Garth George: Islam's followers must learn to live with blasphemy

If the worldwide furore over the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad is nothing less than astonishing, then the defensive, even cringing, reaction of the leaders of Western nations is even more so.

And if the reason for the Muslim angst - if that's not too mild a word - is alleged to be blasphemy, how come it took several months after the cartoons were first published for the virulent reaction to come?

That indicates to me that the uproar is not religious but political, and I suspect that it has been encouraged by the same people who encourage Muslim radicalism, including persuading suicide bombers and other terrorists to do what they do.

Because if the real reason for the widespread Muslim reaction - with the violence and destruction that invariably accompanies any perceived insult to Islam - is against blasphemy, then that simply shows again just how far behind the times the Islamic world has fallen.

Not that I consider that the cartoons should ever have been published - and certainly not widely reprinted in Europe - but having seen them on the internet I wonder what all the fuss is about.

This newspaper and its sister Herald on Sunday made the right decision not to have a bar of them, and the editors down country whose rags did print them proved only that they lack the judgment necessary to do their jobs.

I don't know whether there is still a law against blasphemy in this country, but if there is I wonder how long ago it was used, if ever.

In the past half century or so in most of the Western World, blasphemy - defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as "profane or sacrilegious talk about God or sacred things" - has become so common that it is invariably ignored.

There are exceptions, of course, for some of the blasphemy committed from time to time has been so blatant and base as to arouse in even the most tolerant people feelings of hurt and disgust - the movie The Life of Brian, the so-called artwork Virgin in a Condom and the TV series Popetown to name a few.

And while I'm on that subject, I've seen some specious arguments in my day, but this newspaper's justification of itself in a sub-leader on Monday for running pictures of Virgin in a Condom must take the cake.

It obviously didn't occur to the champions of free speech who made that decision that if newspapers and TV hadn't run pictures of the sickening statue, then only those who bothered to go to that museum in Wellington would have seen it, and hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders would have been spared the offence of looking at it.

And what about that poor (not financially), sad woman Susan Wood, who used the cartoon controversy deliberately to present a blatantly blasphemous skit mocking Jesus Christ?

(Not that anyone should be surprised, since television seems to employ the most ignorant, arrogant and insensitive of people. It's the nature of the medium, I suppose - pushy, intrusive and so far up itself that one day it will disappear into its own orifice.)

Did we have riots and burnings and violence and destruction? No, but I sometimes think that if Christians had persistently tried to protect their beliefs and their deities the way Muslims do, then the Western World would be a much nicer place.

And there's something appealing about the thought of a determined radical assault on that citadel of secular shallowness up in Hobson St with all the satellite dishes poking out the roof.

As I say, blasphemy against Christian deities - my Lord Jesus in particular - is so common these days that it passes pretty much unnoticed. How many times a day, for instance, do you hear somebody utter "Jesus Christ!" as an oath?

But we have learned to live with it and take it on the chin no matter how often it happens, because we know that if God depended on us to defend him he would have been out of business long ago and that he is more than capable of looking after himself.

Really, I guess, what we have here is not a religious issue but a clash of civilisations, one living in the 21st century and the other back in the days of witch-hunts and burnings at the stake.

I have no argument with Muslims who protest at what they see as denigration of their Prophet and their faith.

What I do object to is the manner of some of the protests, and I see it as significant that the most violent and sustained of them have come from those living in countries that are to all intents and purposes at war with the West.

It is significant, too, that in Turkey, that predominantly Muslim country dragged into the 20th century by the sheer vision and will of Kamal Ataturk, reaction to this latest Muslims v The Rest stoush has been muted to say the least.

Christianity has put up with blasphemy ever since it began to make its mark on society two millenniums ago. Now that Islam has begun to spread and proselytise, its believers are just going to have to learn to live with it, too.

God is, after all, great, and certainly great enough to survive unharmed the doodlings of a two-bit cartoonist for a tinpot Danish newspaper.