Profoundly Concerned?

I am starting to feel a sense of impending doom. This conflict between Muslims and the press over these cartoons is spiralling out of control. Yes, the paper was wrong to produce the cartoons, but they did apologise. It was out of order for various papers to reproduce the images, it was intentionally provocative.

But the violent reaction by Muslim communities all over the world is so over the top. I'm not clear on what they expect to get out of it, the paper has already apologised. And really, people dressing up as suicide bombers and waving banners that imply massive acts of violence on the scale of a holocaust doesn't exactly help to demonstrate the peacefull, loving side of Islam - a side that is prominent and important to most Muslims.

I know that there are moderate Muslims shaking their heads in dismay at the acts of some, but it certainly appears from the size and scale of the reaction that the majority of Muslims have reacted incredibly strongly.

I can appreciate the hurt and anger, but the reaction does seem extreme. I have a colleague who is Norwegian, she went home for the week last week and encountered people whose lives had been threatened but let go because they were Norwegian, not Danish, "If you'd been Danish we'd have killed you" was the reported threat. Just ordinary people, they had done nothing wrong. That scared me.

Now Condoleezza Rice is stirring things up by accusing Iranian and Syrian authorities of inciting violence. I can see this escalating further. In fact, there may be no going back now. The tennuous relations between the Muslim community and much of the rich world I feel may have been permanently shattered by overreactions on all sides.

I can't help but feel profoundly concerned about the stability of the world. How do we move on from this now?