Robert Wright in the New York Times:
The American left and right don’t agree on much, but weeks of demonstrations and embassy burnings have pushed them toward convergence on one point: there is, if not a clash of civilizations, at least a very big gap between the “Western world” and the “Muslim world.” When you get beyond this consensus — the cultural chasm consensus — and ask what to do about the problem, there is less agreement. After all, chasms are hard to bridge.
Fortunately, this chasm’s size is being exaggerated. The Muslim uproar over those Danish cartoons isn’t as alien to American culture as we like to think. Once you see this, a benign and quintessentially American response comes into view.
Even many Americans who condemn the cartoon’s publication accept the premise that the now-famous Danish newspaper editor set out to demonstrate: in the West we don’t generally let interest groups intimidate us into what he called “self-censorship.”
What nonsense. Editors at mainstream American media outlets delete lots of words, sentences and images to avoid offending interest groups, especially ethnic and religious ones.
More here. [Thanks to Syed T. Raza.]