One of our regular commenters, AJ, has an extended post on the cartoon riots available just one click away. Here is an excerpt to whet your appetites:
I think we need to be careful not to lump together all Muslims in all countries who respond to the controversy because the political and social contexts may vary. Nevertheless, I think there may be one common thread in all this – namely, that the cartoons seem to be viewed as some kind of rallying cry, a way for Muslims everywhere to shout something like “We ain’t going to take it anymore!” And in that respect, it really does not matter to them who wins or loses the debate we imagine on the proper bounds of freedom of speech or what we think of their reasoning. It only matters that Muslims find themselves united around the Danish cartoons, which they may see as a potent symbol of the double standard they believe the West applies to them.
Click to read the rest.
The cartoon controversy has clearly escalated to the point of madness. There is so much hatred and twisted logic enmeshed in the political, cultural, and religious conflicts centered in the Middle East, that it seems almost beside the point to focus on this one piece of a much larger, unholy, broken mess.
Nevertheless, maybe it is worth looking a little deeper into this latest incident to begin to grasp what may be really going on, indefensible though it may be. Jim, you asked, “Are they really arguing that making fun of Mohammed is morally equivalent to making fun of the murder of 6 million Jews? And why draw Jewish people into this? It wasn’t a Jewish newspaper that printed the objectionable cartoons.”
The premise of these questions, and the title of this thread, “A False Equation,” seems to be that the controversy is really about free speech and that when looking at the response of the Iranian newspaper, one should consider whether its logic or argument is reasonable and moral. I do not think that is what it really is about at all – religious sensibilities and freedom of expression. Or rather, as was discussed in the earlier thread about the cartoons, the religious issue is so inextricably intertwined with history and politics that one cannot look at that alone to have any idea what may be going on in the either the minds of the people who are stirring up the controversy of those whose passions they intend to inflame.
This means different things in different national and cultural contexts. In the context of Iran, where government officials have previously denounced the Holocaust as fiction, the action of the newspaper may be applauded by many, so the notion that they are trying to hurt Jews or Israelis or making a false analogy would be nonsense to them. That does not make it right – if anything it makes it far worse than being grossly insensitive – but it does make it different from a protest designed to make a point about how far freedom of the press should go without regard to offending people.
I think we need to be careful not to lump together all Muslims in all countries who respond to the controversy because the political and social contexts may vary. Nevertheless, I think there may be one common thread in all this – namely, that the cartoons seem to be viewed as some kind of rallying cry, a way for Muslims everywhere to shout something like “We ain’t going to take it anymore!” And in that respect, it really does not matter to them who wins or loses the debate we imagine on the proper bounds of freedom of speech or what we think of their reasoning. It only matters that Muslims find themselves united around the Danish cartoons, which they may see as a potent symbol of the double standard they believe the West applies to them.
Even from the point of view of the Iranian newspaper, which may well suffer from virulent and irrational hatred of Jews and Israel, the point is not the particular subject of the cartoons but rather the context in which the Danish cartoons were published. That context was not, as some uninformed people in the West might suppose, the free expression of an individual cartoonist but rather was part of a project at the newspaper intended to publish material that might well offend Muslims. As a result of this project, the newspaper commissioned a series of 12 drawings of Mohammed to publish to prove that it was free to do so. Reportedly, three years earlier, the same newspaper rejected for publication a cartoon depicting Jesus satirically on the grounds that it might offend some of the readers.
So, while we, who can hardly help but view the Danish cartoons as “just a cartoon folks” (like we said Book of Daniel was “just a t.v. show”), are shocked and horrified that anyone would consider mocking the Holocaust to be in any way equivalent, some Muslims may see it quite differently, focusing on the fact that the Danish newspaper deliberately embarked upon a project that was intended to offend them because they believed that there were not enough militant Arabs in Denmark to make a fuss about it – and then other newspapers seemed to follow suit.
Place all this in the larger context of the very long memory that many Muslims, especially in the Middle East, have with regard to every past wrong, real and imagined, that Western Europe and the U.S. have inflicted upon them. While the Danish may have triggered the latest controversy, everything all reverts back to Palestine, with the ghosts of the Balfour Declaration, the betrayal of Emir Faisal, the creation of Israel, and all that has happened since. Add to the mix of historical grievances the awful, twisted view of Jews in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is still widely circulated and taught in the Arab world.
So, as crazy and terrible as it looks to us – as indeed it is – what the Iranian newspaper is doing may make more sense to some Muslims than we can possibly imagine.
Understanding that perspective more fully does not mean that we have to accept the lies and the distortions or have any empathy for the hatred and resentment. But if we don’t dig deeper we do not begin to see the situation clearly enough to begin to deal with it. I’m no expert on Islam, Middle Eastern politics or history, but from what I do know suggests that this whole cartoon controversy is not something we can begin to get a grasp of without looking at it from an angle different from the way we might view controversy over The Last Temptation of Christ or whatever we might view as the equivalent in our own culture. The core issues are not religion per se, free speech, or offending sensibilities, but rather the raw emotions that stem from deeper, darker political and cultural conflicts.