The Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper’s cartoon of Muhammed that resulted in a terrorist attack on the cartoonists in their Paris office reminds me of the expression pertinent to a democracy: “For every freedom there is a certain responsibility.”

Should laws be made to prohibit cartoons that are offensive to a particular religion or culture? No. Should editors, such as those at Charlie Hebdo, take the responsibility to decide which cartoons are acceptable or not? Yes. But then, how can they make an unbiased judgment? The answer is that they must have adequate knowledge, understanding and respect for the beliefs and values of the culture represented by the cartoons in question. Such cartoons already had outraged some Muslims;, the editors needed to find out why such rage.

Anger among dispossessed people toward the West, represented by Europe and the United States is understandable. Recently, Chris Hedges, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and for two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, wrote in the magazine TruthDig, “We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism has spawned the evil of terrorism.”

In support of his statement, I offer three examples:

• In 1951 the British who had been drilling in Iran for oil and refining it there, together with the United States, supported a coup to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadeq because he nationalized the oil companies. We then helped to put Reza Shah Pahlavi in power. In 1979, Pahlavi was overthrown, in part because of his attempt to secularize Iran and because his corrupt leadership brought his family and his ruling elite great wealth. His successor was the anti-West, Muslim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini.

• The United States repeated a similar course of action in Iraq in its desire for securing oil in the name of deposing Saddam Hussein. Later we learned we had falsely claimed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

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• We focus our concern and attention on Middle Eastern Islamic terrorists but pay little attention to Boko Haram. This fundamentalist Muslim organization in Nigeria murders thousands of people, kidnaps girls and destroys massive amounts of property. The death toll of 17 in France at the hands of terrorists, however, brought much greater outrage at home.

Hedges concludes his essay: “As the resources of the world diminish, the message we send to the unfortunate of the Earth is stark and unequivocal: We have everything and if you try to take anything from us, we will kill you. The message the disposed send us back is also stark and unequivocal. It was delivered in Paris.”

Since greed, frustration and anger breed violence, and responding to violence with violence triggers more violence, how can we learn to take responsibility to reduce this vicious trend?

The answer lies in our schools. We teach our young people to be held accountable to those in power, who in return are accountable to their superiors. Accountability is the opposite of responsibility.

Our primary focus must be to empower our children and emerging adults to learn to make thoughtful, wise and compassionate decisions based on understanding, acceptance and respect toward all people, at home and abroad, for their cultures, beliefs and values. Practitioners of the motto “For every freedom there is a certain responsibility” will lead more fulfilling lives and foster a more secure and harmonious America, and spread that security throughout the world.

David O. Solmitz is a retired social studies teacher, 30 years of which were at Madison High School. Email at dsolmitz@gmail.com.


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