The Goal Of These Pages {WaPo excuse-making]

Washington Post ^ | 2/5/6 | Fred Hiatt

[SmithL]

Last week the editorial page received hundreds of letters and e-mails suggesting that The Post's opinion pages had crossed a line, not once but twice. The criticism echoed, in a very faint way, a controversy raging through Europe and the Muslim world. Three distinct stories -- but together they offer a chance to say something about how we view the role and responsibility of opinion pages.

The European affair began Sept. 30, when a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Muslims view any picture of Islam's founder as blasphemous, and these were particularly insulting; one showed him with a bomb in his headdress.

Muslim protests simmered through the fall, gaining strength in recent weeks with boycotts of Danish products and demands that Denmark's prime minister apologize. To show solidarity with the Danish paper, newspapers in many European countries last week reprinted the cartoons. Protests in several Muslim countries in turn gained strength, in some cases with violence threatened against Europeans and their embassies.

What to make of this? Muslims (and anyone else) are well within their rights to protest the publication of the cartoons if they are offended. They show a basic misunderstanding, though, when they demand apologies from leaders of Denmark or other European countries. In many Muslim-majority countries (Egypt and Syria, for example), officials do control most of the press and so are accountable for the ugly anti-Semitism that often appears in their newspapers. In Denmark, as here, the government cannot tell newspapers what to print or what not to print. We are free to be offensive.

But that leads to an important distinction: The freedom to offend brings with it a responsibility not to offend gratuitously.

That is the line that we at The Post were said to have crossed last week.

[devolve]

Ribs......

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!