On the Fence | Voices of reason needed in Danish cartoon backlash

Ian Saxine Columnist

I had not planned to write two articles in a row touching on Islam and the international scene, but recent events have proven too compelling, too tragic, and too stupid to pass up. The latest flap in the world’s driest tinderbox, also known as the Middle East, has been over a number of cartoons published in a Danish newspaper. They were in response to an illustrator’s refusal to draw a picture of the Prophet Muhammad for a children’s book. The reason? He was afraid. So, a Danish newspaper took up the issue and requested submissions. Some of them were merely drawings, and some of them were political cartoons, several of them associating Muhammad with modern terrorism, including one that portrayed the Prophet with a bomb for a turban.

“Who offends Islam more?” asked Jihad Momeni, a former Jordinian Senator and editor of Shihan, a weekly Jordanian news publication. “A foreigner who endeavors to draw the prophet [Muhammad] as described by his followers in the world, or a Muslim with an explosive belt who commits suicide in a wedding party in Amman or elsewhere?” The answer, at least from the Jordanian government, was loud and clear. Momeni was fired from his job and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was not the only person to suffer that fate.

This all happened back in September, but recently the cartoons came to the attention of the wider Muslim world, and the result was, quite literally, inflammatory. Across the globe, Muslims took to the streets to protest the offensive illustrations, which broke Islamic law by illustrating the person of Muhammad, and then went a step further and essentially called the artist a terrorist. Such protests were, on some level, understandable. What is not is the wave of violence that accompanied the protests. Besides burning effigies of the Danes, not to mention Danish flags, mobs have torched the Danish embassies in Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. When other European newspapers printed the cartoons in a gesture of solidarity with free speech, their embassies were threatened or attacked. To date, the Austrian, Norwegian, Swedish, and American embassies in various Muslim nations have been attacked, and United Nations peacekeepers in Afghanistan were forced to fire on an enraged 600-person mob. The death toll from all of this is at least ten, though it will surely rise.

I can empathize with the angry crowds. On some level, I can even understand their distaste for local freedom of speech for which the unfortunate—and courageous—Jordanian editor Momeni has to suffer. After all, free speech is hard when you don’t like what’s being said. But to attempt to monitor—through mob violence, mind you—what a newspaper in a country thousands of miles away prints is a new level of stupidity.

Top officials in Syria and Iran, in danger of being outdone by mob violence, rose to the occasion with a truly stunning display of twisted logic. The Syrian ambassador to the United States blamed American and Israeli foreign policy for the recent rioting, although how the U.S. occupation of Iraq has anything to do with looting a Danish embassy wasn’t made clear. The Iranian government, long the global torchbearer of state sanctioned anti-Semitism, has blamed the cartoons on a Jewish conspiracy, and has called for a round of cartoons mocking the Holocaust to be published. This isn’t new, however, since Iranian radio shows frequently host American neo-Nazis, and the Iranian government is a veritable cornucopia of Judeophobia and Holocaust denial.

The Canadian branch of the Council for American Islamic Relations has joined in the fun, posting a statement on its website on Feb. 8, criticizing the Iranian scheme in one breath, while in the next, equating mocking the Prophet with Holocaust denial. Oh, and it made no mention of the deaths caused by a few cartoons.
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: the two most dangerous ideologies in the world today are American exceptionalism, characterized by Bush and his administration, and Islamic exceptionalism, characterized by Islamism, the body of thought advocating the political imposition of a fundamentalist version of the Shari ‘a, (Islamic law) on other nations. I honestly can’t decide which one is scarier right now. True, the American exceptionalists have more tanks, bombs, and planes. But they also have over half of electorate, including countless celebrities, intellectuals, and politicians, in vocal opposition to their policies. Islamists face far less opposition from their co-religionists and fellow citizens, at least in their own countries. Last week I read an op-ed piece from the Boston Globe that pointed out that Hindus have not burned down the local McDonald’s, even though it serves beef. Christians didn’t burn down the New York Museum of Art when it displayed pieces including a crucifix suspended in a jar of urine. Where are the people saying, “Hey you guys over there with the machine guns and grenades! What are you doing? You’re making us look bad. Why don’t you grow up?” Where are the voices of reason within Jordan, Syria, Iran, and other nations dominated or influenced by Islamism? In Jordan, those people are in jail.