I remember in elementary school I had a friend -- let's call him Hari. Kids tend to pick on anyone with a weakness and Hari was very effeminate. So when his dad was accused of corruption in the press, he became the class victim. Poor kid. None of it was his fault but we made his life hell anyway, taunting him every chance we got.

Looking back, I am deeply ashamed of what we did but I suppose we were just kids and didn't realize how cruel it was. But what is the excuse when we adults do exactly the same thing to each other?

One of the most common reasons for persecuting other people is, of course, that perennial favorite, religion. Take Islam-baiting, for example, a favorite sport of our post-Sept. 11 world. The most recent incident to draw protests and demonstrations in Indonesia is related to cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. What?! Again?! After all the protests worldwide, has neither side learned anything?

The cartoons were republished purportedly as a defiant answer to murder threats against Kurt Westergaard, one of their creators. That's helpful. Fighting fire with fire guarantees escalation.

Yes, some Muslims violently overreact to depictions of their Prophet, as they did with the cartoons and with Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and Taslima Nasreen's writings. But they aren't the only ones who can overdo it when they feel their religion is threatened. Christians sometimes do too, as demonstrated by reactions to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code a few years back, or Hindu extremists who burned Christian missionaries to death in India.

On one level this is all very puzzling. Adherents of a religion who are serious and secure about their faith shouldn't feel threatened so easily, should they? After all, spiritual diversity has always been a fact of life almost everywhere, and cartoons, books, films or newspaper columns won't change that. Or are these conflicts really about something else rather than religious doctrine? Is it more like what happened in my old schoolyard? The "other" is treated with fear and suspicion, and attacked whenever possible.

And what about "freedom of expression"? Critics of religion brandish it as a weapon to defend the "religion" of secularism (and atheism), with its attendant rationalism. But how are rights to self-expression to be balanced with rights to religious freedom? Isn't the answer that neither right can ever extend to authorize violence -- in word or deed?

Surely there is a difference between defending your right to freedom of expression and deliberately provoking people in the way we kids provoked Hari, just because they are different or don't agree with us. And it's self-defeating, because it breeds precisely what "liberals" or "progressives" say they are against -- violence and irrationality.

Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker, is a case in point. He made the film Submission, about what he perceived as being the oppression of women in Islam. It portrayed a woman wearing a see-through chador, her naked body painted with verses from the Koran; images some claim were plagiarized from video artist Shirin Neshat.

In any case, the film drew both praise and outrage, but as a serious criticism of Islam, it was a dud. A movie critic from the Village Voice said, "It's depressing to think that this morsel of glib effrontery could pass as a serious critique of conservative Islam," while another referred to the stories told in this film as "... simplistic, even caricatures".

Tragically, van Gogh was subsequently murdered by a Dutch Muslim, while Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalia-born Dutch writer and politician who wrote the script, received death threats. These responses are, of course, profoundly wrong, even evil. But they were surely not all that surprising.

Like Taslima Nasreen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, through her writing (Caged Virgin, Infidel), talks of and extols an ideology of victimization -- and is rewarded for it, even being named by Time magazine as being one of the 100 most influential people on the planet.

As a Muslim woman myself, I find this all rather tiresome and in my own personal experience, misleading. Yes, Nasreen and Hirsi Ali's experience may be shared by many women in their respective countries, but it is not the experience of all Muslim women in the world, and is shared by few here in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim society.

We are all living in glass houses and throwing stones at each other with wild abandon, desperate to destroy the other side, even if it means our own home becomes a ruin. And if someone steps in to suggest giving the stones a rest, then -- yippee! -- they become the new target.

Take Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, who recently modestly proposed that there might be a place for some recognition of very limited aspects of Islamic law in the English legal system (in fact, there already is). He is now facing a barrage of abuse and demands that he resign.

Yes, children have their innocence to excuse them when they are cruel and vicious to each other. As adults we no longer have that innocence, so we have no excuse. Surely it is time to stop using religion to justify provoking, reacting to and always, always, blaming the other. Hari would agree.

The writer is the author of Sex, Power and Nation. She can be contacted at jsuryakusuma@gmail.com.

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