The biggest hit on Broadway for the last few years has been The Book of Mormon, a satirical musical comedy that mocks the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But rather than venting outrage, organizing protests, or seeking to shut down the play in New York or on its national tour, Mormons have commendably turned the other cheek. Unfortunately, many Muslims around the world are not as easygoing or wise. As the terror attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo reminds us today, Islamists are determined to enforce a ban on offenses to their sensibilities. Those who draw mocking cartoons about Islam’s prophet or leaders of terror groups understand that they are taking their lives into their hands. There is a reason that the same team that produced the South Park television series chose the Mormons as the butt of their Broadway joke rather than Muslims. But while that choice was understandable, the question we need to be asking ourselves today is whether the West is prepared to go on tolerating the offense to our values of free speech that lies behind the tragedy in Paris.
All faiths and creeds are entitled to a degree of respect. Yet the conundrum at the heart of this issue is the belief on the part of Westerners that anyone may question or insult their faiths but that many Muslims seem to take it as a given that they should be exempt from such treatment. While Muslim nations may unfortunately be prepared to suppress criticism or mockery of Islam in their own societies, the issue in the last decade has increasingly been one of whether they are entitled or will be allowed to extend that ban to the West.
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