Feb 03 2006
Cartoon Antics
I wrote yesterday we in the West had an opportunity to communicate with moderate muslims the challenges and frustrations that come with free speech. The Middle East has no concept of the double edge sword which is freedom. The responsibility for taking care of ones self, the anger at rude and crude zealots from all sides, the risks of not having centralized control over everthing.
The Cartoon Antics gave us an opportunity to commiserate with our moderate Muslim neighbors and comment on how free speech means you get what you paid for. Free means whatever pops out of someone’s head. It is not high quality much of the time. It is insensitive much of the time. It is critical to have all the time.
We seem to be blowing the opportunity. Instead of commiserating with those outraged and joking about how freedom is not a Nirvana, we seem to be shoving the cartoons into their faces and screaming at them to deal with it.
The outrage voiced peacefully at the cartoons is valid and correct. It is what freedom means. But somehow we are yelling past each other. And it is playing into the terrorists hands
BERLIN (Reuters) – Muslim fury over cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammad in European newspapers provides dangerous ammunition for radical Islamists and could serve as a pretext for violence, security analysts said on Friday.
But they said any such action was more likely for the time being to be directed against individuals than to take the form of full-scale terrorist attacks.
The “low intensity” risk is for further anti-European protests in the Muslim world, said security analyst Claude Moniquet, referring to angry demonstrations in Gaza and the storming of a building housing the Danish embassy in Jakarta.
“The bigger risk is to see … al Qaeda or another major terrorist organization getting hold of this affair and using this as a pretext, for example, to kill hostages in Iraq or commit an attack somewhere in Europe. That is not very probable but it’s possible,” said Moniquet, head of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center in Brussels.
Germany, where at least three newspapers have published the cartoons, acknowledged on Friday that the row could complicate attempts to free two German engineers held hostage by a militant group in Iraq.
I was hoping we in the West would take a more reasoned approach to this. I see plenty of support for the right to print the cartoons – which I support. I do not see enough outreach and acknowledgement that political cartoons can be rude, crude and only worth covering the bottoms of bird cages.
The outrage and the irreverence to Islam can be geniune and there is nothing wrong with that. Cartoonists claim they want to evoke strong emotion. As long as violence is not in the mix, the outrage is the proper response in societies who value freedom of speech.
We in the West need to make sure every0ne is clear on this distinction and not simply yell ‘get over it’. That signals we simply do not care about honoring others.
[…] Which is why it pains me to say how disappointed I am with her latest post. From my small little niche in the blogosphere I have tried to alert folks to the fact that we need to be setting an example to the moderate Muslims how to deal with ugly free speech. The best way is to dismiss hate speech and marginalize it. Not one of the best ways is to get in an escalating yelling match: No, you go to hell. […]
I think it is a mistake to denigrate the Prophet Mohammed. He didn’t do 9-11 and lived hundreds of years ago.
Denigrating Mohammed plays right into the hands of the terrorists’ propaganda about the West’s contempt for Islam. It exacerbates the sense of inferiority and injury of many Muslims, and the terrorists rely on this sense of inferiority and injury in their recruiting.
The Western media would be better advised publish the anti-semitic and anti-Western cartoons shown in the Arab media.
I have a background in Soviet Studies. I always tried to find the Soviet media admitting what the Communist Party was doing. Because the media was a mode of communicatin with the Communist Party, these admissions could be found, albeit in distorted form. This way, I couldn’t be dismissed as “anti-soviet.”
Here are an that suggests that Western media show readers the disgusting cartoons in the Arab media, which is state-controlled:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/2/3/113616.shtml?s=et&promo_code=1ABE-1
“Muslims all over the world are outraged over a series of cartoons that have appeared in European newspapers in recent months that feature the prophet Mohammed in ways that suggest he condones terrorism….These same outraged folks, however, have yet to express a peep of protest over cartoons that routinely appear in the Arab press, which poke fun at the 9/11 attacks and the Holocaust.
Mideast media watchdog Tom Gross has collected on his Web site a few of the cartoons that keep some of these sensitive souls in stitches…One knee-slapper that ran Qatar’s Al-Watan newspaper nine months after the 9/11 attacks shows former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon watching as an Israeli plane crashes into the World Trade Center. The Arabic words alongside the Twin Towers are “The Peace”…Then there’s the cartoon that appeared in the Jordanian newspaper Ad-Dustur in October 2003, which depicted the railroad tracks to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The punchline? Israeli flags have replaced the swastikas flying above the death camp – with a caption that reads: “Gaza Strip or the Israeli Annihilation Camp†…And for those who can’t appreciate the humor in that tableau, there’s always the cartoon that ran in Saudi Arabia’s Arab News in April 2002, which shows Prime Minister Sharon wielding a swastika-shaped axe to chop up Palestinian children”….As Mr. Gross notes: Most print media in the Arab world are under the full or partial control of the ruling regimes. “
I think the site for Tom Gross is
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com
Right now they are exceeding their bandwidth, so you can’t see it.
On the other hand, maybe this provocation makes the radicals surface so they can be identified:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1702104,00.html
“Outside the Danish embassy in London, demonstrators burned the Danish flag before ripping it apart. Scuffles broke out at Hyde Park Corner, as marchers clashed with a motorcyclist who called them “extremists”. He was protected by police as some demonstrators surrounded him.
Anjem Choudhary, one of the leaders of the demonstration, refused to condemn the threat of another suicide attack in London on the scale of the July 7 bombings as a result of the perceived insult to Islam. “I am not in the business of condoning or condemning,” he said. “The fact is that 7/7 was brought upon the people of London and Britain by the foreign policy of Tony Blair. There is no reason why there should not be more suicide bombings in London.”
Passersby stopped police officers to ask why the marchers were being allowed to carry banners threatening further suicide attacks in the city. One police officer replied: ‘Don’t worry. We are photographing them.'”