Salon.com | Rotten judgment in the state of Denmark:

“The Danish right has only recently been converted to the free speech principle, and has its own idea of how to use it. In the past two years, the Danish People’s Party has twice proposed to eliminate the blasphemy paragraph. Two of the party’s members, Jesper Langballe and Soren Krarup, both pastors in the Lutheran National Church, have described Muslims as ‘a cancer on Danish society’ in speeches in parliament. They want to be free to say it outside parliament too. The paragraph was not removed in part because of opposition from Lutheran clergy, who do not all share the two pastors’ views.

But is blasphemy what the cartoons are about? The problem with the cartoons isn’t that they violate Islam’s rules about depiction of the Prophet, according to Fatih Alev, a young Danish imam and a prominent advocate for integration with whom I’ve spoken many times on the issue of integration. Rather, it is their political content, he told the Danish press this week. He objects that the cartoons stereotype who Muslims are, and misrepresent the religion entirely as the propaganda program of militant Islamists.”

Good article on the whole history of what is happening in the Muslim world from the Danish perspective. The author is quite honest about where Denmark has made mistakes and about how the internal forces in Danish politics are driving this conflict in concert with the Islamic voices that are also using this issue for their political ends. Take time to read the whole thing.

(Via Salon.)