Everyone will have noticed that there is a lot going on right now in the middle-east concerning amateur films said to insult the prophet mohammed. I haven’t seen them in full, and I haven’t looked them up, but I think I inadvertently saw an ad for one on YouTube a couple of days ago. They look very amateur and very crude: the work of some guys pratting about with cameras and computers. Had they been on any other subject they would have been ignored like all the other crap you find online.

I was thinking about that last night. It struck me that, had they been about jesus, a few people may have called for their banning but there wouldn’t have been riots or the kind of severe disturbances we are currently seeing in the middle east. Look at what happened when Monty Python’s Life of Brian came out. That film was much more mainstream, but as far as I can see lampooned jesus no less than this current film lampoon Mohammed. But whereas it appears that our western culture can accept films like Brian, even to the extent that we play its main musical number at the closing ceremony of our Olympics, the lampooning of Mohammed is not acceptable to muslims. Of course the cultural differences are vast, and I’m not trying to gloss over them, but I do think it is interesting to compare the two instances. Two very different cultures giving rise to two very different cultural reactions to two similar stimuli.

In a way, a similar thing can be seen when comparing the reactions to salman Rushdie in the east and Richard Dawkins in the west: dawkins may be hated by the religious right in America, but no leaders have called for his assassination. You can of course argue that the difference is Dawkins is writing from within whereas Rushdie was writing from a position outside the religion he was criticising, but when you look at the cases objectively, they are similar, so comparing the reactions is very interesting. It also occurs to me that, if we ‘liberals’ are going to defend people like dawkins and rushdie for writing as they do, we have no right to attack videos like those lampooning Mohammed, and should we not be aghast at the violence of the protests against them in the middle east?