Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:20:32 -0800 (PST) From: Gilbert Lawrence <[email protected]>
The point of my post, was the Indian newspaper's "witty and pointed message" of the cartoon, (no pun intended) regarding the response of the Australian police, was taken as an affront by the Australian cabinet minister. No such luck when cartoons in the Western media distort and / or offend the ethnic or religious sensitivities of other groups / nationalities.? If one believes in "freedom of the press", the minister should have stayed out of the reporting of a free-press. I guess we know when and where "the shoe bites". Mario responds: This is a gross misrepresentation of the situation and the initial post as well. There was a double standard being used, but it was not by the Australians. To begin with, representing the Australian police as racists of the worst kind by using a Ku Klux Klan cartoon is hardly "witty and pointed" when there is no evidence that the attacks were based on race as we can see from the puerile explanation of the Mail Today editor. The cartoon was deliberately meant to offend and provoke the Australian Police who had already increased their efforts to prevent these attacks and were thus not ignoring them. Quote: "People in India perceive these attacks as racist, because their children are being attacked and killed. So it's good if Australia is getting agitated. The more agitated they get, the harder they will work to improve the situation," he told the BBC. Unquote. Just because their children are being attacked how does this make the attacks "racist"? As Gabriel has shown, some were clearly not. Secondly, none of the officials in Australia who protested the deliberate and grossly offensive cartoon said the paper had no right to print it, i.e. did not use their official positions to impede freedom of speech in India. This is precisely why mentioning the Danish cartoons in the original post was in poor taste because in that case the Danish cartoonist WAS using his freedom of speech, whereas the reaction was mass rioting and arson across several Muslim countries that took the lives of over a hundred rioters in police firings to quell the riots. This is hardly comparable to the reactions in Australia, nor were the reactions by Muslim radicals an expression of free speech. In fact, four years after the cartoons were first published there was yet anothet attempt on the cartoonists life just a few days ago.
