Europe's cartoon battle lines are drawn in shades of grey, not black and white
Lost in the furore over violent protests is any condemnation of the deliberate provocation by newspaper editors
Jonathan Steele
Saturday February 11, 2006
The Guardian
It is not often that the left agrees with Tony Blair, let alone George Bush. But the good sense the two leaders have shown in the Danish cartoons affair by siding with leftwing and liberal critics of the offensive drawings' publication is one of the more remarkable aspects of the drama. The Bush-Blair position is a useful antidote to those who claim that fear is stalking the offices of western newspapers, where cowardly executives allegedly shrink from publishing anything that might upset Muslims. Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, which first printed the unfunny cartoons, says he wanted to break away from Denmark's "self-censorship" in the face of Islam. Other European papers that followed suit boasted of courage.
They will find it hard to claim that the men (Bush and Blair) who sent ground troops into one of the oldest capital cities of the Arab world, and still keep them there on an open-ended basis in spite of opposition from a majority of Iraqis, are afraid to upset Muslims. Nor can one seriously argue that Bush is now trying to appease the Islamic world after "learning a lesson" from Iraq. He continues to inflame many Muslims with his sabre-rattling over Iran.
The fact is that on the cartoon issue the great neocon and his ideological advisers were pragmatic and smart enough to see that the drawings were in poor taste, deliberately provocative and grotesquely inaccurate in suggesting that every Muslim is a murderous would-be martyr and, worse still, that the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing.
Bush's reaction shows that Americans have a better understanding of multiculturalism than most Europeans (not including the British.) Racial, religious and ethnic discrimination are obviously still present in the United States, but its long history of mass immigration, as well as the American constitution's emphasis on individual rights regardless of origin, led Americans long ago to come to terms with the cultural differences within their rainbow nation and celebrate diversity. E pluribus unum - "unity from many" - as their motto puts it.
In Britain we are further back. If there is a tolerance spectrum, with resistance to diversity at one end, acceptance of it in the middle and celebration of it at the other end, Britain lies somewhere near the middle. It was no accident that Jack Straw, with his Blackburn constituency and a substantial following of moderate Muslim voters, was the first minister to denounce the cartoons. He knew how offensive his constituents found them. No doubt the Foreign Office's Arabists also put in a word, and this time were listened to.
Denmark is still at the spectrum's prejudiced end, a traditionally mono-ethnic country that has not yet accepted the new cultures in its midst. Public discourse is stuck where it was in Britain a generation ago, with angry talk about "guests" who ought to conform to the "host country" or go home. Try telling that to a Kurdish refugee from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, let alone to his Copenhagen-born son.
In an excellent piece in Der Spiegel, Jytte Klausen, a Danish political scientist who has interviewed more than 300 Muslim leaders in western Europe over the past five years, says "religious tolerance and respect for human rights have been sorely lacking in Denmark". She quotes Brian Mikkelsen, the minister of cultural affairs and a fierce advocate of cultural "restoration", as saying just before the cartoons appeared: "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid."
When the demonstrations started and other papers in Europe printed the cartoons in "solidarity" with Jyllands-Posten, they compounded the initial anti-Muslim error by trying to stir up a continental clash of civilisations. But why should a progressive paper in Britain feel "solidarity" with anti-immigrant Danish editors who made a major error of judgment rather than with British Muslims who universally deplored the cartoons?
Now the issue has moved beyond the decision to print the cartoons and become a question about the limits of protest. However justifiably outraged, should demonstrators boycott a country's products, let alone carry slogans calling for beheadings? Overreaction may be more offensive than the initial provocation. It is also counterproductive. It is likely to create even more Islamophobes.
Here too it is important to keep cool. The cartoon row is being seized on by people with a gamut of special agendas. In Gaza, the first protesters who attacked EU offices were not from Hamas but were hotheads linked to the defeated Fatah movement as well as Islamic Jihad and others who never contested last month's elections. The protesters may have wanted to embarrass Hamas or snatch the limelight for their own movements.
