Month: February 2006

"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong," – G. K. Chesterton.

An interesting perspective.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, how this war has so often come down to what we are and are not allowed to see. We were not allowed to see (for long) the video deaths of those who jumped out of the World Trade Center. We were not allowed to see the coffins of soldiers arriving back in the U.S. We are still not allowed to see the most revealing photographs of what really happened at Abu Ghraib (the case is still tied up in appeals). We were not allowed to see the beheading of Nick Berg. And now we are not allowed to see the cartoons that are being used by Islamists for another round of violent intimidation of free societies.

And then, of course, there is what makes this war different. The web has made it possible to see almost all of this, if you look hard enough. Only the government-withheld Abu Ghraib pics are actually out of view for most people – and, even then, some have been kept back by editors, who see their job as preventing the flow of information, rather than enabling it. And so we have two media now in the world. We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward, to become an arbiter of sensitivity and good taste. And it’s up to places like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, images and informed opinions. Obviously, I don’t see the need to publish everything. And editorial judgment counts. But we are approaching a time when the MSM may have that as precisely its role – not as a source of informaton, but as an arbiter of social etiquette and good judgment. The NYT as Miss Manners.

It is a myth that Islam has not allowed depictions of the Prophet. It is a myth that ridicule of religion is impermissible in Islam. Amir Taheri and "Omar" below make this clear:

The truth is that Islam has always had a sense of humor and has never called for chopping heads as the answer to satirists. Muhammad himself pardoned a famous Meccan poet who had lampooned him for more than a decade. Both Arabic and Persian literature, the two great literatures of Islam, are full of examples of "laughing at religion," at times to the point of irreverence.

So, in refusing to publish the cartoons at issue, the American media are simply following the line not of Islam but of radical Islamists, who engineered this outbreak of violence in the first place. Of course, even if the images violated a religious taboo, that’s no reason not to print them. What journalists print should be designed to provide news and data for readers, not to assuage extremist religious sensibilities. Would the NYT refuse to depict a Terence McNally play because of fierce opposition by Christianists? Of couse not. So why the double standard? Or is one of the criteria for journalism now not relevance to a global story but conformance to religious sensibility?

"Callous" is a very strong word for the cartoons published by Jyllands-Posten. But that’s how the New York Times critic has described the banal sketches in a newspaper that will not publish the material it is criticizing:

"They’re callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as a provocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting the general Muslim prohibition on images of the Prophet Muhammad to score cheap points about freedom of expression."

"Cheap points"? It’s a "cheap point" to illustrate the climate of fear and intimidation that free artists and writers live under in Europe when tackling the issue of Islam. It’s "cheap" after the fatwa against
Salman Rushdie, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the police protection for many others, now including the editors of Jyllands-Posten. Choosing sides between those who would murder and kill and those who would simply draw and provoke is, for Michael Kimmelman "exasperating." After all, the newspaper that published them could be broadly described as "conservative". "Conservative" in a land where the welfare state is well to the left of America’s Democratic party. The pusillanimity of the New York Times on this subject is another low-mark for the paper. They have the gall to run vicious commentary on images they will not publish. Below are two images: one of the Virgin Mary constructed out of dung and supported by public funding; and one of the "callous" Danish cartoons, that pokes fun at the newspaper that ran them. The NYT will publish one but not the other. They are not journalists. They are merely cowards.

Here they are. One the NYT will print. The other it won’t. You find some rational criterion for the decision.

This is a pretty pathetic comment:

"When you bring it out early, you are going to leave it open for the spinmeisters in Rove’s machine, the Republican side, to tear it to pieces," said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.

Let me find that tiny violin. It’s around here somewhere. I’m not a Democrat and don’t think I ever could be, but here’s what I’d say if I were in opposition right now. These guys are corrupt and incompetent. They have screwed up the Iraq war, turned FEMA into a joke and landed the next generation with a mountain of debt. We’re for making the homeland safer, winning back our allies, and taking on the Iranian dictatorship. We’re for energy independence, universal healthcare and balancing the budget again. Now, let Rove do his worst. Hey, we need Democrats who relish the fight, not timid ones who cower at the prospect. Bring back the happy warriors. Please.

"You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago and we here in the Middle East have tonnes of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

What I want to say is that I think the reactions were planned to be exaggerated this time by some Middle Eastern regimes and are not mere public reaction. And I think Syria and Iran have the motives to trigger such reactions in order to get away from the pressures applied by the international community on those regimes." – the indispensable Omar, at Iraq the Model.

This is a riveting debate on the whole cartoon issue between my friend, Irshad Manji, and As’ad AbuKhalil, professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. Her website is here. His is here. I have yet to find an opponent of Jyllands-Posten’s decision to publish the cartoons who is prepared to defend the mob violence and intimidation that has ensued. What I find instead is a mealy-mouthed equation between "extremists on both sides." I find the equivalence troubling. There is simply no equivalence between people who merely want to publish and people who use the veiled threat of violence to intimidate them. But I have learned one thing: I wasn’t as aware as I should have been of the razor-edge sensitivity of many Muslims to any depiction of their faith that is not completely orthodox. All I can say is that a self-confident faith is not this defensive and touchy. It can and must brush off provocation, or be consumed by it. Whem more Muslims can look at a banal cartoon of Muhammad with the same equanimity that most Catholics experience when viewing South Park’s bleeding Virgin Mary, we will live in a calmer, safer world.

New York Press’s entire editorial staff just quit, after the publisher refused to print the Danish cartoons. Wow.