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political cartoon has a long history. Some of it is bright
and noble: Goya satirized the Catholic Inquisition with his
wonderful cappricios; Daumier held up the mirror by
which French society could see itself toward the latter part
of the 19th century; George Grosz scandalized
“good society” with his portraits of the decadent rich and
the despondent victims of World War I; Art Spiegelman dared
to use images employed by the Nazi propagandists to depict
the lives of Jews amid the Holocaust while his teacher, the
late Will Eisner, told the story of the fabrication known as
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in The Plot.
Each of these artists used the cartoon to foster reflection,
expose the excesses of the powerful, and build a feeling of
humanity denied. The best evidenced a sense of critical
engagement and cosmopolitan responsibility. Their work
needed the protection accorded by civil liberties because it
dared to contest the reigning belief and the arbitrary
exercise of power.
But the
tradition of the political cartoon also has another
historical tendency. It can be found in the portrait of a
lecherous Voltaire sodomizing his niece; the depiction of
“little Sambo” and the slaves who love their slavery; the
pornographic treatment of Jews in the pages of the Nazi rag,
Der Sturmer, edited by the notorious Julius
Streicher; or the caricatures of Gandhi and the victims of
colonialism who deserve the exploitation they get. Cartoons
such as these undermine reflection, toady to the powerful,
and rub out any sense of a common humanity. They disfigure
what Emmanuel Levinas called “the face of the other” and,
when caught in the act, plead that they are “testing the
limits” and immediately insist upon their right to free
speech. This tradition defines the artistic context for
those political cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb
in his turban, and the others with like-minded stereotypic
and racist images, which provoked the rage of Muslims during
February of 2006.
Jullands-Poste, a right-wing Danish newspaper, first
published the twelve insulting cartoons in September of
2005. Haughtily aware of their civil liberties, ignoring the
tensions within a newly multicultural society, and the
cultural vulnerabilities of Muslim immigrants, the Danish
editors said that they never would have published the
cartoons “had they only known” about the violence that they
would unleash. Part of the problem does stems from a general
lack of knowledge of the “other” that reigns in both the
Occident and the Orient. The degree to which such ignorance
is strong is the same degree to which any sense of
cosmopolitan responsibility will prove weak. Nevertheless,
there is something disingenuous about all of this.
When I was
ready to send off A Rumor about the Jews: Anti-Semitism,
Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion (Oxford University
Press: New York, 2000) it occurred to me that few of my
readers would actually have read the Protocols. It became a
question for me of whether or not to include selections from
this bigoted fabrication or not. Including some selections
would obviously mean publicizing a work of anti-Semitic
rubbish, possibly offending a number of Jews and on top of
that, since my book was to appear simultaneously in English
and German, perhaps running afoul of the hate speech
provisions legislation existing in the Bundesrepublik.
Cutting to the chase: I decided that including these
offensive selections was necessary for pedagogic purposes. I
was willing to deal with the fact that good pedagogic
intentions can lead to unfortunate consequences and that one
doesn’t always know in advance what kind of impact these
selections might have.
In truth,
however, none of this applies to the European editors who
published the cartoons. There was no pedagogic intent
involved. It does not take genius to figure out that
lampooning the Prophet is a particular grievous blasphemy
for the adherents of Islam. Any reasonably intelligent
person should know that. No less than the Jews, the Muslims
consider iconography blasphemous and the depiction of their
Prophet an insult. Even if the original publication of the
cartoons was driven by pedagogic intent, moreover, it was
unnecessary for other editors of other papers to reprint
them. They could easily have been described and, for those
perversely interested, the initial website could have been
noted so that, if members of the audience wished, they could
still sneak a peek. It is not free speech that is involved
here but the hypocrisy of commercial media seeking a
sensation as well as a lack of cosmopolitan responsibility.
Islamic demonstrations against the cartoons only broke out,
indeed, roughly four months after their initial publication.
