February 8th, 2006 by Jemaleddin Cole

Dear Jeff,

I just read your arti­cle We are all Danes now over at the Boston Globe, and I have a few questions:

1. Were you born yesterday?
2. No, really?
3. Do you think we were born yesterday?

I don’t dis­agree with you that the recent vio­lence sparked by draw­ings of Mohammed in Jyllands-​Posten are ter­ri­ble and awful and tragic. I mean, I do think “You don’t pub­lish car­toons of the Prophet Mohammed” might make a nice line in “You don’t mess around with Jim” right after “You don’t spit into the wind.” I mean, “You don’t pull on the mask of the old Lone Ranger” feels strained to me. But even if what the editor was doing was stupid, the reac­tion is nuts. So we agree on that much. My prob­lem is this:

The same is true of Chris­tians, Jews, Bud­dhists, Mor­mons: They don’t lash out in vio­lence when their reli­gious sen­si­bil­i­ties are offended. They cer­tainly don’t expect their beliefs to be immune from crit­i­cism, mock­ery, or dissent.

So again, did you just wake up from a long nap or some­thing? Did you sleep through his­tory class? Or are you just plain stupid?

Wait… you were the guy I just wrote to about your sup­port of Intel­li­gent Design. So you prob­a­bly are stupid. Sorry.

Do me a favor. Get your­self a big mug of cocoa, a copy of an ency­clo­pe­dia, and see if you can find any sto­ries reli­gious folks killing each other. On second thought, you might want to stock up on cocoa first.

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