me similar to Bin Laden. And anyway: neither Nietzsche, Spengler, or Eliot were anything close to leftist.

Technical historical side note: According to Wikipedia, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 as a movement against BRITISH imperialism, and had nearly one million members before Nasser ever came to power. Yes it morphed in response to Nasser's persecution and the torture of its members. But most of the attempts I’ve seen to link it to fascism have not dealt with this transformation, and instead willfully and inaccurately blur the lines between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Young Egypt Party, which was explicitly fascist.

But it's also freedom (at least in the West) to caricature Mohammed, Allah, Jesus, Hale-Bopp, or any other religious deity. I hope the Stranger musters up the courage to reprint the pictures - not because they're funny or insightful (they aren't), but because they represent something. It's standing up (peacefully) to the bullies of the world (and yes, the US is the biggest bully of all, but that's irrelevant to the issue of drawing caricatures of Mohammed).

That said, I'm going to Denmark in 2 weeks and am going to love it.

(1) The first people killed as a result of the debates over the Danish cartoons weren't Europeans. They were two Afghan protesters. Shot dead by police. While excercising their freedom of speech. In an American puppet state. Whoops.

(2) The same Danish editor who published the cartoons critical of Islam refused to publish cartoons critical of Jesus three years ago.