Cartoons an Excuse for Illegal Expressions of an Ideology?
Every life is precious—which is why, to the exclusion of the more than a million people who go missing each year in the United States, I’m not going to supplement with my analysis the already-considerable resources that have been brought to bear on the tragic disappearance of Natalee Holloway, the 18-year-old girl from Alabama who vanished nearly a year ago from the island of Aruba. Leaving this single case in the hands of Greta Van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera, and others who have become its experts, I’d like to take this opportunity to explore an ideology that, by posing a threat to every U.S. citizen’s unalienable right to liberty in the form of freedom of expression, is arguably more treacherous than the widely assumed denial of one U.S. citizen’s unalienable right to life.
The ideology to which I refer is that which galvanizes radical Muslims, inciting riots, let alone other forms of unacceptable behavior, in response to things like cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, 12 of which were published last September by Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. Because the Islamic faith explicitly prohibits depictions of Muhammad, one can imagine that a person of this faith might be offended by such images. Even so, any such person ought to take into account the context within which the offense occurred—in this case, not the Muslim world, but the West, where, because of the separation of church and state, doing cartoons about religion is “fair game,” particularly for non-Muslim cartoonists who aren’t bound by the religion’s prohibition from depicting Muhammad. Context-specific or not, I don’t know that being offended warrants the destruction of property and/or other illegal activities. Perhaps this was the realization to which the Danish imams and their radical Muslim organizations came earlier this year when, according to The Brussels Journal, they proposed to end the cartoon dispute on two conditions, the first of which is presumed to have already existed and the second of which was met shortly after it was proposed: (1) a guarantee from the Danish authorities that Muslims can freely practice their religion without being “provoked and discriminated” and (2) a declaration from Jyllands-Posten that it had not published the cartoons with the intention of mocking the Islamic faith.
Notwithstanding this early-year effort of the Danes to appease its radical Muslims, the situation generally appears to have gone from bad to worse; in addition to a mob’s destruction by fire of the building that housed the Danish embassy in Damascus, Denmark’s radical Muslims have fueled the controversy by distributing three additional, arguably much more offensive, images that it has misleadingly attributed to Jyllands-Posten. Is it any wonder that Western sources that had published the cartoons from Jyllands-Posten to express their solidarity with the Danish paper are now being applauded by other Western sources on the ground that, had they not done so, far fewer people would realize that the more offensive images were not, in fact, among the 12 that Jyllands-Posten had published?
Indeed, I am myself tempted for this reason, let alone others, to post the images. For the time being, however, I’m inclined to exercise the restraint of which radical Muslims seem to be incapable—not because I’m a person who’s persuaded by unacceptable behavior or the “fear and trembling” that it tries unsuccessfully to impress, but only because I choose to do so out of consideration for their more moderate brethren who’d probably think me to be nothing worse than slightly insensitive if I were to exercise my option to do the opposite. In the meantime, I may take to drinking Carlsberg beer and doing anything else I can to support a country that, like my own and despite at times considerable pressure to do the contrary, refuses to be intimidated by impulsive radicals who would deprive them of liberty.
The ideology to which I refer is that which galvanizes radical Muslims, inciting riots, let alone other forms of unacceptable behavior, in response to things like cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, 12 of which were published last September by Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. Because the Islamic faith explicitly prohibits depictions of Muhammad, one can imagine that a person of this faith might be offended by such images. Even so, any such person ought to take into account the context within which the offense occurred—in this case, not the Muslim world, but the West, where, because of the separation of church and state, doing cartoons about religion is “fair game,” particularly for non-Muslim cartoonists who aren’t bound by the religion’s prohibition from depicting Muhammad. Context-specific or not, I don’t know that being offended warrants the destruction of property and/or other illegal activities. Perhaps this was the realization to which the Danish imams and their radical Muslim organizations came earlier this year when, according to The Brussels Journal, they proposed to end the cartoon dispute on two conditions, the first of which is presumed to have already existed and the second of which was met shortly after it was proposed: (1) a guarantee from the Danish authorities that Muslims can freely practice their religion without being “provoked and discriminated” and (2) a declaration from Jyllands-Posten that it had not published the cartoons with the intention of mocking the Islamic faith.
Notwithstanding this early-year effort of the Danes to appease its radical Muslims, the situation generally appears to have gone from bad to worse; in addition to a mob’s destruction by fire of the building that housed the Danish embassy in Damascus, Denmark’s radical Muslims have fueled the controversy by distributing three additional, arguably much more offensive, images that it has misleadingly attributed to Jyllands-Posten. Is it any wonder that Western sources that had published the cartoons from Jyllands-Posten to express their solidarity with the Danish paper are now being applauded by other Western sources on the ground that, had they not done so, far fewer people would realize that the more offensive images were not, in fact, among the 12 that Jyllands-Posten had published?
Indeed, I am myself tempted for this reason, let alone others, to post the images. For the time being, however, I’m inclined to exercise the restraint of which radical Muslims seem to be incapable—not because I’m a person who’s persuaded by unacceptable behavior or the “fear and trembling” that it tries unsuccessfully to impress, but only because I choose to do so out of consideration for their more moderate brethren who’d probably think me to be nothing worse than slightly insensitive if I were to exercise my option to do the opposite. In the meantime, I may take to drinking Carlsberg beer and doing anything else I can to support a country that, like my own and despite at times considerable pressure to do the contrary, refuses to be intimidated by impulsive radicals who would deprive them of liberty.
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