Now I know that everybody and their brother has been touting this brouhaha as another example of The Free Speech Principle Under Siege by Hostile Foreigners Contemptuous of Occidental Secular Society, and without a doubt, there certainly is an element of that present in the current rioting and hell-raisings by angry Muslims/Islamists who no doubt would be quite happy to use warfare to accomplish A Muslim Planet, if it were possible. Granted. Now I don't believe in pussyfooting around about my own opinion, or restricting my personal beliefs and thinking just because some particular members of some religion or other would rather pretend that my opinion on some topic did not exist at all. That being said though, there comes a point where expression is not just expression, but provocation, and whereas I am quite sure that the Occidental idea of a right to free expression and the principle that "names can never hurt me" are ethically correct, I do see provocation as treading beyond the unlegislatable pale of etiquette.
Nevertheless, there's a bit more to this fiasco than the surface issues being debated to death in the press. Hey, I'm a libertarian, a hard core anarcho-capitalist, in fact, and I'm all about the freedom, especially the freedom of thought and speech. The thing is, as Justin Raimondo, of Antiwar.com says, There's Something Rotten In Denmark that just doesn't quite add up. So, you think that it's all about the Free Speech, right, 
fearsclave, sorceror, forthright, et al? I don't think it's as cut and dried as many would have us believe. Adlai Stevenson said, "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." On the other hand, it is not a logical corollary of this observation to say that all members of free societies should go out of their way to be obnoxiously offensive.
