Official Israel was obligated to vigorously condemn the blasphemous publications against Islam and its founder, the Prophet Muhammad. Not because history has forgiven him for defrauding the Jews in the Arabian Peninsula at the start of the seventh century and violating a deal with them (the Quraish agreement), but because Israel has a moral and practical interest in denouncing the slander of any religion, both on behalf of its Jewish majority and as a representative of the Muslim sector of its Arab minority. The "Innocence of Muslims" film stoked flames that have always been simmering. The nude cartoons of Muhammad in a weekly French satirical magazine have thwarted the efforts of good-willed people to put those flames out. No religion has a sense of humor and no believer would accept these cartoons with a smile. Sometimes it seems as if those who produce such films or publish such cartoons are like people who yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, causing chaos and endangering lives. But the Islamic response has been appalling. All in all, this was a Coptic director who apparently wanted to express his bitterness about the fate of his co-religionists in Egypt, which is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, and then sought to remain anonymous, go underground in the U.S. and lie that he was Israeli. And it was a cartoonist in France who was tired of the spread of the Arab and Islamic trends in his country. How is it that agitators and arsonists, as well as inciters to murder like Iran's leaders and Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah, can impose their terror on the French throughout the world in such a way that causes the French government to close embassies and not trust local governments to protect its diplomats? Most importantly, how is it that in the age of international media, Arabs cannot be found who understand that Western governments can condemn and perhaps even investigate slanderers of religion, but are limited in their power to prevent such acts due to a commitment to free speech- Hassan Nasrallah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, along with their comrades, know very well that governments did not initiate the defamation of Muhammad, and even the attempt to argue that "Zionists" were behind the film failed. Yet the masses in the Middle East have not begun to internalize the limitations of power that characterize democracy. This does not justify, God forbid, the offensive slandering of Muhammad, but it indicates the lack of any chance for a bridge to be built between the wooing West and Islamic countries. In the meantime, the Islamic response has arrived, and it did not touch churches or the Christian citizens of France, but rather a kosher Jewish supermarket in northern Paris. The situation for French Jews worsens from incident to incident and the aggressiveness of Muslim extremists is growing. There is a clear and natural expectation that the French police will thwart the harassment of French Jews. Perhaps the incident is a sign that French Jews should organize in self-defense. And the Jews of the Sarcelles neighborhood of northern Paris should know that Israel is home.