Posted by
Owen Densmore on
Feb 20, 2006; 4:43am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Washington-Post-Why-I-Published-Those-Cartoons-tp521395.html
Interesting article from the WP on why the cartoons were published:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/
AR2006021702499.html
(also attached as text)
Hard to believe, but apparently in Europe, there is great fear
growing among editors and reporters over possible insulting Islam.
Puts the cartoons in an entirely new light. It would be interesting
to see if similar self-censorship is occurring in the US too.
I was surprised how the cartoons were no worse than most of the
political style cartoons I've seen with a Christian "message". These
have caused outrage, but no killings.
A recent NYTimes article, "The Islam Gap" by Karim Raslan:
http://tinyurl.com/s8a2gpoints out that Indonesian Islam has a different slant on the west,
and apparently distinguishes between the European brand of secularism
and the US's odd brand of religion:
"Nor is the West a unitary culture. Europe's fervent secularism
reminds me that the nation of the Great Satan, with its crowded
churches and Sunday preachers who fill sports stadiums, is actually
more like my world than Europe is."
I found that sort of subtlety surprising. Guess its my week for
surprises!
-- Owen
Owen Densmore
http://backspaces.net -
http://redfish.com -
http://friam.orgWhy I Published Those Cartoons
By Flemming Rose
Sunday, February 19, 2006; B01
Childish. Irresponsible. Hate speech. A provocation just for the sake
of provocation. A PR stunt. Critics of 12 cartoons of the prophet
Muhammad I decided to publish in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten
have not minced their words. They say that freedom of expression does
not imply an endorsement of insulting people's religious feelings,
and besides, they add, the media censor themselves every day. So,
please do not teach us a lesson about limitless freedom of speech.
I agree that the freedom to publish things doesn't mean you publish
everything. Jyllands-Posten would not publish pornographic images or
graphic details of dead bodies; swear words rarely make it into our
pages. So we are not fundamentalists in our support for freedom of
expression.
But the cartoon story is different.
Those examples have to do with exercising restraint because of
ethical standards and taste; call it editing. By contrast, I
commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-
censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of
intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam. And I still
believe that this is a topic that we Europeans must confront,
challenging moderate Muslims to speak out. The idea wasn't to provoke
gratuitously -- and we certainly didn't intend to trigger violent
demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to
push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing
in tighter.
At the end of September, a Danish standup comedian said in an
interview with Jyllands-Posten that he had no problem urinating on
the Bible in front of a camera, but he dared not do the same thing
with the Koran.
This was the culmination of a series of disturbing instances of self-
censorship. Last September, a Danish children's writer had trouble
finding an illustrator for a book about the life of Muhammad. Three
people turned down the job for fear of consequences. The person who
finally accepted insisted on anonymity, which in my book is a form of
self-censorship. European translators of a critical book about Islam
also did not want their names to appear on the book cover beside the
name of the author, a Somalia-born Dutch politician who has herself
been in hiding.
Around the same time, the Tate gallery in London withdrew an
installation by the avant-garde artist John Latham depicting the
Koran, Bible and Talmud torn to pieces. The museum explained that it
did not want to stir things up after the London bombings. (A few
months earlier, to avoid offending Muslims, a museum in Goteborg,
Sweden, had removed a painting with a sexual motif and a quotation
from the Koran.)
Finally, at the end of September, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh
Rasmussen met with a group of imams, one of whom called on the prime
minister to interfere with the press in order to get more positive
coverage of Islam.
So, over two weeks we witnessed a half-dozen cases of self-
censorship, pitting freedom of speech against the fear of confronting
issues about Islam. This was a legitimate news story to cover, and
Jyllands-Posten decided to do it by adopting the well-known
journalistic principle: Show, don't tell. I wrote to members of the
association of Danish cartoonists asking them "to draw Muhammad as
you see him." We certainly did not ask them to make fun of the
prophet. Twelve out of 25 active members responded.
We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and
other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The
cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity,
Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in
Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the
Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not
strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.
The cartoons do not in any way demonize or stereotype Muslims. In
fact, they differ from one another both in the way they depict the
prophet and in whom they target. One cartoon makes fun of Jyllands-
Posten, portraying its cultural editors as a bunch of reactionary
provocateurs. Another suggests that the children's writer who could
not find an illustrator for his book went public just to get cheap
publicity. A third puts the head of the anti-immigration Danish
People's Party in a lineup, as if she is a suspected criminal.
