Once again, the Muslim Middle East shows us how glaringly different their society is from ours. Our rights are granted to us by nature and by nature’s God, guaranteed by our Constitution and protected by our government and our way of life. That the leaders of terrorist organizations and their state supporters don’t understand our democracy is evident in their shrieking demand that President Obama arrest the producers of the film “Innocence of Muslims.” They are not liable to arrest under our laws. On the contrary, our laws protect freedom of expression, however abhorrent we find their opinions to be.
Nor do we legislate sanctity. We pride ourselves on the multitude of religions and religious opinions within our borders and our right to disagree with any or all of them publicly. We insult each other’s religions at our peril — the peril of ostracism, not the peril of arrest, torture and execution, as it is done in Islamic nations.
The violence of the Muslim Middle Eastern response to a film and some cartoons shows an unthinking fanaticism that has no place in American life. Let what we see in Islamic nations be a lesson to us that we must guard our constitutional freedoms vigilantly.
Joel Littauer
Vancouver
