The Missing Link

February 05, 2006

The Soft Bigotry of Acting as Though It's Understandable That Islamic Radicals Want to Kill Danes

(Welcome Real Clear Politics readers. Updates on the Danish cartoon affair can be found on the main page--just keep scrolling.)

In an editorial about the Danish cartoon affair the Boston Globe asserts the following:

Just as the demand from Muslim countries for European governments to punish papers that printed the cartoons shows a misunderstanding of free societies, publishing the cartoons reflects an obtuse refusal to accept the profound meaning for a billion Muslims of Islam's prohibition against any pictorial representation of the prophet. Depicting Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb with a sputtering fuse is no less hurtful to most Muslims than Nazi caricatures of Jews or Klu Klux Klan caricatures of blacks are to those victims of intolerance. That is why the Danish cartoons will not be reproduced on these pages.(emphasis added)

Nazi caricatures of Jews and Klu Klux Klan caricatures of blacks both asserted the inherent inferiority of their targets due to their race. Those caricatures also served a uniquely insidious function: helping along efforts to murder Jews and blacks.

In contrast, the Danish cartoons mostly just depicted Mohammed. Even the most offensive cartoon, which suggested a link between Mohammed and terrorism, neither asserted the inferiority of all Muslims nor abetted an effort to hurt Muslims.

I'm unsure how the Boston Globe editorial board gauged the relative emotional hurt felt by WWII era Jews, Jim Crow era blacks and modern day Muslims. It seems safe to say, however, that if modern day Muslims feel as hurt by the Danish cartoons as the Jews and blacks felt due to the Nazis and the KKK the offense they are taking is wildly unreasonable.

I find it far more likely that the world's billion Muslims have widely divergent views about whether the Danish newspaper should've been allowed to publish the cartoons, how offensive or hurtful the publication proved and the appropriate response, if any.

You'd think the fact that Muslim editors have themselves decided to publish the cartoons -- and that a faction among Danish Muslims is dissenting from the reaction of their imams -- would prove my point.

(In fact, you'd think the rather obvious fact that Muslims are distinct individuals whose shared religion doesn't suggest identical opinions, value systems or behavior would've made proving my point unnecessary.)

Instead the Western press is largely treating Muslim reaction to the cartoons as though it is monolithic-- Muslims are extremely offended and extremely pissed off, we're to believe. That's "the Muslim reaction" on "the Muslim street."

Everything is seen through that frame--one that allows the most vocal and/or violent Muslims to speak as if for all practitioners of Islam. In Muslim nations and Western Europe this unfortunate tendency isolates moderate Muslims who might speak out for free speech, and against the fundamentalists, more vocally if only we weren't so quick to assume their non-existence (thus weakening their position).

Meanwhile our generalizations mitigate the cognitive dissonance we might otherwise feel applying an insulting double-standard to Muslims, excusing barbaric behavior we'd condemn if perpetrated by a Westerner as understandable since a Muslim, provoked by offensive speech, is perpetrating it.

That phenomenon is quite pervasive.

Imagine the most offensive behavior imaginable--learning about the molestation of a child will suffice. Imagine a British newspaper publishing an image of the molestation. We'd cancel our subscription. We'd organize a boycott.

Yet none of us would, for example, set fire to the British embassy, or wander the streets of New York searching for a British citizen to kidnap and behead, or threaten to blow ourselves up in the Tate Modern.

Somehow, however, news accounts depict Islamic radicals perpetrating these actions as though they are understandable-if-wrongheaded "Muslim responses" to being offended. The coverage seems to tell us, Yes, the Muslim reaction to this is unfortunate, but after all, the cartoons were a provocation.

The Muslims who aren't rioting, who weren't offended by the cartoons, or who at least come down on the side of freedom of expression though they were offended?

A news consumer could be forgiven for a lack of familiarity with such Muslims, though they far outnumber the headline grabbing radicals who we won't condemn outright for fear of offending Muslims. It's a vicious circle held together by the truly insulting prejudice: that Islamic radicals and Muslims are enough alike that insulting one is to insult the other.

So what of "provocation"?

It misses the point! The term provocation, as used in this coverage, seems to assume that we humans reach some level of offense at which we just can't restrain ourselves from acting barbarically. In fact, I can quite confortably say that there are cartoons that would offend me just as much as the Mohammed cartoons have offended Islamic radicals... and yet there is no cartoon capable of provoking me to behave like a barbarian.

Rest assured that the Islamic radicals out burning down embassies and hunting Europeans on the street aren't necessarily the most offended by the cartoons. Rather, they are the least civilized among their fellow believers, so that even minor offense seems to them sufficient grounds for barbarity.

Amid all the talk of provocation many also seem to have missed the obvious point that even granting the premise of the Islamic radicals--that the cartoons are a provocation that demand punishment for the perpetrators--it is still entirely unjustified even by those standards to target people, economic goods and buildings whose only tie to the supposed provocation is that the supposed provokers happen to share the same national origin.

Put succinctly, too many press accounts have implicitly accepted the notion that if you're Muslim being very offended somehow makes it perfectly natural that you'd start behaving barbarically.

One odd consequence of this bizarre double standard: several months after a single newspaper published 12 controversial cartoons Western society is having an ongoing argument about whether or not the Danish government should apologize for their content.

Meanwhile masked Islamic radicals have stormed EU aid offices, angry mobs have shouted death to Denmark in the streets of Pakistan, terrorist organizations have promised suicide bombings in Denmark, the 12 cartoonists have received death threats, a Danish embassy has been burned down... and no one, so far as I've seen, has called for an apology.

Why is that?

UPDATE: In the LA Times Tim Rutten makes a similar point:

Posted by Conor at February 5, 2006 03:45 AM