With violent protests across the world, you would think that Denmark must have bombed a mosque or set an imam on fire. But, no, a newspaper in Denmark merely printed a set of caricatures of Muhammad. In response, “Death to Denmark” became yet another battle cry for Islamic extremists. One must wonder whatever happened to “Thou shall not kill.” While Islamic tradition prohibits direct pictorial depictions of Muhammad, declaring it a heinous crime worthy of holy war borders in ridiculous.

One Iranian newspaper, the Hamshahri, said that it would host a contest for Holocaust cartoons to test the West’s standards of freedom of expression. Perhaps, as a gesture of reconciliation and unity between our two great cultures, we should adopt their standards of freedom of expression in this instance. For every cartoon claiming that the Jews faked the Holocaust, we will gather in the streets of our capital cities and torch half a dozen embassies. This notion is absurd; no matter how controversial a viewpoint may be, the holder of that opinion has the right in our culture to publish it. Ridicule or peaceful protests are acceptable, civilized responses to an insulting opinion. Committing arson and murder is not.

The Danish newspaper that published the cartoons was perfectly within its right to do so. The cartoons are an expression of political opinion; the freedom if expression is one of Western society’s most cherished liberties. Whether or not a group of people is offended, even if the group is one of the most influential religions on Earth, does not matter. An ayatollah can certainly try to tell a Danish newspaper what it can or cannot publish; it is up to the publication whether or not it wishes to give up its freedom of the press to satisfy an extremist denouncing them from a continent away.

The caricatures of Muhammad, however offensive and inappropriate they might be, do not warrant the extreme response. When a miniscule minority of Christians in the United States protest violently and burn abortion clinics, the vast majority of Americans rightly brand them as extremists and terrorists. The minority of Muslims conducting these violent protests and embassy burnings are similar extremists. If the goal of the cartoonist was to provoke an unreasonable response from Muslim extremists to cause world opinion to turn against the Muslims, the cartoonist certainly succeeded.