Leave it to the great hedonist to put things in perspective. I am wading back into the Mohammed Cartoon fiasco because I feel like I have perhaps presented an unbalanced view of my own thoughts on the subject, so please bear with me. This will hopefully be the last time it demands my attention.
There have been several things that have really bugged me about this whole brouhaha besides the one I mentioned in my last post on the subject. First and foremost amongst these is the incredible double-standard; not in the “well they shouldn’t have printed the cartoons” sense, but rather in the way that riots and protests are being considered. When thousands of people march and even riot in, lets say Quebec City, burn a few buildings and scuffle with police, they are called fringe-lunatics and dismissed, and the other 330 million people on this continent escape judgement.
Of course when thousands of Muslims protest, and riots encouraged by terrorists and political groups begin, it casts a pall over everyone. Curious double-standard, no? The usual responses to this sort of observation are “well Westerners didn’t fly to planes into the World Trade Center, or behead Nick Berg.” This is true, but irrelevant. People are being lumped together because they are muslims, which is lazy and dangerous. The fact remains that in spite of everything that has transpired there are anywhere between 500 million and 1 billion Muslims worldwide. The name of Islam been dragged through the mud by extremists who are hell-bent on violence and ideology, and instead of trying to dialogue with muslims or engage them constructively, the Afterpostens instead joined in the parade.
I have no vested interest in this subject. I’m not a muslim, cartoonist or journalist. My country hasn’t been rocked by riots or scandals, I have not been personally insulted or attacked, nor has anyone I know. That being said, I was offended by the cartoons in question; the same way I would expect any Jew I know to be offended by a cartoon of Jesus burning down Solomon’s temple. The fact is that those sorts of cartoons are relegated to trashy propaganda leaflets and underground websites. Yet the editors in question felt that this sort of material is fine, because it’s depicting the Islamic faith.
Again, I cannot condone violence, nor do I support that tacit rejection free speech and rejection of all things Danish. At the same time muslims have a legitimate beef. They do have a right to be angry at Denmark, not the government per say, but the people of the country. It was them who didn’t feel there was anything wrong with offending an entire religion, and didn’t practice the second-most important part of free speech: speaking up in response; not through censorship or violence, but through letters, phone calls and a refusal to purchase the paper in question.
I will close with a hypothetical. Say I’m the editor of a major daily newspaper, the biggest in Canada, and I decide to print a cartoon that shows a malicious looking Jesus pouring gasoline on the Temple of Solomon (the most holy place in Judaism), with a match in the other hand and a mischevious grin spread across his face. Ask yourself this: would I be fired? If not, would thousands of people, and not just Christians write in complain, leading to a public outcry? If one didn’t happen, the other would. Well that outcry never happened in Europe, and Muslims have a legitimate beef when they step back and ask why?
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