Those Danish Cartoons…

The Danes have added a fresh member to what E.H.Carr would call the ‘club of historical facts’ – the Great Cartoon War of 2006. What is it all about and how will it play as history?

The cartoons are a series of 12 images printed in the paper Jyllands-Posten on 30th September 2005, including one which depicted the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb hidden in his turban. It does not require a great deal of sensitivity to realise that caricaturising Muslims as suicide bombers will offend many Muslims, is unfair to moderate Muslims and likely to provide ammunition for extermists. Since the issue has been debated so widely in the media in recent years, most people are aware that many Muslim clerics argue that the prohibition in the Koran on killing innocents in war means that suicide bombing, as it is practised by modern terrorists, illegal in Islam. The cartoon is therefore stupid and wrong.

On the other hand, free speech does mean that people will say or publish things that offend; and while I think the Jyllands-Posten was stupid to give offence needlessly, I defend their right to do it. By the same token, the right of free speech also allows Muslims to protest about the cartoons. So far, so good.

This week however, the whole issue has gotten out of hand and grown into a major issue. The cartoon war has become part of the history of the ‘clash of civilisations’. It is interesting, and sad, to see how the story has become contentious.

On the one hand, some of the western media has insisted that Muslim protests about the cartoons threaten freedom of speech. Several European newspapers reprinted the cartoons in solidarity with the Jyllands-Posten, which in my book counts as a particularly stupid thing to do – they could have voiced their support without adding to the injury. Ibn Warraq, in Spiegel Online, argued that if we in the west apologise for the cartoons, we will end up apologising for “Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe? Mozart, Beethoven and Bach? Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Breughel, Ter Borch? Galileo, Huygens, Copernicus, Newton and Darwin.” The steaming indignation that some media outlets have managed to muster is not really in proportion to the issue which would be better served by a lot less hysteria and a lot more reason.

On the other hand, some Muslim reaction is also out of order. It is wrong for Muslims to demand that western governments apologise for the western media, or censor it in some way to prevent this happening again. Western society does not work like that, the government does not control the media and should never try to do so. The western media print cartoons that offend our politicians on a daily basis by mocking their pretensions and policies and while the Danish cartoons are at a different level in that they do attack a whole religion, nonetheless, it is a fact that in a culture which is based on vigorous and open expression of ideas, people get offended. Occasionally breaking the limits of fair free speech is necessary if we are to be reminded of where those limits lie.

Even less acceptable is the reaction of Muslim radicals and militants who have threatened to use violence against westerners in the Middle East, or claimed that the cartoons are justification for further terror attacks in the west. The danger is such that two Danish members of the EU mission monitoring the border grossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip have been unable to go to work – work which helps the Palestinians. That is a very fundamental conflict of values between those who believe, wrongly, that power comes out of the barrel of a gun and those who see that violence and the threat of violence does not produce solutions.

Some interpretations of Islam are deeply at odds with the values of liberal democracy – but so are the views of many fundamentalist Christians, Jews or Hindus. The conflict is not between one religion and another, but between tolerance and intolerance. The difference between the pen and the sword is that the sword kills forever, whereas the offence given by the pen can lead to deeper understanding in the future.

As a hisorian, I wonder how this will be written up in 50 years time – as just another chapter in the cultural misunderstandings between Islam and the West? As a major turning point in the ‘clash of cvilisations’ that makes matters much worse by fueling hatred? or as an event that leads moderates on every side to make a renewed effort to foster mutual understanding and toleration?

I am also curious as to why the Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons originally, why it took so long to become a major story, and if there were local protests Denmark? The decision by several major media groups in Europe to reprint the cartoons is also interesting – apparently they took this decision independently but at the same time and this raises issues about historical inevitability. Is it accurate to say that given the cultural and ideological background of the media in the west, confronted by an issue like this, some editors will reprint the cartoons? Is it inevitable that enough editors will reprint the cartoons to create a major crisis? I don’t think it was inevitable, but the dynamics of the story; how it ‘grew legs’ and turned from a local Danish issue in a major international crisis are interesting. We have an option on contemporary crises in our dept, and I can see this being an interesting case study in that course.


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