Thesecartoons are much less offensive than what is routinely printed inevery American newspaper about presidents, presidential candidates, andother pols. Yet strange as it may seem to Western non-Muslims, the rageover them seems to grow with each passing day — until the global scaleof the response to it has now involved ambassadors from many countries,the United Nations, international boycotts, and the threatening ofutterly innocent businesspeople and embassy personnel. A few recentexamples:
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: "Wefeel great rage at the continued attacks on Islam and the Prophet ofIslam and we demand that the Danish government make a clear and publicapology for the wrongful crime."
Arab interior ministers, meeting in Tunis,declared: "We ask the Danish authorities to take the necessary measuresto punish those responsible for this harm and to take action to avoid arepeat.”
Libya and Saudi Arabia recalled their ambassadors from Copenhagen, while in Saudi Arabia, an angry mob beat two employeesof the Danish corporation Arla Foods, which has been subjected to acrippling boycott throughout the Islamic world – a boycott that hasbeen 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 huffingself-righteously: "So now what are we going to do? ... Replace theanti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice?” Of course not, buthis question is beside the point. The cartoons are not a manifestationof anti-Islamic prejudice: criticism of Muhammad or even of Islam isnot equivalent to anti-Semitism. Islam is not a race; the problems withit are not the product of fear mongering and fiction, but of ideologyand facts -- facts that have been stressed repeatedly by Muslims aroundthe world, when they commit violence in the name of Islam and justifythat violence by its teachings. Noting, as some of the cartoons do,that there is a connection between the teachings of Muhammad andIslamic violence, is simply to manifest an awareness of what has beenrepeatedly asserted by Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Abu MusabAl-Zarqawi, Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza, Abu Bakar Bashir, and so manyothers. Do all these men and so many, many others misunderstand andmisrepresent the teachings of Muhammad and Islam? This question, ascrucial as it is, is irrelevant to an ethical evaluation of thecartoons. The fact is, these and other jihad terrorists claimMuhammad’s example and words as their inspiration. Some of the cartoonscall 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 cartooncontroversy indicates the gulf between the Islamic world and thepost-Christian West in matters of freedom of speech and expression. Andit may yet turn out that as the West continues to pay homage to itsidols of tolerance, multiculturalism, and pluralism, it will give upthose hard-won freedoms voluntarily.” Freedom of speech encompassesprecisely the freedom to annoy, to ridicule, to offend. If it doesn’t,it is hollow. The instant that any person or ideology is consideredoff-limits for critical examination and even ridicule, freedom ofspeech has been replaced by an ideological straitjacket. Westernersseem 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 cartooncontroversy, insignificant and even silly as it may be in its origins,is an increasingly serious challenge to Western notions of pluralismand freedom of speech. The Danes have already begun to apologize,to the tentative satisfaction of Danish Muslim groups. But so far boththe newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the Prime Minister have limitedthemselves to saying essentially that they are sorry if Muslims tookoffense, and that none was intended. If they go farther and "punishthose responsible,” as the Arab Interior Ministers demanded, or treatthe cartoons as a human rights violation, as a Belgian imam demanded,they will be acknowledging that lampooning Muhammad and criticizingIslam is somehow wrong in itself. Such a notion is just as dangerousfor a free society as the idea that the Beloved Leader or dialecticalmaterialism 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 muchlarger conflagration between the West and the Islamic world than thepresent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan .The Muslim world was enraged over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, andover 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 thecartoons yet, as opposed to the Qur’an desecration scandal, theinternational scope of the cartoon rage makes those other sources ofanger 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 hadindeed been flushed, Muslims would have justifiably been offended. Theymay justifiably have considered the perpetrators boors, or barbarians,or hell-bound unbelievers. They may justifiably have issueddenunciations accordingly. But that is all. To kill people thousands ofmiles away who had nothing to do with the act, and to fulminatewith threats and murder against the entire Western world, all becauseof this alleged act, is not just disproportionate. It is not justexcessive. It is mad. And every decent person in the world ought tohave the courage to stand up and say that it is mad.”
Noone has been killed for these cartoons. But otherwise the same wordsapply today to the cartoon controversy. It is mad. It should bedenounced as mad. The fact that Bill Clinton is the only Americanpolitician who has taken notice of this ongoing controversy, and thaton 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 thisprinciple. But in a grim reminder of the dhimmitude andmulticulturalist 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.