One cartoon -- depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban -- has
drawn the harshest criticism. Angry voices claim the cartoon is
saying that the prophet is a terrorist or that every Muslim is a
terrorist. I read it differently: Some individuals have taken the
religion of Islam hostage by committing terrorist acts in the name of
the prophet. They are the ones who have given the religion a bad
name. The cartoon also plays into the fairy tale about Aladdin and
the orange that fell into his turban and made his fortune. This
suggests that the bomb comes from the outside world and is not an
inherent characteristic of the prophet.
On occasion, Jyllands-Posten has refused to print satirical cartoons
of Jesus, but not because it applies a double standard. In fact, the
same cartoonist who drew the image of Muhammed with a bomb in his
turban drew a cartoon with Jesus on the cross having dollar notes in
his eyes and another with the star of David attached to a bomb fuse.
There were, however, no embassy burnings or death threats when we
published those.
Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly
didn't intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque,
I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just
as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer
demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public
domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And
that is incompatible with a secular democracy.
This is exactly why Karl Popper, in his seminal work "The Open
Society and Its Enemies," insisted that one should not be tolerant
with the intolerant. Nowhere do so many religions coexist peacefully
as in a democracy where freedom of expression is a fundamental right.
In Saudi Arabia, you can get arrested for wearing a cross or having a
Bible in your suitcase, while Muslims in secular Denmark can have
their own mosques, cemeteries, schools, TV and radio stations.
I acknowledge that some people have been offended by the publication
of the cartoons, and Jyllands-Posten has apologized for that. But we
cannot apologize for our right to publish material, even offensive
material. You cannot edit a newspaper if you are paralyzed by worries
about every possible insult.
I am offended by things in the paper every day: transcripts of
speeches by Osama bin Laden, photos from Abu Ghraib, people insisting
that Israel should be erased from the face of the Earth, people
saying the Holocaust never happened. But that does not mean that I
would refrain from printing them as long as they fell within the
limits of the law and of the newspaper's ethical code. That other
editors would make different choices is the essence of pluralism.
As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about
calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular
trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for
debate as an insult and punish the offenders. That is what happened
to human rights activists and writers such as Andrei Sakharov,
Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, Boris
Pasternak. The regime accused them of anti-Soviet propaganda, just as
some Muslims are labeling 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper anti-
Islamic.
The lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian
impulses once, new demands follow. The West prevailed in the Cold War
because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease
totalitarian tyrants.
Since the Sept. 30 publication of the cartoons, we have had a
constructive debate in Denmark and Europe about freedom of
expression, freedom of religion and respect for immigrants and
people's beliefs. Never before have so many Danish Muslims
participated in a public dialogue -- in town hall meetings, letters
to editors, opinion columns and debates on radio and TV. We have had
no anti-Muslim riots, no Muslims fleeing the country and no Muslims
committing violence. The radical imams who misinformed their
counterparts in the Middle East about the situation for Muslims in
Denmark have been marginalized. They no longer speak for the Muslim
community in Denmark because moderate Muslims have had the courage to
speak out against them.
In January, Jyllands-Posten ran three full pages of interviews and
photos of moderate Muslims saying no to being represented by the
imams. They insist that their faith is compatible with a modern
secular democracy. A network of moderate Muslims committed to the
constitution has been established, and the anti-immigration People's
Party called on its members to differentiate between radical and
moderate Muslims, i.e. between Muslims propagating sharia law and
Muslims accepting the rule of secular law. The Muslim face of Denmark
has changed, and it is becoming clear that this is not a debate
between "them" and "us," but between those committed to democracy in
Denmark and those who are not.
This is the sort of debate that Jyllands-Posten had hoped to generate
when it chose to test the limits of self-censorship by calling on
cartoonists to challenge a Muslim taboo. Did we achieve our purpose?
Yes and no. Some of the spirited defenses of our freedom of
expression have been inspiring. But tragic demonstrations throughout
the Middle East and Asia were not what we anticipated, much less
desired. Moreover, the newspaper has received 104 registered threats,
10 people have been arrested, cartoonists have been forced into
hiding because of threats against their lives and Jyllands-Posten's
headquarters have been evacuated several times due to bomb threats.
This is hardly a climate for easing self-censorship.
Still, I think the cartoons now have a place in two separate
narratives, one in Europe and one in the Middle East. In the words of
the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the integration of
Muslims into European societies has been sped up by 300 years due to
the cartoons; perhaps we do not need to fight the battle for the
Enlightenment all over again in Europe. The narrative in the Middle
East is more complex, but that has very little to do with the cartoons.
flemming.rose at jp.dk
Flemming Rose is the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-
Posten.
? 2006 The Washington Post Company