At a time when many leaders and presidents of Arab and Muslim States make great efforts to eradicate terrorism and terrorist ideology on the intellectual, cultural, security and military levels, we find that there are voices in the West fueling religious and international conflicts.
When some people in Denmark call for introducing cartoons of the Prophet (peace be upon him) to the education curriculum, supposedly to study the relationship between the religious, social and political issues, they are trying to fuel the fire of religious strife that will be hard to control in the future in case Western countries adopt this strange decision.
The matter is not confined to calls by some teachers’ unions. Some radical right-wing politicians from the People’s Party called on to make the cartoons subject compulsory.
Even least stringent conservative parties in Switzerland believe that the crisis related to the attack on Charlie Hebdo has become part of the history of the country and should be studied. This is somewhat true from a historical perspective, but addressing this issue should be done carefully in order not to institutionalize offending religious symbols for the coming generations and fuel religious and international conflicts which would be a catastrophic scenario for the present interactions.
The problem is that some political parties use this matter to achieve their own political objectives. Danish People Party, an anti-immigrant party, supported the calls of compulsory cartoons education. The Berlingske daily reported the party’s spokesman Alex Orindtsn saying, “if you live in Denmark, you should accept seeing the cartoons.”
Trying to institutionalizing offending religions symbols and involving religion in politics is irrational. We always call for separating political practices and religion in order to protect communities from this harmful confusion that only leads to violence and bloodshed.
A category of Western societies cannot feed the atmosphere of hatred and hostility while the Arab and Muslim communities are seeking to extricate themselves and save their children’s future from the currents of violence and terrorism. We can only refute the arguments and allegations of this category if Western societies accept tolerance and acceptance of others and reject the culture of insulting any religious symbols and respect them.
This also requires a legislative and institutional treatment by the United Nations. The UN should consider binding decisions to ban insulting religions and their symbols and to criminalize any practices relating to that, to disassociate the erroneous relationship between offending religious symbols and freedom of expression.
A few weeks ago, the US President Barack Obama spoke about the need for Muslims to reject terrorism and violence and reject terror groups; however, the West too should reject offending religions and religious symbols under the pretext of protecting freedom of expression. Such practices introduce hatred through which terror groups infiltrate the minds of young people that are protective of Islam.
The culture of tolerance and acceptance cannot be confined to the Arab and Muslim world. Everyone pays the price of violence and terrorism. The world countries must be involved in efforts to promote this culture.
