Gwynne Dyer: Defending The Life of Brian
cyprusmail: "Without this there would be no Life of Brian," said Roger Koeppel, editor-in-chief of the German newspaper Die Welt, claiming that his decision to republish the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that have caused such offence to many Muslims was a free speech issue. "It's at the very core of our culture that the most sacred things can be subjected to criticism, laughter and satire." That is true, but it is not the only truth.
Europeans did not overthrow the power of Christian religious authorities to kill people who disputed their version of the truth just to hand it to Islamic religious authorities several centuries later. There is no contradiction, however, between asserting the right of free speech and condemning those who use it to inflict gratuitous pain on others. Particularly when it is the powerful abusing the vulnerable.
Jyllands-Posten, which originally published the series of 12 cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed over four months ago, has the largest circulation of any Danish newspaper. Denmark's Muslim community, only 170,000 strong, is one of the most marginalised and beleaguered in Europe, and the governing coalition includes a large party that is explicitly anti-immigrant and implicitly anti-Muslim. The paper's culture editor, Flemming Rose, claims that the decision to commission 12 cartoonists to lampoon Muhammad was just an attempt to start a debate in Denmark on self-censorship in the media, but he got a lot more than that for his money.
The cartoons were neither clever nor funny, and two of them were blatantly offensive. One depicted Mohammed himself as a terrorist, his turban transformed into a fizzing bomb; the other showed him speaking to a ragged queue of suicide bombers at heaven's gate saying "Stop, stop, we've run out of virgins." They deliberately implied that Islam is a terrorist religion, and Denmark's Muslims quite reasonably demanded an apology. It was still a storm in a very small teacup - but then the usual suspects got to work. Read more
Europeans did not overthrow the power of Christian religious authorities to kill people who disputed their version of the truth just to hand it to Islamic religious authorities several centuries later. There is no contradiction, however, between asserting the right of free speech and condemning those who use it to inflict gratuitous pain on others. Particularly when it is the powerful abusing the vulnerable.
Jyllands-Posten, which originally published the series of 12 cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed over four months ago, has the largest circulation of any Danish newspaper. Denmark's Muslim community, only 170,000 strong, is one of the most marginalised and beleaguered in Europe, and the governing coalition includes a large party that is explicitly anti-immigrant and implicitly anti-Muslim. The paper's culture editor, Flemming Rose, claims that the decision to commission 12 cartoonists to lampoon Muhammad was just an attempt to start a debate in Denmark on self-censorship in the media, but he got a lot more than that for his money.
The cartoons were neither clever nor funny, and two of them were blatantly offensive. One depicted Mohammed himself as a terrorist, his turban transformed into a fizzing bomb; the other showed him speaking to a ragged queue of suicide bombers at heaven's gate saying "Stop, stop, we've run out of virgins." They deliberately implied that Islam is a terrorist religion, and Denmark's Muslims quite reasonably demanded an apology. It was still a storm in a very small teacup - but then the usual suspects got to work. Read more
posted by exoplanet at 8:34 PM
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