That was after other conservative and anti-immigrant papers
elsewhere in Europe had reprinted the images and mullahs
both within and outside Europe decided to turn them into
a cause celebre. The cartoons were not used to edify
and inform but to sell newspapers and build ratings. It was
less the initial publication of the cartoons than their
incessant reprinting that fanned the flames and turned the
publishing of a few cartoons into a deadly provocation.
The intent
behind their publication was evident from the start and the
cartoons satirizing the Prophet soon enough gave birth to
others and a variety of stunts. A group of Iranian soccer
players were depicted as suicide bombers. A right-wing
Italian politician, Roberto Calderoli, paraded in front of
television cameras with an offensive cartoon emblazoned on
his T-shirt thereby sparking deadly demonstrations against
the Italian consulate in Libya. A “wall of separation” now
exists not only in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The
Danish People’s Party has gained support from the
controversy unleashed by Jyllands-Posten or that its
cultural editor, Flemming Rose, should now view the outrage
against the cartoons as a “wake-up call” for the Danes.
Little wonder that Rose, an ardent admirer of the
neo-conservative and ultra-Zionist writer, Daniel Pipes,
should have claimed that “Danish people are no longer
willing to pay taxes to help support someone called Ali who
comes from a country with a different language and culture
that is 5000 miles away (The New York Times
2/12/06).” The backlash is evident everywhere in Europe,
which is now reconsidering bringing Turkey into the European
Union, and especially in France where a new piece of
legislation proposes making it more difficult for low-income
immigrants to bring in relatives. Indeed, those who were
most outraged were the same as those who published or
supported the cartoons in the first place.
Since
9/11, there has been a tendency to identify Islam as the
enemy in the “war on terror.” Western leaders have,
admittedly, sought to draw distinctions between the majority
of believers in Islam and its fanatical minority.
But this attempt has floundered on the reef of right-wing
media demagoguery. The constant saber rattling of western
nations in the Middle East, and a general privileging of
Israeli interests. Western nations led by the United States
are not radically at odds with the bulk of the Islamic
community. All too predictably, however, a small circle of
Islamic fanatics pounced on the cartoons to justify their
own fanaticism. The breakdown of whatever cosmopolitan
sensibility existed in the West was precisely what the
Islamic radicals sought to bring about through the violence
that they both fostered and manipulated.
The Danish
imam, Abu Laban, sought to fan the flames of anger by
distributing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed as a
pig and a pedophile that had supposedly been “received” by
Muslims in Denmark (The Economist 11 February 2006,
pg. 25). The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, blamed
the cartoons on a Zionist “plot” to revenge the electoral
victory of Hamas in Palestine. Syria played up the cartoons
and approved mass demonstrations that deflected other issues
like nuclear energy and terrorism. In Pakistan, where
numerous villagers were recently killed by an “errant” U.S.
missile, the cartoons sparked riots that were directed
against the secular government of General Pervez Musharraf
and his alliance with the United States. The protests were
generated both from the top down and from the bottom up.
Many took place in Europe but most, understandably, occurred
in states with a Muslim majority or a sizable minority like
Afghanistan and Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka,
Kenya, Indonesia, and the Sudan.
Flags were burned, official apologies
were demanded (and refused), and protestors set fire to
Danish and other western embassies throughout the Middle
East. Death threats were made to the editors of papers that
carried the cartoons. Nine were killed in Libya, ten in
Afghanistan, and more than one hundred in Nigeria where, in
the aftermath of Muslim attacks on churches and Catholic
shops, Christian mobs revenged themselves on their
neighbors. Cries of “Strike, strike, bin Laden” could be
heard in Khartoum, Islamabad, and Gaza. Israel and the
United States were excoriated, and millions of dollars in
property were destroyed. In various places, demonstrators
numbered in the tens of thousands. Dismissed were the
majority of demonstrations that were generally peaceful and
the voices of reason in the Muslim community – like the
Ayatollah Ali Sistani, leader of the Shi’ites in Iraq -- who
denounced the violence. It was not simply the number of
demonstrators; it was their vehemence that sold the papers.
