Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is teaching a course on Faith and Globalization at Yale University, has stated that he thinks Yale Press made the right decision to not include the infamous Muhammad cartoons in a book about the cartoons. When asked how he would have approached the matter, he replied:
It’s certainly an example – I mean, the whole fury is an example of how it’s important to get a better and easier way of having a dialogue about things of religious sensitivity for sure. But I mean, I was heavily involved at this, I was Prime Minister at the time all this broke, and obviously it was condemned very strongly, the violence that surrounded it, but I really think from Yale’s perspective it made the right decision. Because this is not a piece of original research that Yale has suppressed. That would obviously be a completely different issue. The question is, does it reignite a controversy that has already been there or not. I think it was an entirely responsible and sensible thing that they did.
In Muhammad cartoon related news, The Copenhagen Post reports that Jakob Scharf, the director of Denmark’s domestic intelligence agency PET, says that Al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks are keeping the the cartoon controversy alive for strategic reasons. He says,
It resonates with people in many Muslim countries. The cartoon controversy isnâ??t going away and that means the increased awareness of Denmark isnâ??t going to subside for many years to come.