It's the protest principle

So my principled co-religionists have displayed their rage, once again, over something that offends them. To demonstrate their horror at the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in an offensive manner in some newspaper cartoons, they have torched the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and the Danish consulate in Beirut; they have stormed the EU building in Gaza; and they have burned Danish and other flags. And, on top of it all, Hasan Nasrallah has pretty much compared the drawings to suicide bombers and called for an oil boycott to punish the West.

There also were reports of a riot in London where a speaker linked the cartoons to Iraq:

"A representative of the organizers proclaimed through a loudspeaker that the cartoons were a desperate attempt to draw attention away from the "defeat" of the "infidels" in Iraq at the hands of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "

That's really laughable. Because the Zarqawi thugs target Iraqi civilians most often. So when the speaker talks of the "defeat of infidels" in Iraq, he's basically calling the Iraqi people infidels.

Yes, the cartoons are tasteless and disrespectful. But whatever happened to writing an angry letter to the editor asking for an end to such cartoons?

Jihad Momani, an editor in Jordan, reprinted the offensive drawings in
the newspaper, Shihan. He also wrote a column calling for reasonable
behaviour. The man was promptly
fired.

Momani is right: Muslims need to calm down. When the fiasco first started, such sensible Middle Eastern writers as Mona Eltahawy wrote that the Muslim community needs to stop overreacting.

"What should have remained a local issue turned into a diplomatic uproar that Muslims otherwise rarely provoke when fighting for their rights around the world. Perhaps the Muslim governments who spearheaded the campaign - led by Egypt - felt this was an easy way to burnish their Islamic credentials at a time when domestic Islamists are stronger than they have been in many years."

But the fury appears to be spreading. And, some Europeans are adding fuel to the fire. France Soir fired an editor over the drawings, the Danes apologised and so on. Anyway, since when did stupid, tasteless cartoons start stirring such passions among the Muslims? Arabic language newspapers and magazines regularly run cartoons that offend all sorts of communities. It would be easier to respect all this rage if these angry people applied the same standards all around.

You know, in 2002, 15 Saudi schoolgirls burned to death when Saudi religious police wouldn't let them escape their building because they were not in hijab.

Waiting for my fellow Muslims to react to that kind of criminality with the same impassioned outrage they save for offensive newspaper cartoons has been rather like waiting for a desert-blown Godot. Our community leaders, as always, fail us.