The Missing Link: First They Came for the Cartoonists

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February 02, 2006

First They Came for the Cartoonists

The world's most important story today is the ongoing fallout from a Danish newspaper's decision to publish 12 political cartoons depicting Mohammed. (If you're unfamiliar with the story catch up here and here.)

The controversy, ongoing since the September publication of the cartoons, has finally begun to attract the attention it deserves in the American press--no doubt because events have progressed from threats against free speech we ought not have ignored into actions that we cannot ignore.

The Associated Press reports:

Outrage over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad escalated in the Arab and Islamic world Thursday, with Palestinian gunmen briefly kidnapping a German citizen and protesters in Pakistan chanting "death to France" and "death to Denmark."

Palestinian militants surrounded European Union headquarters in Gaza, and gunmen burst into several hotels and apartments in the West Bank in search of foreigners to take hostage.

In Iraq, Islamic leaders urged worshippers to stage demonstrations from Baghdad to the southern city of Basra following weekly prayer services Friday.

Afghanistan and Indonesia condemned the drawings, and Iran summoned the Austrian ambassador, whose country holds the EU presidency.

Amid these factual news accounts, in which it is credulously reported that cartoons published in September have triggered all this uproar and violence, it is time someone stated the obvious: the behavior we are witnessing isn't just utterly unjustifiable but absolutely absurd! Radical Muslims are ostensibly objecting to a cartoon that cast Islam as inclined to radical terrorism by sending radicals to terrorize Westerners... who incidentally had nothing to do with the publication of the cartoons!

This paragraph from the Associated Press story is particularly noteworthy:

The cartoons were first published in September in a Danish newspaper, touching off anger among Muslims who knew about it. The issue reignited last week after Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark.(emphasis added)

Yes, that's right: Saudi nationals crash airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing thousands of people; the United States doesn't recall its ambassador, and the Saudi government vocally claims that it is unfair to blame them for the actions of its citizens, despite government funding for radical Wahabbi religious schools and terror netowrks; but when a Danish newspaper publishes 12 cartoons that offend Muslims the Saudis feel justified recalling their ambassador from Denmark!

It's hard to imagine that amid all this madness some Western leaders fail to appreciate that the mere fact that someone claims offense neither obligates the offending party to apologize nor justifies the subsequent actions of the offended.

The AP frames this dynamic quite nicely in the exchange between two European officials:

Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said EU leaders have a responsibility to "clearly condemn" insults to any religion. But French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said he preferred "an excess of caricature to an excess of censorship."

Disappointingly, former President Bill Clinton has seemingly weighed in on the wrong side.

"So now what are we going to do? ... Replace the anti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice?" he said at an economic conference in the Qatari capital of Doha.

"In Europe, most of the struggles we've had in the past 50 years have been to fight prejudices against Jews, to fight against anti-Semitism," he said.

Clinton described as "appalling" the 12 cartoons published in a Danish newspaper in September depicting Prophet Mohammed and causing uproar in the Muslim world.

Surely Clinton is right that we shoudn't stereotype Muslims. Nor should we engage in anti-Islamic prejudice. What a strange focus to choose for his comments, though.

As Kathleen Parker remarked in a Townhall column today:

Denmark is a cautionary tale for those who doubt the insidious and serious nature of our enemies and illustrates the deep schism between believers in democratic ideals and many of those we hope to convert. In the relaxed parlance of our uniquely Western attitude toward irreverence, they don't get it.

Until Muslim nations and peoples do get the idea that free expression means freedom to offend as well as the necessary correlative - to be offended - we have a problem. And people like former President Bill Clinton, who essentially sided with jihadists with his recent comments on the cartoon controversy, have done much to exacerbate it.

Is it possible that Clinton doesn't get it either?

It's going too far to say that Clinton sided with the jihadists: our former president surely doesn't think the current violence justified. But he doesn't seem to grasp that this is a watershed moment for free speech, and his analogy--comparing Nazi-era anti-Semitism to modern day anti-Muslim sentiment--seems bizarre considering that the day's headlines are about Islamic radicals threatening Westerners with death, not vice-versa.

It is also hard to believe that Bill Clinton would condemn comparable political cartoons had they been directed at Christianity instead of Islam. This isn't due to prejudice against Christianity on his part; rather it is a function of how those offended by the Danish cartoons have responded. Clinton ought to heed Glenn Reynold's warning:

The lesson is that if you want your religion not to be mocked, it helps to have a reputation for senseless violence. Is this the incentive structure we want?

Meanwhile political cartoonist Doug Marlette offers the best response to this controversy I've yet read:

The genius of Western democracy is that there should be no 'special' rights or privileges for any group or class of people. All are created equal and are treated equally under the law. Law is insensitive that way. And so is intellectual inquiry. And so is good satire.

Every American reading about this story knows deep down that it is absurd and inexcusable to respond to a political cartoon by issuing death threats, threatening kidnappings, expelling foreigners, recalling diplomatic delegations, threatening boycotts and all the rest of this nonsense.

If fringe groups of Western citizens or a Western governments ever
displayed such behavior they'd likely be condemned, and they certainly wouldn't garner any support from mainstream leaders or pundits.

To the extent that we treat Muslims and Islamic nations differently we are in effect saying that while we expect certain standards of behavior among people like us, we're willing to tolerate lesser behavior from lesser people like you.

Instead we ought to recognize that the radicals issuing death threats and the governments posturing as victims don't speak for all Muslims, and to the extent that they are speaking earnestly they are making demands so absurd that the preservation of our civilization demands that we reject them outright.

We are all equal under the law and we all possess certain inalienable rights. Freedom of expression is mong them. The right to not be offended is not.

Posted by Conor at February 2, 2006 03:25 PM

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