The Cartoon Controversy proves a few things. First, multiculturalism and freedom are not synonyms (I thought of titling this essay "freedom of speech, which threatens it more, the State or Culture?). Second, the United States and Europe continue to grow apart, and may already constitute distinct civilizations, with Europe being at once more liberal and traditional (liberty and tradition are not antithetical: what was Edmund Burke if not a liberal of the Right?). Third, the greatest threat to freedom of speech and of the press, and hence of thought, in North America is not the government, but the culture, specifically the many cultures and nations residing within the empire, and the ideology which holds them together. In Europe, there are strict laws banning certain kinds of speech; in America (thanks to the First Amendment) there are no such laws, but there is something far worse here – self-imposed censorship, and we have seen just how efficient and soothing a method of repression it is. Here the censors are the boards of directors, the lawyers, and the public relation departments of the media conglomerates. And not only them: newspaper editors, news anchors, and reporters are censors too; as are educators; and the people themselves, organized into various phalanxes of ethnic and religious assertion. In America, it appears, the people have internalized the apparatus of repression in the form of sensitivity codes, politically correct taboos, multicultural myths (the products of years of conditioning by teachers, advertisers, journalists, and television producers and writers), and the result is a population of informers, ready to cheer on the bombing of Baghdad but afraid to stand up to their boss, talk back to power, or print a cartoon.
I know that there are some who believe that the publication of the anti-Islamic cartoons last year was intended as a deliberate provocation, intended to stir things up, rattle Europeans, prepare the ground for the next war; that some neoconservatives, maybe even some within the government, were behind it. Maybe so. But whether that's how it started or not, the issue has become nothing less than freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the tradition of critical inquiry, and the freedom to satirize, versus politically correct inspired self-censorship. Have we forgotten John Milton's magnificent Areopagitica (1644)? I confess to having done so, but I'm rereading it now. Libertarians may not want to hear this – that they have more to contend with than the Government – but I make no apology in stating an unwelcome truth.
Denmark Strikes a Blow for Freedom
On September 17, the Danish newspaper Politiken reported that a writer had tried and failed to find an illustrator for his book about the founder of Islam. They all feared reprisals. This was not paranoia. Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was assassinated in 2004 for making a film about the repression of women in the Islamic world. Hearing of this – the latest example of the climate of fear and intimidation had settled over Europe with regard to all things Islamic – the cultural editor of another Danish paper, Flemming Rose, the editor of Jyllands-Posten's, decided to commission a group of satirical cartoons about Islam (the artists to remain anonymous for their own protection), and the paper published twelve of them on the last day of September 2005. Right after that, a group of local Muslim imams demanded to see the Dutch Prime Minister about the matter. Quite rightly, he refused. The imams took their complaints to the resident Arab ambassadors, ten of whom demanded to see the Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, on October 21. Again, he refused – a brave and dignified act inconceivable by an elected leader in the United States subjected to such pressure. The implicit threat (do something or we'll cause trouble) became explicit on October 14 when street protests were staged in Copenhagen, and the imams filed a criminal complaint against the paper on October 27. Then Islamik Trossamfund, an organization of Muslims living in Denmark, sent a delegation to the Islamic world showing off the cartoons. They added three more to their dossier of incitement (43 pages long), which they either plucked from a batch of hate mail (their claim) or fashioned themselves, as an extra inducement to riot and mayhem. They had great success at the summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, held in Mecca on December 6, attended by delegates from 57 Islamic nations. The OIC issued a communiqué condemning both the cartoons and the practice of "using freedom of expression as a pretext for defaming religions." The delegates also began to organize a boycott of Danish goods. Peaceful it might be, but it was still a form of economic coercion whose object was to curtail freedom in the West.
