Well, looky. Seems the whole situation with the Danish cartoons isn’t as simple as it appears. Salon has an interesting piece from Jytte Klausen, a Dane, on the whole debacle.
First, Denmark may not be the bastion of tolerance and free speech it has been historically regarded to be:
In the past five years, I have interviewed 300 Muslim leaders in Western Europe about their views and solutions for the integration of Islam. It has long been evident to me that religious toleration and reverence for human rights have been sorely lacking in Denmark. The debate now raging over the caricatures has tilted on the defense of free speech — but a deep and unflinching commitment to free speech is not really the mission of the paper at the center of the maelstrom, nor of the present Danish government.
Moreover, the paper that ran the cartoons originally is quite conservative and is essentially an organ of the ruling party in Denmark:
Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that originally published the 12 caricatures, has a circulation of about 175,000 and is Denmark’s largest paper. The paper’s main offices are in Aarhus, the country’s second-largest city, on the outskirts of town in an area zoned for industrial use. The building resembles a well-kept small manufacturing plant, but inside everything is white and pleasant. It is where I grew up, and in my family the paper still sits on our coffee tables. But don’t let the blond wood deceive you. Jyllands-Posten is a conservative paper and it has always minded the religious and political sensitivities of its readership, the Lutheran farmers and the provincial middle class.
In Denmark the national papers have historically been associated with the main political parties and the movements that formed them. Jyllands-Posten is associated with the prime minister’s party.
While some of the cartoons may indeed have some value as politico-religio commentary, others are clearly racist and were meant to cause trouble.
The Economist called the Danish cartoons a “schoolboy prank.” That describes them pretty well, but I like a few of them nonetheless. …. The rest are a predictable mix of self-righteous, unfunny commentary and depictions of shady-looking faces with big, bulbous noses and blood-dripping swords. They tab popular prejudices about Muslims as war-mongering and misogynistic blackbeards. They are the pebble that started a tsunami — but they were never meant to be innocent.
Incidentally, some of the cartoonists themselves recognized the inflammatory nature of the assignment (described by the paper as “exploring the effects of muslim activism on self-censorship” by soliciting cartoonists to submit drawings of “how they saw the Prophet.” ) For instance, one depicted Mohammed as a schoolboy writing over and over on a chalkboard, “Jyllands-Posten’s journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.”
On Sept. 30, 12 cartoons were published under the headline “Mohammed’s Face.” Rose cited a statement by a Danish stand-up comedian, who had complained that he was afraid to make fun of Mohammed on TV. A children’s book author complained that he could not get anyone to illustrate his book about Mohammed. Another example of Islamic pieties’ crushing influence on free speech was that three theaters had put on shows deriding George Bush, but none Osama bin Laden. Cartoons are an important anti-totalitarian expression, Rose wrote, and therefore the paper had asked 40 Danish cartoonists to draw their image of Mohammed. Only 12 responded. Rose implied that some of those who did not respond were infected by self-censorship.
I read this and the fact that the paper ran each and every cartoon that they received, regardless of artistic merit or pithiness or exercise of editorial judgment, leaped out at me. What kind of paper does that?
One that is looking to provoke a reaction.
But only from Muslims, because the paper didn’t exactly give free reign to another cartoonist who’d submitted drawings of Jesus, because that might offend the religious sensibilities of its own readership:
This all would have been very well if the paper had a long tradition of standing up for fearless artistic expression. But it so happens that three years ago, Jyllands-Posten refused to publish cartoons portraying Jesus, on the grounds that they would offend readers. According to a report in the Guardian, which was provided with a letter from the cartoonist, Christoffer Zieler, the editor explained back then, “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them.” When confronted with the old rejection letter, the editor, Jens Kaiser, said, “It is ridiculous to bring this forward now. It has nothing to do with the Mohammed cartoons.” But why does it not? Can you offend Muslim readers but not Christian readers? “In the Muhammed drawings case, we asked the illustrators to do it. I did not ask for these cartoons,” Kaiser said. “That’s the difference.”
And therein lies the truth. The paper wanted to instigate trouble, just not the kind of trouble it got.
I have to wonder what kind of trouble they were hoping for. Were they thinking that they’d get the Muslims in Denmark all riled up and be able to sit at their Danish modern desks and cluck their tongues about the inferiority of all those immigrants and that Denmark should be for the Danes?
Well, quite possibly. As Julia put it, once the reaction got rolling,
So now embassies are burning and (while mainstream islamic leaders condemn the riots) there is lovely juicy footage of islamic mob violence on every station and in every newspaper just as the effort to escalate against Iran ramps up.
