Imagine that you live in a society that's very tightly focused around a single majority religion, with over 90% of people sharing your religious beliefs. There isn't a separation of church and state; religion and politics are so tightly entwined into the very fabric of your society that even your laws adhere strongly to your religion. Yours isn't some tapestry of atheists, Mormons, Buddhists, a variety of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and others who might interact on a given day. Yours isn't a society that sees freedom of speech as some inviolable entitlement that human dignity demands you be given as a basic right. In your society, the individual and her rights are not given special priority over the group or its needs, and your social order hinges on a respect for collectivism. In your society, political or religious blasphemy (again, not wholly different) is met with far worse than a slap on the wrist, public ridicule, or a few unfriends on Facebook.
Now imagine that the majority religion in question is Christianity, that yours is a theocratic society, and that someone (who lives in a land in which pastors are free to burn the bible without much consequence) makes a film depicting Jesus as a lying, child-molesting murderer that objectified women and was sexually aroused by donkeys.
If you are one of the 2.2 billion people in 232 countries–33% of the entire world's population–you might be more than just offended. You might be incensed. Driven to rage. You've been violated in a deeply personal way, a way even more personal than if you yourself had been the subject of the film's hateful depiction, because you are just a person, but Jesus is part of the very core of your being, and your faith in him affects absolutely every facet of not just your life but also that of almost everyone you know and care about; Jesus is part of your neighborhood, nationhood, livelihood, and even existential likelihood.
Now take yourself out of this imagining, and realize that this is more or less what has happened this week to 1.57 BILLION people–twenty-three percent of the entire world–that believes in Islam. For those who haven't heard: the Prophet Mohammed, who is for Islam what Jesus is for Christianity, was depicted in a movie as a womanizing homosexual child abuser (the lack of immorality of gayness notwithstanding).
The anti-Islamic film sarcastically titled "Innocence of Muslims" was made by an American ex-convict, and although the film itself has been rightfully condemned by even the UN as "hateful", the New York Times reports that Anti-American protests have spread to over a dozen nations:
The violently anti-American rallies that have roiled the Islamic world over a video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad expanded on Friday to more than a dozen countries, with demonstrators storming the American Embassy in Tunisia in a deadly clash and protesters in Sudan’s capital broadening the targets to include Germany and Britain.
Several Americans have already lost their lives, including Chris Stevens,
the first U.S. ambassador to be killed since the 1979; Marines have been
deployed to foreign embassies at great cost to our ailing economy; hard-earned international
diplomatic relationships are facing strain;
other countries' embassies have been besieged; and, perhaps worst of all, whatever progress we've made as a nation in showing Muslim countries that America isn't a nation of bigots, that the worst among us are not
representative of us, our two steps forward might now be set back three by the news stories on the front page of every major newspaper in the world in the aftermath of that film.
In fact, the American behind this film just gave the right-wing Islamist extremists (the few who are hellbent on spreading anti-American sentiment to incite terror) the biggest PR push they could ever have hoped for, absolutely free of charge. The film is so devious and so costly to our to our image that I wish we could say Al Qaeda or some other extremist group was behind it somehow. Sadly, reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. An American made that video, an individual seeking to exercise his inalienable right to express himself, and in a perverted inversion of my introductory paragraph, he doesn't have to shoulder the burden–we, collectively, now do.
So don't tell me freedom is free. It's easy to speak our minds and exercise our cherished First Amendment right when someone else, or everyone else, has to pick up the tab.