About as much to do with Islam as football hooligans are to do with the game, I suspect

It’s been a while since my last post, and in that time the cartoon situation which I wrote about on 4 Feb 2006 (‘Sense and Censorship’) has escalated completely out of control – there have been riots, people killed, and embassies burned to the ground. And all because some people who claim to be followers of Islam are saying that they’re offended by the suggestion that there may be a connection between their professed religion and violence.

Let me just run that by you again in case the irony didn’t knock you to the floor: people are protesting against the alleged connection between their beliefs and violence, by behaving in a violent fashion.

And as if that wasn’t enough of a paradox, there’s a picture on page 6 of the current issue of Private Eye (cover dated 17 Feb – 2 Mar) of some protestors holding a placard reading “FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION GO TO HELL!!”

And they say we live in a ‘post-ironic’ age.