Fears regarding troops in Afghanistan arose a few months ago after a Dutch film criticizing Islam would be aired. Dutch MP Geert Wilders, the maker of the film, says that it will show how the Koran is “an inspiration for intolerance, murder and terror.”

The issue of freedom of expression has been highlighted over and over again. The ongoing saga of “Jyllands-Posten”, the Danish newspaper, of printing the so called “joke” cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohamed in offensive way to many Muslims, has just recently started to settle down, somewhat. This issue has made people start to think again about just how free should the press be, or anyone in expressing their opinion.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders felt that the reaction displayed in the Arab world towards the publishing of the cartoons showed a “lack of understanding” of press freedom as “an essential accomplishment of democracy.” It would be interesting to see if they also defined Wilders comments about Islam being a “sick ideology” as freedom of opinion and essential to democracy.

Freedom to express yourself or the right to do so seems to never apply equally around the world. Let’s take France for example, a country that has the privilege of criticizing the government and according to the 2006 press freedom index of Reporters Without Borders rates France at place 35 of 168 countries. France was one of the countries that reprinted the Muslim Cartoons, it may have been newsworthy to do so, it may have not, but for a country that has laws against Holocaust denial, does this not seem somewhat hypocritical?

Perhaps Islam has become nothing more than public relations tool for people when in need of some publicity. Or is it really that there are people who bear such great resentment for people’s religious beliefs? Or is it just that Muslims can’t take a joke?
Or maybe they just can’t face up to the fact that it was a very bad joke with very bad taste to a large part of the World’s Community. With Syria and Saudi Arabia recalling its ambassadors, Libya closing its embassy from Denmark, and many people across the Middle-East not buying Danish food products, it’s obvious that not too many people saw the funny side of the cartoons.

Testing times are coming for both Muslims and freedom of expression, but death and bomb threats are doing no service to all Muslims and are only enforcing Wilders’ comments about there not being such a thing as moderate Islam. Regardless of the repercussions of broadcasting this film between European and Arab countries, If Muslims can form some sort of successful and peaceful means of protest, this will do a great favor in changing the bad image that currently surrounds Islam around the world.