Jeg har ikke tenkt å publisere karikaturene av Muhammed – rett og slett for at jeg synes de var dårlige (men for all del, døm selv, du finner dem blant annet her.) Men siden Vampus til og med kommer ut av sin anonymitet for å markere sin motstand, bør man jo vise sin støtte. Og det er faktisk noen ganske viktige poenger i denne debatten – om ytringsfrihet, om at vi faktisk har en kultur å forsvare i den vestlige verden, en kultur som også kan krenkes – og at Islam ikke er tjent med at debatten om hva som er rett og galt, krenkende eller ikke, skal føres av folk hvis hovedmål er å vise seg helligere enn alle de andre.

Jeg siterer:

"Jeg misliker hva du sier, men vil forsvare til døden din rett til å si det." (Voltaire tillagt Voltaire)

"The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point of having a culture." (Neal Stephenson).

"The unassailable status of the Qu’ran in Islamic education, thought, and society is ultimately Islam’s greatest disadvantage in the modern world. Such unassailability does not debar a society from great artistic achievement or charms of its own: great and marvelous civilizations have flourished without the slightest intellectual freedom. I myself prefer a souk to a supermarket any day, as a more human, if less economically efficient, institution. But until Muslims (or former Muslims, as they would then be) are free in their own countries to denounce the Qu’ran as an inferior hodgepodge of contradictory injunctions, without intellectual unity (whether it is so or not)—until they are free to say with Carlyle that the Qu’ran is “a wearisome confused jumble” with “endless iterations, longwindedness, entanglement”—until they are free to remake and modernize the Qu’ran by creative interpretation, they will have to reconcile themselves to being, if not helots, at least in the rearguard of humanity, as far as power and technical advance are concerned." (Theodore Dalrymple)

Ellers burde det vel være nok med å henvise til Wikipedia.