On the Danish Cartoons

This is a first draft; modifications were made, none substantive.

Five months ago a Danish newspaper published a series of political cartoons which are said by some Muslims (not all) to defame Islam and Muhammad, its Prophet. One of them shows a purported Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb with a lit fuse. American news outlets have been reluctant to print the cartoons for fear of offending Muslims. By now these have been posted on various websites and are readily available. I was not appalled, but, of course, I’m not a Muslim.
On the other hand, response from the usual quarters has been intense. Riots in Gaza and Iraq — these places have nothing else to worry about? Muslim countries have called home their ambassadors and have called in Danish ambassadors to dress them down. Saudi Arabia’s top cleric, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, called for the Danish government to punish Jyllands-Posten, the center-right newspaper that first published the cartoons: “It should impose a penalty as a deterrent on those who took part in provoking this subject. That’s the least Muslims demand,” he said.
The Jordanian parliament also called upon the Danish and Norwegian governments “to express their condemnation and disapproval of this hateful crime and to punish the perpetrators and instigators.”
In Pakistan, protesters marched chanting, “Death to Denmark” and “Death to France” (presumably because a French newspaper reprinted the offending cartoons). Organized boycotts of Danish products are underway. “The cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad are an attack on our spiritual values. There should be a limit to press freedom,” Turkish foreign minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan fulminated when berating French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy during talks in Ankara.
There’s more, but you get the point.
What are we to make of all this? What crime, exactly, is it, to which the Jordanian parliament alludes? Portrayals of the Prophet by Muslim artists are not unheard of. Again, they are on the Internet. Denmark is an enlightened Western country which honors freedom of speech and the press to a point I think absurd (it is, or was, the hard core pornography capital of the universe) but we in the West take our lumps with our liberties. If some Muslims are offended by the way their Prophet is portrayed, maybe they shouldn’t dance in the streets when a suicide murderer blows up a shopping mall in the name of Islam. How dare the Turks declare that there should be a limit to Western press freedom?
Maybe Muslim countries should shut down those presses that spew forth Arabic language versions of the anti-Semitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Maybe Muslim governments should close down the newspapers that print cartoons that show Israeli (and American) political leaders with swastikas emblazoned on their chests or heads. Earlier this month an Iranian daily called for cartoon submissions that question the Holocaust. “The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let's see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons,” graphics editor Farid Mortazavi said. My guess is that if these cartoons do appear in the West, the Iranian embassy will not be attacked by torch bearing irate Jews screaming “Death to Islam!”
We in the West ask, “Should the Danish newspaper have slurred the Prophet?” but I think it’s the wrong question. I don’t think the Prophet was the target at all; I think the real target is those who use the name of Muhammad and the teachings of the Koran to perform unspeakable acts of murder. It is they who defame Islam, not the cartoons; it is they who create a negative image of Islam, not an obscure Danish newspaper. The response to the cartoons is obviously a politically inspired one. Yes, Muslims were offended by the cartoons, but they would not have seen them had not a Palestinian-born Danish imam named Ahmed Abu Laban, frustrated by the fact that nobody was paying attention to them, sent representatives of his group carrying them like time bombs to Middle Eastern countries. He now claims that violence wasn’t his intention, dialogue was. What a hypocrite. And can we really believe that Middle Eastern tyrants aren’t yet again focusing the wrath of their people on an outside source, diverting it from themselves?
Political cartoons show in exaggerated graphic imagery the view of the cartoonist. Sometimes I applaud the image presented, sometimes I turn my head in revulsion. But I’m willing to pay the price for freedom of the press. I WOULD END HERE, ELECTIONS ARE ANOTHER TOPIC It’s the enlightened thing to do in a liberal Western democracy — the kind we think we can impose in the Arab world by forcing out their tyrants and giving them free elections.