EDITOR: Cartoons of Muhammad have been framed as a battle between free speech advocates and Islamic fundamentalists. The premise begs for righteous polarization around opposing ideals. Modern defenders of liberty face off against archaic zealots defending the honor of their prophet.
That spin is a lie.
Editors make judgments about acceptable material every day and tiptoe around things like obscenity, libel, defamation, or sedition. It’s fun to imagine that freedom of speech is absolute. It isn’t. The EU commissioner recently called upon European media to “self-regulate,” implying possible strictures on speech in the form of a “voluntary code of conduct” that would carry no legal weight. The suggestion has journalists escalating their free speech rhetoric to fever pitch. Dozens of papers have reprinted the cartoons in a show of solidarity with Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper.
Perhaps editors hope republication of the cartoons will desensitize fundamentalist Muslims to the harsh realities of Western-brand free speech, or maybe they just want to flex their free press muscles in a display of power. The first possibility seems highly unlikely to succeed, the second matches the moral arrogance of protestors who would silence the press.
Whatever the intent, republishing the cartoons completely sidesteps a valid component of the debate: Are the cartoons broadly offensive to a large segment of the population? This is not a legal question—you have the right to be a jerk. It is a different question: whether you should be a jerk. It is a moral question. Editors exercise moral judgments all the time. Every opportunity to cause offense has its own context. This is not the Abu-Ghraib Halloween issue, or the Pope vs. Shiavo race to the grave. This is a different question.
Merely asking this question has been characterized as a “justification” of violent Muslim protestors who have made death threats or set fires. Nonsense. We need not preface every argument with moral outrage over actions that are clearly indefensible. All the moral outrage you can muster won’t make embassies unburn, or recapitate an infidel. Moral outrage conveniently shirks its responsibility to find a meaningful response to senseless actions. We shouldn’t fear questions about the nature of the cartoons, as though asking them dishonors some noble tradition of political satire.
Some area Muslims have made it clear they find some of the cartoons deeply offensive. These Muslims are not burning down embassies. They are not threatening to behead staffers at The Stranger. Washington is their home. They are our neighbors and our friends. Telling them to “get over it” is rude and unkind, again, not a legal question.
Here lies the offense created by some of the cartoons. The caricature of an angry-eyed, bushy-faced Muhammad wearing a bomb as a turban is the creation of anti-Islamic European sentiment. It is a racist stereotype that fosters ill will toward Muslims, whether or not they’ve ever bombed a discotheque. The caricature of an angry Muhammad menacingly drawing a dagger while burqa-clad women cower behind him conveys a message: Muslims are violent savages who oppress women. These two cartoons in particular bear more than a little resemblance to the caricatures of Jews published in Der Stürmer during the 1920s and ’30s.
Not all of the cartoons are tainted by racist sentiment, but some clearly are. That taint rubs off on the free speech rhetoric and complicates the moral clarity of republishing in solidarity with a Danish publisher. Does it make sense to rally around racist propaganda in defense of civil liberties? You could argue that only offensive speech requires legal protections, which is fair enough, and that allows reasonable people to present offensive materials in context.
Last week The Stranger reprinted four of the cartoons, along with an article by Bruce Bawer with the subheadline: “Islamic Fundamentalists Don’t Just Have a Problem with Cartoons, They Have a Problem with Freedom.” Side by side with the racist caricatures, Bawer’s article issues a clear moral imperative: fear Islam.
Why preface fundamentalists with “Islamic?” Is it more acceptable for Pat Robertson to call for the assassination of Hugo Chavez because he is a Christian fundamentalist? Fundamentalism is anathema to civilization, no matter what the religious prefix, and Bawer’s larger work addresses that. But by tacking on “Islamic,” and illustrating it with stereotypical caricatures, we drink the Kool-Aid of irrational fear: Don’t fret over the anti-Islamic tensions that have grown ugly across Europe. We shouldn’t “enable” extremism talking about Western involvement in Middle Eastern countries where we prop up brutal dictatorships as it serves our security and oil interests, where we destabilize popular governments that threaten to centralize wealth away from us (cue the “blame America first” sound bite). All of this can be dismissed as liberal hand wringing, apologizing for Western liberty. What does it have to do with the cartoons?
A better question concerns what the cartoons have to do with the violence. Some editorialists would have us believe that any depiction of Muhammad is an affront to Muslims. This is false. Well-known and beloved portraits of the prophet are common in many Muslim communities, similar to portraits of Jesus common among some Christian communities. Some fundamentalist Muslims take an extreme view of Koranic admonishments against idolatry, and shun all representations.
As it turns out, cartoons far more offensive than the Jyllands-Posten dozen were circulated among fundamentalist populations in a deliberate attempt to instigate civil unrest. Our buddies in Saudi Arabia were among the first to use a months-old, dead news story about cartoons to redirect outrage over the stampede deaths during Hajj. Other repressive Middle Eastern governments quickly adopted the device to redirect their own populations’ rage away from governmental failings. It was easy to do. This is not an excuse or a justification of violence, but to pretend that banal cartoons in a Danish newspaper provoked irrational fury actually mischaracterizes reality.
Similarly, it would be wrong to pretend that last week’s republication of four cartoons in The Stranger, along with Bawer’s article, was nothing less than a righteous crusade for freedom of speech. In a liberal Western state, that kind of deliberate agitation is far more likely to provoke anti-Islamic violence than a fundamentalist reaction. It isn’t a question of whether a publication should have the right to print the cartoons; clearly it does.
But The Stranger did more than merely reprint cartoons. It reprinted them in a context that suggested the existence of a great battle between freedom and slavery, heroes and monsters, Western liberty and Muslim bogeymen. If truth is an absolute defense against defamation, last week’s page 17 failed the test. It was fear-mongering garbage.
David Summerlin