A couple of simple caricatures printed in a Danish newspaper has the Arab world outraged. Unfortunately, the paper apologized for the Muhammad-critical cartoons and democratic values lost out to totalitarian ideology.
In Germany and the rest of free Europe, one likes to talk about the necessity of learning from the past, of helping newcomers to the democratic club and of supporting stable democracies. Over sixty years after the end of the Nazi regime, everyone is determined not to let such a group rise to power again.
But the reality is that our real options when confronted with such a force are somewhat modest. A dozen faux-Nazis being elected to the Saxony state parliament was enough to plunge the established parties into frenetic helplessness. The late German television personality Johannes Gross -- a political conservative who possessed an acute sense of history -- once said: "The resistance to Hitler and his kind will only grow the further the Third Reich recedes into the past."
One shudders to imagine how the political classes would react if the country were threatened -- from the right or the left -- by a real totalitarian movement.
What one can and must consider, however, is the reaction within Germany if a mainstream daily paper -- like the Frankfurter Rundschau or the Süddeutsche Zeitung, for example -- were to print a dozen or so caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in much the same way as such caricatures of Jesus, the Pope or other religious figures are published all the time. One only has to take a quick glance over Germany's northern border into Denmark, where Jyllands Posten allowed itself just such caricatures four months ago. A storm of indignation has been raging in the Muslim world since -- as though a second Abu Ghraib had been discovered in a suburb of Copenhagen.
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http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398532,00.html
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