Nope, it’s not a “row.” It’s a war.
At first take the name The Cartoon War may suggest something comic, exaggerated, or surreal. Those elements are in play– definitely in play. Cartoon and War are a collision, words that should not appear in the same serious sentence. They are a collision of values. But that’s the core of this, isn’t it? Likewise, the very real violence and anger add a heavy, instructive irony. The war between open and closed societies is not superficial, exaggerated, or surreal. The imagination is a battlefield. On a “technologically-compressed planet” the small and mundane –the cartoon– can quickly inflame; in a world of unfiltered, borderless information “the imagined” can have extraordinary conzequences.
Perhaps it should not be, but it is. Perhaps 9/11 should not have occurred, but it did.
Islamists are using the cartoons as a propaganda vehicle, but then they used Newsweek’s “Koran flushing” article. An implacable, unappeaseable enemy can use anything and everything as propaganda.
The Cartoon War is complex. It pits free speech against violent mobs. It also pits provocation against faith.
The conflict once again reveals the peculiar arrogance of some European Muslim immigrants: they cannot be criticized or satirized, though they freely critique and satirize Christians, Jews, and secularists.
UPDATE: “Islamist” is used in the sense The Economist uses the word– a “political” and “ideological” hijacking of Islam. I think The Economist coined it over a decade ago, with Bin Laden-types (Salafists) in mind. I suspect tyrants of various secular and sectarian stripes are using the photos as well– Syria as an example. I noted there is an ugly component that implicates the “free speech” advocates — that of provocation contra faith. All too many western “free speech extremists” lack any sense of reverence.
UPDATE 2: A fine post at New Criterion’s web log on this subject.
UPDATE 3: Please review the rules for posts on this blog. Your comment won’t appear if you use the usual DailyKos obscenities — I’ll never see it since the spam filter takes them out.
And a great post from The New Criterion
2.05.2006
Hamlet's question, updated
[Posted 11:01 AM by Roger Kimball]
Once again, Mark Steyn hits the nail on the head, puts the arrow in the bullseye, gets it just right. When the Danish newspaper printed 12 cartoon's of Mohammed, it not only meant to be provocative, but also to demonstrate the limits of tolerance. Their two misjudgments: 1) those limits turned out to be a lot narrower than they imagined and 2) support from the good guys, the devotees of tolerance and multicultural understanding, turned out to be exceeding thin on the ground.
In a normal world, a satirical cartoon provokes a laugh or a mutter, at most a letter to the editor. In the world of the Islamists--i.e., "really existing" Europe--it provokes murderous demonstrations, arson, and death threats. Again, in a normal world, when a bunch of ravening fanatics take to the streets and start burning your national flag and your embassy in some God-forsaken Middle-Eastern satrap, you stand up to the madmen. You might, for example, put the demonstrators in jail. You might also run those cartoons in every major paper for the next month. And you might expect your friends in other countries to do likewise.
That's in a normal world. In our world, you go into full-grovel mode, apologizing to the people who are burning your embassies and firing journalists who have the temerity to dissent. As Steyn points out, it's the "sensitive" thing to do.
One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they'll marvel at how easy it all was. You don't need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that's a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural "sensitivity," the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want -- including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers. Thus, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, hailed the "sensitivity" of Fleet Street in not reprinting the offending cartoons.
No doubt he's similarly impressed by the "sensitivity" of Anne Owers, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, for prohibiting the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and thus is offensive to Muslims. And no doubt he's impressed by the "sensitivity" of Burger King, which withdrew its ice cream cones from its British menus because Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word "Allah" in Arabic script. I don't know which sura in the Koran says don't forget, folks, it's not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name, but ixnay on both just to be "sensitive."
Is he, could he possibly be making this up? Alas, no: see for example, this story. Steyn has many other examples of suicidal paralysis--I mean "sensitivity." But here is the gravamen of the situation. Our Enlightened, "tolerant," soi-disant multicultural elites just don't know what concessions to make to people like this. Where's it all headed? I fear Steyn may be right:
One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, "To be or not to be, that is the question."
I think of Hilaire Belloc's little ditty: "Pale Ebeneezer thought it wrong to fight/ But roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right."
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