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February 05, 2006
Danish Cartoon Clash Continues
A team of four reporters wrote a great piece for today's British Observer on the roots of the cartoon clash and how a tiny (circ. 100,000) newspaper triggered global rioting with 12 crude cartoons of Mohammad.
"The initial publication of the cartoons brought no response other than some angry letters. But when in mid-October two of the artists received death threats, the menaces were widely reported and rekindled debate, prompting vicious, anti-Muslim comments on Danish talk shows. Coming soon after a series of new, strict laws relating to marriage and citizenship, enforcing obligatory Danish lessons and clamping down on imams, the row plugged straight into pre-existing tensions. A minor storm was on its way to becoming much bigger."
"...One showed the prophet with a bomb as a head, another with either horns or half a halo growing out of his head, a third showed a ragged line of suicide bombers arriving in heaven to be greeted by an anxious-looking prophet telling them: 'Stop stop, we ran out of virgins!'. Crude in execution and thought, the cartoons offended not merely because they breached the Islamic prohibition of representations of Muhammad, but because they depicted the prophet, seen as a man of peace and justice by Muslims, as a man of terror and violence."
The Observer explains how after the Danish newspaper editor decided to apologize (in a nearly insulting way, if you ask me), the editor of Berlin's Die Welt newspaper decided to republish the cartoons (which also ran in France and some other European papers) partly as a defense of press freedom and partly as a response to what he saw as double standards.
"The Arab world couldn't have it both ways. Anti-semitism is rampant in much of the 'hypocritical' Middle East, the editor wrote, with Jewish rabbis depicted on prime-time Syrian TV as cannibals. In this context, he felt poking fun at Muhammad was fair enough."
But was it fair? Simon Jenkins nails the issue in the British Sunday Times today. "Despite Britons’ robust attitude to religion, no newspaper would let a cartoonist depict Jesus Christ dropping cluster bombs, or lampoon the Holocaust. Pictures of bodies are not carried if they are likely to be seen by family members. Privacy and dignity are respected, even if such restraint is usually unknown to readers. Over every page hovers a censor, even if he is graced with the title of editor.
"To imply that some great issue of censorship is raised by the Danish cartoons is nonsense. They were offensive and inflammatory. The best policy would have been to apologise and shut up. For Danish journalists to demand “Europe-wide solidarity” in the cause of free speech and to deride those who are offended as “fundamentalists . . . who have a problem with the entire western world” comes close to racial provocation. We do not go about punching people in the face to test their commitment to non-violence. To be a European should not involve initiation by religious insult."
Exactly. Exactly. Adding insult to injury, of course, was that tiny matter of the Danish prime minister refusing to see 11 (eleven!) ambassadors from Islamic countries who wanted to discuss the issue with him. Snubbing them might have played well to local voters but making them welcome and actually listening to their concerns at the first opportunity would have been a good way to model the virtues that Westerners supposedly hold dear. It might even have dampened the outrage that led, early this morning, to an attack on the Danish Embassy in Beirut. (The Swedish embassy was also damaged in the fire, and reportedly 18 people were injured.)
It would be nice to think that politicians and newspaper editors are learning something from this. But I'm skeptical.
"Of all the casualties of globalism, religious sensibility is the most hurtful," writes Jenkins. "...It is clearly hard for westerners to comprehend the dismay these gestures cause Muslims. The question is not whether Muslims should or should not 'grow up' or respect freedom of speech. It is whether we truly want to share a world in peace with those who have values and religious beliefs different from our own. The demand by foreign journalists that British newspapers compound their offence shows that moral arrogance is as alive in the editing rooms of northern Europe as in the streets of Falluja. That causing religious offence should be regarded a sign of western machismo is obscene."
It's also stupid. It completely plays into the hands of extremists who find it much easier to convince fellow Muslims that Westerners are unholy pigs who deserve eradication when we ridicule and insult their most holy symbol and then snub 11 representatives of Islamic nations.
Of course, there are extremists on both sides. Here's the response one guy has to a picture of young Danes lighting candles to encourage a dialog between the Danish newspaper and Muslim protestors.
"These misguided souls are unable – or unwilling – to see that with Islamists no dialogue is possible. With Islamists you either accept their outlook or else. We in the West settle our differences through debate and democratic process. They do it through chicanery and brutality."
This doesn't have to be a pissing contest. But extremists on both sides want to make it one. There's no guarantee, though, that it's a contest the Western world can win.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at February 5, 2006 10:56 PM
Comments
It seems to me that the riots directly violate what they attempt to protect. Isn't rioting and killing over an image the most blatant symptom of idolatry? If an image is too sacred to exist... that seems a form of worship, and a violation of the strictures that the upset moslems are attempt to enforce.
Posted by: wench at February 6, 2006 03:01 AM
I wonder ... happen you live 70 years ago, would you be among those insisting on having "dialog" with nazies, appeasing Hitler&Co ?
Posted by: Igor at February 6, 2006 03:04 AM