I arrived in London around 2am Friday and will be here, staying in Soho, for a week. I woke up late and was thinking about breakfast when I turned on the TV and saw the BBC reporting on the third week of protests in response to anti-islamic cartoons in Trafalgar Square, and I decided to go.
I'm an absolutist when it comes to freedom of speech, but the issue here is tricky. As Robert Wright points out, our free press engages in self-censorship all the time. And the speakers (the English speaking ones, anyway) made it clear that this whole cartoon flap was being viewed/positioned as one in a long line of insults that includes the Crusades, Srebrenica, and Abu Grahib. I didn't hear a mention of Palestine, but there was a direct invocation of the Holocaust, namely that Western World was marching in the direction of exterminating muslims with the same efficiency.
People, these are unsettling times.
Some pictures are here.
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