Reactionaries and enemies of the Enlightenment ethos in the
Occident and in the Orient have thus increasingly appeared
as mirror images of one another. The mainstream media on
both sides of the great divide have been irresponsible in
their presentation of the controversy. One, ostensibly
“free,” but dependent on the market; the other controlled by
authoritarian figures who can only benefit from the
displacement of resentment. Each has played down ideological
and political distinctions among the supposed enemy of
civilization and fanned the flames of a symbolic politics
that permits no compromise. What was popularly considered a
vindication for the “clash of civilizations” is better
understood as a conflict between fanatics ignorant of the
“other,” and themselves opposed by cosmopolitan voices
within their respective communities, in both the East and
the West.
Highlighting free speech without referring to the ethical
sense of responsibility for its exercise – a cosmopolitan
responsibility under conditions of increasing globalization
and the growing interface between radically different
cultures -- can only render liberal ideals abstract and
produce what Herbert Marcuse once termed “repressive
tolerance.” There has always been a tension between the
imperatives of law and the dictates of morality and it is
perverse to discuss one without reference to the other.
Maintaining a commitment to free speech does not
imply that any given media outlet must accept any piece of
news or literature that comes across the desk of an editor.
It is also not simply a matter of shouting “fire” in a
crowded building. Editors for publishing houses and
magazines routinely reject manuscripts and newspapers need
not accept advertisements from neo-Nazis. Consensus
determines the particularly “legitimate” range of political
debate and criticism in the United States. Even sports
commentators who once made far more timid racial remarks, or
who insulted one specific community or another, were fired
from their jobs. Most European nations also have laws
against “hate speech:” Britain, in fact, still has a
blasphemy law that criminalizes defaming the Christian God,
Austria has just imprisoned the Holocaust denier David
Irving, while the most famous Holocaust denier, Ernst Zundel,
is facing trial on 14 charges in Germany.
The mullahs are surely correct when they note that
denying the Holocaust, or inciting anti-Semitism, is usually
considered a crime while insulting Islam and its Prophet is
viewed as a legitimate expression of free speech.
As with
everything else in this preposterous controversy, however,
the outraged Muslim fanatics were as cynical as their
opponents in exploiting an opportunity and too rarely
question their own reliance upon the double standard. They
say nothing about government-sponsored publication of works
like the Protocols of Zion or the use of vile anti-Semitic
textbooks throughout the Middle East. Such activity only
further poisons the political atmosphere. The manifest
inflammation of anti-immigrant feelings by the right-wing
European media does not justify the attempts of Islamic
fanatics and bigots to intensify anti-Semitic and
anti-Western sentiments. Responding to these hateful
anti-Islamic cartoons by placing an $11 million bounty on
the head of the Danish cartoonists or creating a contest
that would award a prize for the best caricature of the
Holocaust shows a dearth of emotional maturity and
cosmopolitan responsibility. Such posturing self-indulgence
is indefensible and inexcusable: the victim thereby becomes
defined by what he should oppose. It is best to recall
Gandhi’s statement that responding to a grievance with the
claim of “an eye for an eye” will quickly leave the whole
world blind.
Two
options present themselves. Either legislation that makes
denying the Holocaust or defaming Christianity a crime must
be extended to Islam or all such legislation must be wiped
off the books. The problem with the first position is that
racism would be driven underground and its purveyors might
well turn into martyrs. Censoring critics of religious faith
could easily enable reactionary religious institutions to
insulate themselves from any type of meaningful criticism.
