These
cartoons are much less offensive than what is routinely printed in
every American newspaper about presidents, presidential candidates, and
other pols. Yet strange as it may seem to Western non-Muslims, the rage
over them seems to grow with each passing day — until the global scale
of the response to it has now involved ambassadors from many countries,
the United Nations, international boycotts, and the threatening of
utterly innocent businesspeople and embassy personnel. A few recent
examples:
Gaza: On Monday, gunmen seized an EU office, demanding apologies from Denmark and Norway (where another publication later reprinted the cartoons). On Tuesday, demonstrators chanted "War on Denmark, death to Denmark"
as they burned Danish flags. Said Islamic Jihad leader Nafez Azzam: "We
feel great rage at the continued attacks on Islam and the Prophet of
Islam and we demand that the Danish government make a clear and public
apology for the wrongful crime."
Arab interior ministers, meeting in Tunis,
declared: "We ask the Danish authorities to take the necessary measures
to punish those responsible for this harm and to take action to avoid a
repeat.”
Libya and Saudi Arabia recalled their ambassadors from Copenhagen, while in Saudi Arabia, an angry mob beat two employees
of the Danish corporation Arla Foods, which has been subjected to a
crippling boycott throughout the Islamic world – a boycott that has
been endorsed by, among others, the Sudanese Defense Minister
• Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari complained to the Danish ambassador to Baghdad, while Danish troops were put on alert there after a fatwa concerning the cartoons was issued.
These incidents follow diplomatic protests from the Organization of the Islamic Conference, protests in Kashmir, death threats emanating from Pakistan, protests to the United Nations from the Muslim World League and other organizations, and more.
Even Bill Clinton has gotten into the act, decrying
"these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam" and huffing
self-righteously: "So now what are we going to do? ... Replace the
anti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice?” Of course not, but
his question is beside the point. The cartoons are not a manifestation
of anti-Islamic prejudice: criticism of Muhammad or even of Islam is
not equivalent to anti-Semitism. Islam is not a race; the problems with
it are not the product of fear mongering and fiction, but of ideology
and facts -- facts that have been stressed repeatedly by Muslims around
the world, when they commit violence in the name of Islam and justify
that violence by its teachings. Noting, as some of the cartoons do,
that there is a connection between the teachings of Muhammad and
Islamic violence, is simply to manifest an awareness of what has been
repeatedly asserted by Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Abu Musab
Al-Zarqawi, Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza, Abu Bakar Bashir, and so many
others. Do all these men and so many, many others misunderstand and
misrepresent the teachings of Muhammad and Islam? This question, as
crucial as it is, is irrelevant to an ethical evaluation of the
cartoons. The fact is, these and other jihad terrorists claim
Muhammad’s example and words as their inspiration. Some of the cartoons
call attention to that fact.
Ultimately, then, the cartoon controversy is a question of freedom of speech. As I wrote in mid-December:
"As it grows into an international cause celebre, the cartoon
controversy indicates the gulf between the Islamic world and the
post-Christian West in matters of freedom of speech and expression. And
it may yet turn out that as the West continues to pay homage to its
idols of tolerance, multiculturalism, and pluralism, it will give up
those hard-won freedoms voluntarily.” Freedom of speech encompasses
precisely the freedom to annoy, to ridicule, to offend. If it doesn’t,
it is hollow. The instant that any person or ideology is considered
off-limits for critical examination and even ridicule, freedom of
speech has been replaced by an ideological straitjacket. Westerners
seem to grasp this easily when it comes to affronts to Christianity,
even when they are as sharp-edged and offensive as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ or Chris Ofili’s dung- and pornography-encrusted Holy Virgin Mary. But the same clarity of thought doesn’t seem to carry over to an Islamic context.
Yet that is where it is needed most today. The cartoon
controversy, insignificant and even silly as it may be in its origins,
is an increasingly serious challenge to Western notions of pluralism
and freedom of speech. The Danes have already begun to apologize,
to the tentative satisfaction of Danish Muslim groups. But so far both
the newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the Prime Minister have limited
themselves to saying essentially that they are sorry if Muslims took
offense, and that none was intended. If they go farther and "punish
those responsible,” as the Arab Interior Ministers demanded, or treat
the cartoons as a human rights violation, as a Belgian imam demanded,
they will be acknowledging that lampooning Muhammad and criticizing
Islam is somehow wrong in itself. Such a notion is just as dangerous
for a free society as the idea that the Beloved Leader or dialectical
materialism is above criticism. It is death for a free society.
Not only that. Muslim cartoon rage, having spread now all across the Muslim world, from Egypt and Sudan toPakistan
and beyond, also threatens to become the tinderbox that sets off a much
larger conflagration between the West and the Islamic world than the
present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan .
The Muslim world was enraged over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and
over reports last May that a Qur’an had been flushed down at toilet at GuantanamoBay.
But although there have been no killings in connection with the
cartoons yet, as opposed to the Qur’an desecration scandal, the
international scope of the cartoon rage makes those other sources of
anger trivial comp Afghanistan in which people were reportedly killed — people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the alleged desecration — I wrote:
"The question here is one of proportionate response. If a Qur’an had
indeed been flushed, Muslims would have justifiably been offended. They
may justifiably have considered the perpetrators boors, or barbarians,
or hell-bound unbelievers. They may justifiably have issued
denunciations accordingly. But that is all. To kill people thousands of
miles away who had nothing to do with the act, and to fulminate
with threats and murder against the entire Western world, all because
of this alleged act, is not just disproportionate. It is not just
excessive. It is mad. And every decent person in the world ought to
have the courage to stand up and say that it is mad.”
No
one has been killed for these cartoons. But otherwise the same words
apply today to the cartoon controversy. It is mad. It should be
denounced as mad. The fact that Bill Clinton is the only American
politician who has taken notice of this ongoing controversy, and that
on the wrong side, is a travesty.
The free world should be standing resolutely with Denmark , ready to defend freedom of speech. Insofar as it is not defended, it will surely be lost. On Wednesday publications all over Europe — in France , Spain , Germany , Italy , and Holland
— published the cartoons to demonstrate their support for this
principle. But in a grim reminder of the dhimmitude and
multiculturalist fog that still grips us, the editor of France Soir was fired for doing so. The defense of free speech and free thought will not be easy, and is not the matter of just a day.