The news story that isn't

It's amazing -- Muslims all over the world are engaging in blood and fire riots because a Danish paper had the temerity to print some cartoons. The cartoons aren't news, of course, but the response should be. Except the response isn't. I went to today's San Francisco Chronicle on line and found nothing. I went first to the "front page" on line. No stories about the rioting. Okay, that's the Sunday front page, which is fixed fairly fair in advance. Let's see what the News Stories page has to offer at 1:45 on a a Sunday afternoon. Nothing in the way of news. The only mention of this profound culture clash is a copy of a New York Times opinion piece that said, "well, they may be fundamentalists, but it's really Denmark's fault because they haven't been treating their immigrants well." No, I'm not kidding:

But this did not take place in a political vacuum. Hostile feelings have been growing between Denmark's immigrants and a government supported by the right-wing Danish People's Party, which has pushed anti-immigrant policies. And stereotyping in cartoons has a notorious history in Europe, where anti-Semitic caricatures fed the Holocaust, just as they feed anti-Israeli propaganda in the Middle East today. In the current climate, some experts on mass communications suggest, the exercise was no more benign than commissioning caricatures of African Americans would have been during the 1960s civil rights struggle. Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School in New York City, put it this way: "He knew what he was doing."

There you have it, that beastly, belittling multiculturalism, which subliminally says that it's always the West's fault, because the superior Westerners should know that the little brown people are uncontrolled, amoral, violent animals, and should be sure not to bait them. If this isn't racist, I don't know what is. Color me unracist, but I actually believe that Muslims have the same capacity we do for humanity, intelligence, and self-restraint, and I will not give them a free pass to behave in an uncivilized way. Talking to Technorati: Media, Mainstream media, Cartoon riots, Cartoons, Islam, Censorship, Multiculturalism