Those Cartoons: Drawing The Line…
Islamophobia, like the poor, will, it seems be always with us and as the cartoon fracas splutters and fizzles beneath the ever-decreasing attention-span of Joe Public (translation: maximum vilification has been achieved and the chance of blowback is disproportionately high) it is probably a good time to attempt a summation as well as to round-up the last dying embers before they sink beneath the waterline.
So let’s nail this bad boy down once and for all. What exactly happened here? Let’s break it down into bite-sized chunks:
One: Cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
The basic gist was that the Prophet Muhammad was a terrorist and that it is really no surprise that there are terrorists in Islam today as Islam actually teaches intolerance and extremism.
Several months after these cartoons were published the present furore blew-up and people started losing it. Why? In part due to the activities of some Danish (radical?) Imams who apparently toured the Middle East bringing people’s attention to the cartoons (but strangely, using cartoons that were not from the newspaper).
The existence of these Imams is well documented, see for example Charles Moore in the Telegraph, but unfortunately they do not seem to be now locatable so who they are and where they were from remains a mystery for the moment.
Whoever they were, they were clearly part of a larger plan as the curious availability of a surplus of Danish flags for burning across the Middle East might suggest.
Two: Following things kicking off in the ME, the Western media piles in and hoists the sacred ‘Free Speech’ flag by way of an ostensible explanation or justification of the original publication. Just for good measure, amidst all the aggro, several other papers, notably French (quelle surprise) and German, pile more fuel onto the rapidly spiraling inferno by publishing the cartoons also.
The ‘party line’ for the publication was this: It was an experiment in Free Speech to test how far our ideals hold - what exactly can we say and where is the line drawn and by who?
The ‘party line’ for the Islamic response was this: Muslims have a total ban on figurative representation and this particularly applies to the Prophet.
The first of these is amorphous and is often framed in different ways according to the situation. Sometimes it is framed as ‘attempting to start a debate on terrorism’ - with the corollary that this ‘debate’ has somehow been prevented by extremists. In reality no such debate was intended or attempted. We know this because the cartoons existed for three months with no trouble - and no debate either - something happened to trigger the events.
The second ‘party line’ is spurious. No such ban exists.
Three: The ‘orthodox’ story more or less stops above at point two. It rumbles on interminably of course but it does not develop from there, at least in many people’s minds. It generally remains stuck at the point of rehashing one or other of the positions outlined above pro or against.
At this point there was the notorious demo in London where the extremists were kind enough to help write the next day’s headlines with tabloid-ready (albeit somewhat unwieldy) headlines such as ‘Butcher the Infidels’ etc. But perhaps the extremists were Sun-readers or something or of a class similar to that famous winger in the US with the ‘Morans go home’ placard. But I digress.
One of the protesters at this demo was dressed up as a suicide bomber. Of course there was tabloid outrage and everyone agreed that ‘these people were trying to stop Free Speech’. General shock and horror abounded. General consensus: this is the extremism we are dealing with.
But this is where thinking stops - if it ever started. Let’s analyze it:
The newspaper that published the cartoon argued that Free Speech is paramount and that they were merely making a point to encourage thought and debate. In the light of this, any offence caused was regrettable but should not interfere with the process which is an inalienable right.
But what if the ‘suicide bomber’ was doing exactly the same thing? What if he wasn’t an extremist at all (or a suicide bomber) but merely doing exactly the same thing from the other side of the coin?
Turns out this was in fact the case. This guy - who curiously was called Omar Khayyam (you just couldn’t make this stuff up could you?) - called a press conference. The BBC fed it live online and I heard it - he was very intelligent and articulate and outrightly condemned all terrorism and extremism (he is a Muslim obviously). He apologized to the families of the victims of the London bombs and said he knew how much it must have hurt but he just wanted to continue the debate in the same way as the cartoons but from another angle.
I thought at the time that this would present a problem for the media and was very curious to know what turn the debate would not take in the light of this - clearly he was doing the same thing: causing offence. He wasn’t actually threatening violence. He was just being very, very offensive. But then that’s what Muslims claimed the cartoons were.....tricky.
As it turns out, this is a debate we’ll never have (imagine my shock) as he is now languishing behind bars at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Turns out he was a major-league Crack dealer who was out of jail on parole. Bit silly to hold a press conference let alone dress up as a suicide bomber when you’re out of jail on parole but it’s a funny old world and as we know only too well, many people in it are completely doolally. Maybe he was one of them. Who knows?
Four: Before I get any flames, I disagree with this next one - I am merely recording the development of the issue.
It seems that Iran has weighed in to the furore and organized their own ‘Free Speech’ test. They are organizing a Holocaust Cartoon Contest.
I disagree with this just as I disagree with the original cartoons - on the grounds it is divisive and no good can come of it. Just like the originals. Note: that does not mean I am calling for a ban or would want one (has anyone called for a ban actually on the cartoons? Not sure), I just don’t think it’s a very good idea.
But my opinions are not the point - what will be interesting to see is whether those people who supported Free Speech in the first case are equally supportive here. Personally I am not obsessed with some beatified vision of a ‘Freedom’ that we do not possess and which is not in any Government or Nation’s power to bestow anyway - especially at the expense of encouraging racists and Nazis who anyway need very little encouragement to do a bit of the old stomping on their minority of choice in some dark alley somewhere. But that’s just me.
Five: So we come full circle. The newspaper Jyllands-Posten argued that offence was not a factor and that ‘Free Speech’ transcended such paltry considerations.
However, it seems that this was not always the case. A couple of years ago the paper refused to publish cartoons lampooning Jesus on just those grounds.
Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have caused a storm of protest throughout the Islamic world, refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ, it has emerged today.
The Danish daily turned down the cartoons of Christ three years ago, on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers and were not funny.
In April 2003, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to Jyllands-Posten.
Zieler received an email back from the paper’s Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them.”
“In the Muhammad drawings case, we asked the illustrators to do it. I did not ask for these cartoons. That’s the difference,” he said.
“The illustrator thought his cartoons were funny. I did not think so. It would offend some readers, not much but some”.
You just couldn’t make it up could you.......only they did.
Links
Godbothering
Techieness &
Design
Mystic Mayhem
ParaPolitics
Everything Else
Archives
Recent Entries
Meta
