BAHRAIN has serious problems…and now they want to take away my KDD guava juice! Can someone tell me what Kuwait Danish Diary (KDD), Bahrain Danish Dairy, Lurpak and all those other goodies have to do with one newspaper in Denmark publishing a few un-Islamic cartoons?

Boycotts can be a legitimate form of protest if they target the right people. But usually they're impractical or just plain absurd. Didn't the world laugh when the French Fries were turned into Freedom Fries in the US Congressional cafeteria, because of France's stance against the last Iraq war?

Many in the Middle East are now boycotting Danish goods, giving little thought to how it will hurt Arab businesses and jobs. How long will this one go on for, I wonder ? Longer than the Great American Products Boycott of 2002, which lasted, oh, about six months?

Publishing the cartoons was a stupid, irresponsible and deliberately offensive move by the newspaper, which Danes around the world are paying the price for….but it was not against freedom of speech. Open debate means that occasionally people are going to get offended. Constantly having to worry about hurting others' feelings effectively silences free thought. People have a right to express their views, no matter how extreme they may be. Many Islamists have not shied away from showing their complete contempt of other beliefs all over the media. They like to burn things, for example, including most recently, the Danish flag, which contains a white cross (a symbol of Christianity!).

These cartoons, or any other form of critique, cannot be classified as hate crimes or incitement in themselves. They are not calling on anyone to take up arms to hurt anyone, unlike many of those protesting against them. The cartoons may have been in poor taste, but violence, or even just the threat of it, is where freedom of speech stops.

The caricatures that have caused so much outrage across the Muslim World were designed to depict the Middle East as being full of violent, backward and intolerant extremists; the reaction it provoked has unfortunately proven the point. The cartoonists, who have now gone into hiding to avoid revenge attacks, have been turned into martyrs for freedom of speech. The outcry has been a public relations disaster, giving the cartoons more publicity than any cartoon deserves. British author Salman Rushdie would probably would have been a footnote in literary history if not for a 1989 fatwa, which turned him into one of the best-known personalities of the last century. At least the death threats didn't come from an official source this time, but the behaviour of so many only goes to show that this is still a developing region, despite all the changes that have taken place.

Satire is healthy because it promotes change, but the Middle East seems to be too politically immature to understand why it is protected in advanced societies. If the current debate pressures the region into reacting less extremely to this sort of thing in the future, then the cartoonists may have actually done us a great favour in the long run. But somehow the pessimist in me doubts it.

Perhaps it's more effective in this part of the world to bring about change little by little, so that people don't even notice it's happening, rather than to shock the system. We can only be a mature civil society on the day we can publish anything without fear of reprisal. Societies that can't take criticism stagnate.

Now excuse me while I go sip on some KDD guava juice…

Barefoot Bahraini MP Mohammed Khalid, barefoot, burns a Danish flag

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