Thursday, February 09, 2006
Comic Relief
I have not been keeping up with the world on-line, limiting my input to television, radio, and the legitimate stage that all the world, as some say, is. So I don’t know if what I have to say here is already old hat or done to death or offensive to Allah or anything else. I’ve just been stewing for a while on too many subjects, and finally I’ve had it with this one.
I’m a big believer in free speech. Hell, I’m a blogger, aren’t I? I paste my opinions on the cyberether at least a couple of times a week, and I don’t want anyone telling me what not to say. Then again, I’m sensitive to the fact that I could hurt someone’s feelings, and I’ve actually retracted a few lines or posts here and there when I failed to honor my own standards of decency to others. I know that words and images can hurt, and I don’t want to minimize that.
That was kind of heavy. Here’s some comic relief.
What I’m concerned about, today, is the uproar over cartoons that are insulting to the Islamic community. I feel their anger and their frustration, and I understand their desire to respond in the strongest possible terms.
However, I also feel, very strongly, that they are so monumentally wrong about so many aspects of this debate, especially the violent, vituperative nature of their response, that those who have engaged in these actions have given up any right to the respect of the international community, including the right to have their religion or their autonomy respected.
I understand that it’s insulting, a violation of Islamic law, to depict the prophet Mohammed – a towering historical figure for whom I hold no antipathy. And yet this insult was dealt to the community of his followers. They have every right to be outraged. But their outrage is hypocritical and so far out of proportion to their actual injury, as to be beyond any shadow of justification.
First, let’s recognize that the cartoons did not show Mohammed eating babies; they did not encourage anyone to kill Muslims, or suggest that the Islamic community is rewriting world history in order to gain sympathy or credibility for atrocities they are committing. Nothing of the sort was even implied by any of the Danish cartoons. The cartoons, rather, depicted, at worst, a face under a hat that was a bomb, and a prophet guarding the gates to heaven. There was no genocide, suggestion of satanic influence, or intimation of revisionist historicism.
Comic relief, as if you needed more.
Limitations on speech that neither actively incites violence nor is obscene (without redeeming social value) are contrary to liberty and free thought. The western world has chosen to honor the values of liberty and free thought, and as a result, the horrific cartoons I’ve linked above have never resulted in the burning of a single embassy, nor the issuance of a single death-threat against a cartoonist or editor. I am profoundly saddened by those images, but not shocked by them, because they were produced by a culture that has established a long record of insults, defamation, and revisionism. And it is a tenet of my political philosophy that they are free to vomit this hideousness on their own walls anytime they want. I am insulted, offended, and injured by their words, but it is my duty to bear these injuries, because the alternative – forced silence and prior restraint - is much worse.
Any nation that wants to limit the free speech of its inhabitants is free, I suppose, to do so, at least until those individuals rise up to defend the rights I believe are theirs by virtue of their mere humanity. So if Palestinians or Indonesians or Iranians want to outlaw speech they find offensive, they have it within their power to do so. But when they seek to restrain others from political speech they find offensive, I must protest. Would they want to be prohibited from depicting Jews as eating human flesh, which is a fundamental violation of the laws of kashrut? To show them as devils? As Nazis? For all of these are as offensive to the small minority of this world’s citizens who are Jewish, as it is to the 1.3 billion Muslims to depict Mohammed as a warmonger.
And this brings me to my second, and more important, point:
Hard-line fundamentalist Islamists are now mounting a contest to find the best Holocaust cartoons. Let us put aside the fact that many in that community claim that the Holocaust never happened, that it is yet another fabrication by Jews who have rewritten world history for their own purposes. It is obvious that the choice of subject matter in this contest was chosen solely for the purpose of causing the greatest possible outrage and pain to the Jewish community. The advocates of this exercise suggest that it’s a test for world media – will they publish something offensive to Jews just as they published something offensive to Muslims? Of course, it’s a fatally flawed experimental model, since the purpose of publication of political cartoons should not be to offend but to express some editorial comment on current events. The Danish cartoons, for example, offer a perspective on militant Islam, which is a very hot topic these days. There is no such comment that is currently worth making with images of Hitler in bed with Ann Frank.
In fact, anti-Semitic cartoons have been published non-stop since before printing presses were invented, and though the Jewish community has always sought to speak out on its own behalf in such cases, it has never stormed embassies or called for the death of the defamers. Other cartoons have offended the Christian community, sometimes featuring Jesus on the cross or performing miracles. These people have a right to be offended, but they have no right to beat, burn and kill those who have offended them, and they have responded with a strong arm and a stalwart heart and with political power and all legal means at their disposal. Even when a blasphemer blatantly violated the law of the land in making an offending statement, the recourse was in court and not via the KKK.
And let’s face it: making fun of the Holocaust is nothing like making fun of Mohammed. In one case, we’re talking about a historical figure, dead for over a thousand years. The Holocaust was the slaying, not even 70 years ago, of 12 million innocent people – Jews, Roma, Catholics, homosexuals, people of African descent, the physically or mentally disabled. These people were slaughtered wholesale, as rapidly as the world’s most sophisticated culture could manage to dispose of the bodies. If you don’t believe it happened, I will not be able to persuade you to the contrary – but even disbelievers must recognize that making fun of genocide is not akin to commenting on the violent misuse of ancient religious texts.
If the fundamentalists in the madrasas want to verify that the world offers them an even playing field for offensive images, the ones they’ve already published should suffice. Rather, it seems to me that they’ve finally gotten a taste of their own medicine, and it’s so bitter they want to kill their doctor and burn down his hospital.
I wish I could hear the moderate Islamic response over the cries and bellows of the offended fundamentalists, but it doesn’t really carry very well. In the meantime, I can only hope that the blind fury of the outraged Muslim community finally succeeds in alienating the European nations that have accused Israel for so many years of instigating the difficulties in that region. These were difficulties that needed no instigation. When you are dealing with maniacal zealots, the best you can hope is that they find someone else to hate – but hatred is their ultimate religion and eventually it will seek and find a new target. The pen is only mightier than the sword when you put the sword down. It seems that the fundamentalists here have a pen in one hand and a sword in the other, and they’ll take the hand or head of anyone who dares follow in their bloody, selfish footsteps.
I now return you to your regular whatever. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.