What’s more, historically, disastrous forms of “blowback”
resulted every time the Left has sought to constrain civil
liberties. With respect to the second position, however,
expanding free speech in legal terms says little about
issues of cosmopolitan responsibility regarding its
exercise. There is little concern with abused sensibilities
that might produce violence. Adherents of this stance are
content to insist with Ronald Dworkin, the important
political and legal theorist, that “religion must be
tailored to democracy, not the other way around.”
Unfortunately, however, that is not enough. It is necessary
to begin with the understanding that the word is not the
deed. Commitment to expanding the realm of discourse is a
fundamental element of the Enlightenment legacy and the best
political traditions. Yet there is no reason why such a
commitment cannot be linked with the insistence upon legal
sanctions against violent acts of prejudice. Calls for
special legislation directed against “hate crimes” also
derive from the Enlightenment legacy. Such legislation was
passed in the United States in the aftermath of the 1960s
and it had a profound impact on organizations and mobs
engaged in racist practices directed against people of
color, gays, and other “outsiders.”
It is
imperative that progressives move beyond the present
discursive impasse. In the aftermath of the cartoon
controversy, free speech and civil liberties are seen as now
part of the arsenal by which supposedly innocent right-wing
editors in Europe can defend provincial and racist
provocations while traditionalists and fundamentalist
proponents of Islam insist upon protection from satire and
criticism for themselves, though not the adherents to other
religions, in the name of human dignity. Or, putting it
another way, hypocritical beneficiaries of liberalism and
equally hypocritical manipulators of religious faith have
each gotten their fair share of the ideological profits from
this debate. The endless platitudes converge in creating a
climate of constraint and, for all the moral posturing, they
expose a position that is content to let sleeping dogs lie.
This
climate of constraint is insidious. Just recently, in fact,
the debut of a play about Rachel Corrie – the young activist
who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to
protect the home of a Palestinian family – was cancelled due
to fear of offending the Jewish community. Little time has
been spent in this controversy on how religions and ethnic
groups can use the outrage expressed by partisans of Islam
as a precedent to shield its own dogmatists from criticism.
Even less time has been wasted on those brave newspaper
editors in Jordan and Yemen whose willingness to publish the
cartoons not only genuinely tested the theocratic
institutions and moral boundaries of their communities but
cost them their jobs, their standing and – ultimately –
perhaps even their lives. It is always easy for the powerful
and complacent to forget that context counts when talking
about the exercise of liberty. Those who really do think
differently have – as usual – been abandoned.
Rational
radicals will in the future not only have to confront a new
form of repressive tolerance, but the repressive
manipulation of “sensitivity” by those seemingly unaware
that meaningful free speech has always had a bite. Critical
thinkers will, by the same token, ever more surely have to
develop criteria for making ethical -- not simply
legal -- judgments about the role, the limits, and the
possibilities of free expression. It is not enough simply to
let the hand-wringing provincial defenders of the “liberal”
state and the provincial upholders of “illiberal” religions
continue baiting one another forever. The partisans of
radical thinking must break the deadlock by beginning to
reconsider the positive aims that critique should
serve.
Caught
between an imperative not to destroy free speech, and
another imperative not to offend anyone by its exercise, the
work of genuine radicals will become ever more difficult.
They will increasingly have to justify their assault on the
status quo in terms different from those employed by the
phony rebels -- the “shock jocks” and their ilk --who
identify freedom with license. The controversy produced by
these incendiary images has made it necessary to provide new
social content and cosmopolitan meaning for the notion of
liberty. That is a stiff challenge. It is, however, one that
each generation of genuine radicals has had to face and it
is unavoidable for those who would foster the cause of
freedom.
See the excellent article by
Sayeed Hasan Khan and Kurt Jacobsen, “Experiencing
Islam, British Style" in Economic and Political
Weekly 4 February 2006
Stephen Eric Bronner is Professor of
Political Science at Rutgers University. The author of
Reclaiming the Enlightenment (Columbia,) and Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies,
Rightwing Ambitions and the Erosion of Democracy
(Kentucky), he is the Senior Editor of Logos.