As the Journal pointed out, what began as a local Danish dispute was elevated into an international controversy thanks to the intervention of the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian governments. From there it was not long before the most radical and vile elements of the Islamic world were able to harness the issue to their own purposes.
In doing so, the Islamists proved the essential point suggested by the cartoon of a be-bombed, turbaned Mohammed: that Islam harbors a virulent strain of belief that is not only violent in nature but terrorist by design. That peaceful Muslims were offended by the image is understandable, but the fact remains that for the vast majority of the world’s peace-loving citizens of all persuasions, it was an apt analogy.
That, we suspect, is the underlying reason why so many papers in Europe — and at least three in the United States — saw fit to reprint the cartoons. In doing so, they were not only endorsing the Western ideal that freedom of speech should be sacrosanct and that the cartoons to non-Muslims were clearly within the Western tradition of political comment. At least two, the now-infamous turban-bomb one and another lampooning suicide bombers who acted on the promise of heavenly satisfaction from hundreds of virgins, hit uncomfortably close to the bone.
So commonplace are outrageous graphic libels and slanders published in the Islamist press, that when Iran’s leading newspaper announced a contest for the funniest depiction of the Holocaust, it was met with the equivalent of an international shrug. “There they go again,” those hate-filled Islamic radicals.
Denunciations of the Islamofascists are certainly welcome, but they are too few and too far between. The Islamic world is one where theocracy, not liberty, is the watchword. Women are oppressed, gays are executed, and freedom of speech is unknown or severely restricted. Witness the repeated calls for the destruction of Israel if you want to view the face of Islamic intolerance.
But hypocrisy is rampant everywhere. Over the past 20 years Western democracies have significantly weakened the institution of free speech by adopting so-called hate-crime laws. These laws criminalize speech that, for example, denies the existence of the Holocaust. As reprehensible as those vile opinions may be, the people who hold them should not be imprisoned as they have been in France and Germany. Great Britain has recently adopted watered-down but still restrictive codes that make it more difficult to criticize the religion of others. Too many American campuses are ruled by speech codes that seek to cleanse discourse from what is not only vulgar and socially unacceptable, but also that is deemed politically incorrect according to institutional standards of received opinion. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News operation has tried to bully American corporations that adopted the benign and inclusive “Happy Holidays” greeting into accepting the Christian but restrictive “Merry Christmas.” The Republican Party that effectively controls all three branches of government subtly and not so subtly promotes various schemes favorable to organized religion in the face of opposition among those who don’t believe in a deity, or don’t believe that others should be forced to believe. And then there is Turkey, that Asian nation that wants to join the European Union: it is prosecuting perhaps its most internationally well-known novelist for national slander for daring to recognize the genocide the Turks visited on the Armenians. The Armenians, who understandably do not want the world to forget the horrors inflicted on them, themselves maintain a brutal and repressive regime. The irony of all this is so intense as to be painful.
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On the Web:
View the cartoons: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/698