Quel coinkydink.
I doubt very much that the editors of the paper that originally published the cartoons thought that things would turn out the way they have (they have, after all, acknowledged that while perhaps they had the right to publish the cartoons, they did not exercise good judgment in doing so). But clearly, they underestimated extremists in both the West and in the Middle East, both of whom are spoiling for an eliminationist fight. They wrote a check that someone else had to cash.
But back to the original publication. The paper, being closely affiliated with the ruling party, wasn’t alone in the shit-stirring:
And in this mission it acted in concert with the Danish government. “We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid,” boasted the minister of cultural affairs, Brian Mikkelsen, in a speech at his party’s annual meeting the week before Rose’s cartoon editorial last fall. Mikkelsen is a 39-year-old political science graduate known for his hankering for the “culture war.” He continued, “The Culture War has now been raging for some years. And I think we can conclude that the first round has been won.” The next front, he said, is the war against the acceptance of Muslims norms and ways of thought. The Danish cultural heritage is a source of strength in an age of globalization and immigration. Cultural restoration, he argued, is the best antidote.
Ah, yes. “Culture war.” Where have I heard that before?
It is worth noting that the cartoons did not provoke a significant outcry until much later — they were, after all, first published in September, 2005. It was only after they were reprinted by two Norwegian evangelical Christian magazines that the furor really started. From Julia:
It was still a primarily diplomatic wrangle, though, until two Norwegian evangelical Christian magazines reprinted the cartoons a week later with the stated intention of making a comment on Islam and terrorism (are you beginning to notice a common thread amongst the free speech enthusiasts here?) and all hell broke loose.
Well, not all hell – arab groups called for a boycott, there were threats against the newspaper that commissioned the cartoons, protesters burned flags and fired bullets in the air, and islamic countries recalled their ambassadors.
No, full-metal hell didn’t break loose until various newspapers in Europe, giving reasons ranging from support of free speech (see above) to anti-religious principles (France, of course), went ahead and reprinted the cartoons again. One brave soul printed them in Jordan. He’s been fired. The boycott, largely a pipe dream before last week, is now severely damaging danish industry.
In the meantime, the Danish Prime Minister missed an opportunity to put a lid on the reaction when he refused to meet with diplomats from several Muslim countries about the issue. He instead has maintained that this is purely an issue of free speech and that his government has no control over the paper.
Well, except that that’s not entirely true, given the links between the paper and his party and the existence of Danish law penalizing just what the paper did. Back to the Salon article:
The paper is related to the government, not by ownership but by political affinity and history. And Denmark is no paragon of free speech. Article 140 of the Criminal Code allows for a fine and up to four months of imprisonment for demeaning a “recognized religious community.”
A law which has been used in the past to punish those who demean Christians, by the way:
Back in 1975, Jens Jorgen Thorsen, a multimedia artist belonging to the “situationist school,” had a government grant provided to make a film about Jesus taken away. Five thousand young Christians had demonstrated in the street of Copenhagen against Thorsen and his movie and tumultuous scenes broke out. (Coincidentally, a police estimate held that about 5,000 people participated in one of the first demonstrations against the cartoons held in Copenhagen in October 2005.) Respected politicians spoke up and said that Thorsen had free speech, but if the blasphemy law had not been violated then certainly good taste and the feelings of religious Danes had the case dragged on in court forever with no conviction.
And right-wing Danish politicians are well aware that the blasphemy rule applies to demeaning statements about Muslims, given the efforts of some members of the Danish People’s Party to get it overturned, for less than noble reasons:
In the past two years, the Danish People’s Party has twice proposed to eliminate the blasphemy paragraph. Two of the party’s members, Jesper Langballe and Soren Krarup, both pastors in the Lutheran National Church, have described Muslims as “a cancer on Danish society” in speeches in parliament. They want to be free to say it outside parliament too.
I’ll let Julia have the last word, since I’ve been shamelessly stealing from her all along:
Free speech means that you have the right to express yourself. You even have the right to be protected by law from people you’ve offended who want to express their offense in illegal ways. It does not mean that if you act like a dumb [rude anglo-saxon noun] you’re really a brave warrior for truth and the rights of man or anything but a really, really dumb [rude anglo-saxon noun].
Congratulations, o culture warriors of the right. You’ve gotten the deep offense and the highly-telegenic violence you wanted. You must, although resembling them closely in many other significant ways, be much happier than pigs in shit.