The Missing Link

February 11, 2006

It's About Culture, Not Religion

Leonard Pitts on the cartoon affair:

The argument is not about religion, but culture. Note that American Muslims - surely as offended by the cartoons as Muslims elsewhere - have felt no need to riot. They are writing letters to editors and holding peaceful rallies while their co-religionists are burning embassies down.

No, the argument is about what happens when any culture anywhere is so bereft and so closed that its people have no way of comprehending or even imagining lives and beliefs beyond their own.

Consider the announcement by an Iranian newspaper of a retaliatory contest seeking cartoons that mock the Holocaust. This, as a means of highlighting the West's supposed hypocrisy, its double standard on the question of free expression. A Muslim Web site has already posted a cartoon showing Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler.

All of which is so appallingly stupid, misreads the rest of the world so completely, you don't know where to begin pulling it apart.

Perhaps it is enough to ask: Do they really expect this crude attempt at provocation to make Jews riot in the streets of Tel Aviv or Palm Beach?

Dear God, I think they do. That's the pitiful thing. Both for the aforementioned stupidity and for what it says about radical Islam's isolation, its separation, its ''apartness'' from the entire rest of the world, mainstream Islam emphatically included.

I'm dismayed that a few publishers felt it necessary to give gratuitous offense to 1.1 billion people. Just because you have the right to say a thing doesn't always mean you should.

Still, what's more dismaying is the way some in the Muslim world have chosen to respond. At least 10 people have lost their lives in these riots. All over a series of cartoons.

And you wonder: Are they so far removed from the realities of the world the rest of us occupy that they don't see the damage they're doing their faith, their people, themselves?

Posted by Conor at February 11, 2006 02:10 PM