European Solidarity
On January 10, a Norwegian Christian paper, Magazinet, in a gesture of solidarity with the Danes, republished the cartoons. On February 1 (Wednesday), newspapers in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany reprinted all or some of the cartoons. They were France Soir, Spain's El Mundo, Italy's La Stampa, and Germany's Die Welt. Some of them paid an immediate price. The managing editor of France Soir, Jacques LeFrance, who published all twelve of the cartoons, was sacked by the owner, Raymond Lakah, who then issued a groveling apology: "We express our regrets to the Muslim community and all people who have been shocked or made indignant by the publication." The remaining editors, led by Serge Faubert, rebuked him. "Imagine a society that added up all the prohibitions of different religions," they wrote. "What would remain of the freedom to think, to speak and even to come and go? We know societies like that all too well. The Iran of the mullahs, for example. But yesterday, it was the France of the Inquisition, the burning stakes and the Saint Bartholomew's Day (a 16th century massacre of Protestants)." The editor of Die Welt, Roger Koppel, was equally defiant. He said the publication of the cartoons was an integral part of the "news value of the story," and added that "in our culture, we have a tradition that even our most holy things can be subjected to satire or criticism. Muslims in our culture have to understand that in our culture, the representation of a holy man has another meaning." Note the confident phrase: in our culture. On February 2 (Thursday), more newspapers in Europe published the cartoons, including ones in Switzerland, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Hungary. The editor of the Swiss Le Temps, Patricia Biel, boldly defended her paper's decision: "Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are fundamental achievements made by democratic societies, and the latter do not have to bow in the face of demands that endanger these hard-won principles." On February 3 (Friday), the Irish Daily Star (Dublin) also published the cartoons. Many European leaders refused to bow to the increasingly violent protests. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, having earlier declined to be kicked on demand, still refused to apologize: "A Danish government can never apologize on behalf of a free and independent newspaper." Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister began as if he were going to grovel ("It is not normal to caricature a whole religion as an extremist or terrorist movement") only to add that the violent protests and extreme reaction "would suggest the caricaturists were right." Vive La France! That's the spirit that turned back the Moors. Wolfgang Schauble, the interior minister of Germany: "Here in Europe, governments have nothing to say about which paper publishes what." Exactly.
The Cartoons
During February, Bahrain's Gulf Daily ran a one-word headline reading: "Apologize!" Let's examine the three most printed cartoons to see if that demand has any merit. One cartoon depicts a knife-wielding Mohammed, suggesting that he was a man of violence. The historical record is fairly clear that he was a warrior; that he spread his religion not only be the power of the word but by the power of the sword. A second illustrates the oppression and degradation suffered by many Muslim women. A third satirizes the notion that suicide bombers have a ticket to Heaven with coupons for sixteen-year-old virgins. Are these untruthful, disrespectful, idolatrous? I'll let the reader decide (they seem eminently defensible to me), but Muslims have no right to impose upon non-Muslims their view of what is sacred or true, even if the imposition is carried out by peaceful means. Christians have had to put up with much worse than what the Muslims are complaining about, and in their own country: Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and, lest we forget, Serrano's "Piss Christ" (1987), and that's just a sample. Why should Muslims be any different? And why should a non-Western religion be accorded a privileged status within Western European civilization?
Anglo-American Appeasement
That Bush and Blair care nothing for civil liberties is not news. So why should we be surprised that when the assault on press freedom began they were nowhere to be found? But they had their underlings suggest that the crisis could be assuaged by a cringing apology. The U.S. State Department denounced the cartoons as "offensive to the belief of Muslims" and declared their publication "unacceptable." Kurtis Cooper, the department spokesperson, did his best imitation of a Sunday-School scold: "We all fully respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility." (The second clause exposes the insincerity of the first.) Later, the Secretary of State, Condi Rice, tried to gain political advantage by blaming the governments of Syria and Iran for stirring up all the trouble.
The British government sent mixed signals. On the one hand, Tony Blair's spokesman said that the government would exert no pressure on English papers ("It is entirely a matter for media organizations to decide what they want to do"); but they didn't need to apply any pressure: the English press was self-censoring; not one English paper published any of the cartoons. Then the execrable Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, pro-war and politically correct, condemned the publication of the cartoons as "unnecessary, insensitive, disrespectful, and wrong" and praised English papers for their "considerable responsibility and sensitivity" in self-censoring.
Some Brave Britons
An editorial in the London Telegraph (February 2) warned against the "appeasement of forces hostile to Western values," even though the editors shrunk from printing the cartoons. "Muslims must accept the predominant mores of their adopted culture," the editors intoned, and "Muslims who cannot tolerate the openness and robustness of intellectual debate in the West have perhaps chosen to live in the wrong culture." Why the "perhaps"? And what happens when they reject those mores, but also refuse to leave?
Mathew Parris did better, accusing his paper, the London Times, of "kowtowing to pressure." He defended the freedom to satirize and mock with this astute and telling observation: "Many faiths and ideologies achieve and maintain their predominance partly through fear. They, of course, would call it u2018respect.' But whatever you call it, it intimidates. … Against reverence and awe the best argument is sometimes not logic, but mockery. Structures of oppression that may not be susceptible to rational debate may in the end yield to derision. When people see that a priest, a rabbi, imam, or uniformed official may be giggled at without lightening striking the impertinent, arguments may be won a deeper level than logic." That's very good.
