Derek Scarlino: While I appreciate satire greatly, and I abhor censorship, there are still such things as nuance, tact and context. That one was attempting to piss off fascists with Qu’rans in one hand and Kalashnikovs in the other is fine with me to the point that it also brews resentment against over four million French citizens who are themselves Muslim. No great esoteric undertaking is needed to understand Muslims. They’re everyone. Part of the whole. Concerned with the exact same matters as you and I are on a daily basis. There is, though, beyond Paris, this divide propagated by media and published works and polemicists, between Islam and The West. It’s funny that this should be the case due to the millennia of considerable, history-shaping interaction between Muslims and The West. A Muslim isn’t a swarthy figure, shrouded in mystery from some barbaric land beyond ours. These are people who have inhabited the crossroads of East and West for longer than that concept has existed. Our medicine, our science, our math, our faith; all rooted in the land where Islam developed, the Near East. In trade, treaty, war and so much else, we have been dealing first-hand with Islam for over a thousand years. And now there’s a cultural conflict? No. Where there is talk of conflict of that sort, there is only voluntary ignorance. More here.