Thursday, March 02, 2006

right. been thinking about the issue for a long time now, and been really tentative about tackling it. sensitive as it is, the prickliness is compounded by the very fact that you can never second-guess what the authorities might find offensive these days. anyway, i've decided to take a stab at it, and so, if you find this space closed down in the next week or so, you can more or less conclude that i'm rotting in changi. here goes...

read somewhere recently that a great deal of people in the West are astonished as to how fierce (and violent) the reaction to the caricatures have been. yet, they fail to grasp the fact that these caricatures seek to lampoon a holy figure in the religion of a billion or so in the world. surely, they must admit that the "cartoons", if you must call them that, have gone too far. after all, in many countries in Western Europe, there are laws to tackle anti-Holocaust ideas, be they in print or otherwise. a case in point would be a certain British historian who's now rotting in jail for saying that the Holocaust never took place. the media in these countries accepts that freedom of the press must be tempered with press responsibility and hence they seek to be sensitive to the feeling of their audience. so why can't this same responsibility come to the fore when it comes to the caricatures? would Westerners take kindly to cartoons that seek to poke fun at the Holocaust? would they go up to the cartoonist and compliment him on having told an excellent joke? i can tell you right now, the answer would be a resounding "NO". why can't the blockheads in the Western media accept their mistake and apologise? freedom of expression is not a concept that is superior to all laws. the concept of freedom of speech itself is one created by Man. laws and concepts do not have a life on their own. it is down to the person who wields the concept as a tool who breathes life into it. freedom of expression must go hand-in-hand with press responsibility. let not the members of the press corps believe they can get away with anything, but do not seek to go overboard.

i heard the crickets at 11:50 am

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