The American Press Corps: Multicultural Warriors
How did the American press react? As of this writing, less than five newspapers in the United States of America ("land of the free, home of the brave," a phrase now more meaningful as irony than poetry) have had the courage and professional ethics to publish even one of the controversial cartoons. The Philadelphia Inquirer was the first. Its editor, Amanda Bennett, said simply, "This is the kind of work that newspapers are in business to do." What kind of a country do we live in when such a plain, matter-of-fact, expression of basic journalistic duty sounds as heroic as Patrick Henry oath of defiance hurled at the British Empire? The Austin American Statesman was the second. But where were the flagship publications, the newspapers of record: the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times? I'll tell you where they were – "in the rear with the gear," running as fast as they could away from the sounds of a mob ransacking and burning an embassy, hiding behind the cant of political sensitivity and cultural diversity, writing elaborate rationalizations of cowardice and betrayal. Shame!
Animal Farm in the Heartland
For an egregious example of such special pleading go to the website of the St. Louis Post Dispatch (my home town paper) and read commentary page editor Eric Mink's article (February 8) defending the right "not to publish." He calls it an exercise in "editorial judgment"; I call it self-censorship. I want to ask him: If one cannot examine the cartoons, how can one render an independent and informed judgment on their propriety? Are we, or are we not, citizens of a free and self-governing country? Who are you to decide whether we can see these cartoons or not? The existence of the internet provides editors like Mink with a copout. They can say, as he has, that if one wants to see them one can go to this or that website, but not here.
A week later, the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois, dared to go where adults fear to tread. On February 9, the paper printed six of the cartoons. The reaction was immediate and censorious: the wringing of hands, expressions of consternation and dismay, calls for reeducation seminars and disciplinary proceedings. The chancellor of the university, Richard Herman, criticized the paper's editors, as did leaders of various student groups (the proud products of years of educational conditioning in ethnic sensitivity and group think). And, of course, Muslim students raised the flag of victimhood and demanded a forum to harangue the infidels. Shaz Keiserruddin, president of the Muslim Student's Association, deplored "hate speech" hidden under "the guise of free speech," and pointed to the rising tide of "Islamophobia." Shaz added that they were organizing "meetings" with university officials and student leaders to combat anti-Islamic prejudice and hate. Sounds great!
The two editors responsible, Acton Gorton and Chuck Prochaska, bravely stood their ground, refusing to apologize or admit they had done anything wrong. This marked them as recalcitrant, in need of official punishment, and they soon got it. First, the paper's student editorial board ran an editorial that accused the two of a "blatant abuse of power," and then apologized for them "to the Muslim community as well as the rest of our readership." Two days later, the two editors were suspended and a "student task force" was formed to "investigate the internal decision-making and communication" that led to the crime of publication. As the two student editors were burned alive at the stake of political correctness, the St. Louis Post Dispatch was silent, except for one independent voice – columnist Bill McClellan, the voice of old St. Louis, and a direct descendant of the General George McClellan, heroic commander of the Army of the Potomac (1861–1862) and Democrat candidate for president in 1864. In a February 20th column (stltoday.com), McClellan gently chided his own paper for not running the cartoons and failing to support the two student editors. "These cartoons from Denmark have become an integral part of a big news story. The public ought to be able to see them. Besides, when people are willing to kill in the name of religion, their decision becomes fair game to editorial cartoonists. That's what a free press in a secular society is all about…. My daughter, who attends the university, asked me what I would have done had I been the student in charge of the paper. I'd have published the cartoons, I said. First of all, I lean to the u2018free press-secular society' side of this particular debate, and second, we're talking about a university campus, and if you can't debate this stuff on a university campus, where can you?" Nowhere, that's where, Bill.
Would Jefferson Recognize the Republic of Fear?
The atmosphere of repression and thought control in this country is redolent of the worst days of the Puritans, or maybe even Stalin's time. We can see here how free speech dies: it is slandered as hate speech and institutionally and culturally proscribed – all in the name of diversity and tolerance. Hard-headed liberals (e.g., Jefferson) have always believed that liberty had to be fought for, and sometimes that fight is not physical but psychological, finding the moral courage to resist the sensitivity codes and thought police and minority bullying that is suffocating intellectual freedom in this country. Publish the cartoons? Yes, and a thousand times YES!
March 7, 2006