In Iran, the deliberately confrontational new president is exploiting what he sees as yet another way of keeping grassroots support. He came in on a platform of promises to help the economic underclass but has failed to deliver, even as Iranian capital flees the country, the stock market falters and investors hold back on new projects in fear of war with the United States. What easier diversion than despicable denials of the Holocaust and synthetic tirades about the cartoons being a western conspiracy?
In Lebanon, anti-Syrian politicians use the crisis to denounce Damascus for allegedly getting marchers to burn the Danish embassy in Beirut - a charge which feeds into the frantic internal power struggles that are paralysing Lebanon's current government. And let us not forget that the protests against Denmark began in conservative Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, which has a broadly pro-western foreign policy. Even the Saudis only reacted after Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, refused to receive a protest delegation of Danish Islamic leaders and ambassadors from Muslim countries. The Danish government's insensitivity and rudeness were almost as offensive as the cartoons.
Several days after the dispute erupted, Bush rang Rasmussen to express support. But he was careful to say he was acting "in light of the violence against Danish and other diplomatic missions", not in solidarity with the phoney free-speech issue.
A huge responsibility now rests on the mainstream European media. The extremist slogans carried during the anti-cartoon protests do not represent the views of all Muslims and should not be portrayed as such. Moderate Muslim leaders in European countries have been speaking out all week to urge restraint and condemn the protesters' violence, just as in Britain they condemned Abu Hamza's incitement to murder long before the courts did. The trouble is that these long-standing tensions and arguments in Muslim communities where voices of moderation have consistently sought to counter the radicals were rarely reported. Extremism is a better story.
Muslims are not only an important part of Europe's new diversity. They are diverse among themselves. To suggest that, because almost all of Europe's Muslims felt offended by the cartoons, they all support slogans calling for revenge and beheadings is as inaccurate as it is for people in Muslim countries to claim that every European approved the cartoons' publication. There are liberals, conservatives, modernisers and traditionalists in all communities, just as there are those who know the bounds of good taste and bigots who do not.
guardian.co.uk
Lost in the furore over violent protests is any condemnation of the deliberate provocation by newspaper editors
Jonathan Steele
Saturday February 11, 2006
The Guardian
It is not often that the left agrees with Tony Blair, let alone George Bush. But the good sense the two leaders have shown in the Danish cartoons affair by siding with leftwing and liberal critics of the offensive drawings' publication is one of the more remarkable aspects of the drama. The Bush-Blair position is a useful antidote to those who claim that fear is stalking the offices of western newspapers, where cowardly executives allegedly shrink from publishing anything that might upset Muslims. Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, which first printed the unfunny cartoons, says he wanted to break away from Denmark's "self-censorship" in the face of Islam. Other European papers that followed suit boasted of courage.
They will find it hard to claim that the men (Bush and Blair) who sent ground troops into one of the oldest capital cities of the Arab world, and still keep them there on an open-ended basis in spite of opposition from a majority of Iraqis, are afraid to upset Muslims. Nor can one seriously argue that Bush is now trying to appease the Islamic world after "learning a lesson" from Iraq. He continues to inflame many Muslims with his sabre-rattling over Iran.
The fact is that on the cartoon issue the great neocon and his ideological advisers were pragmatic and smart enough to see that the drawings were in poor taste, deliberately provocative and grotesquely inaccurate in suggesting that every Muslim is a murderous would-be martyr and, worse still, that the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing.
Bush's reaction shows that Americans have a better understanding of multiculturalism than most Europeans (not including the British.) Racial, religious and ethnic discrimination are obviously still present in the United States, but its long history of mass immigration, as well as the American constitution's emphasis on individual rights regardless of origin, led Americans long ago to come to terms with the cultural differences within their rainbow nation and celebrate diversity. E pluribus unum - "unity from many" - as their motto puts it.
In Britain we are further back. If there is a tolerance spectrum, with resistance to diversity at one end, acceptance of it in the middle and celebration of it at the other end, Britain lies somewhere near the middle. It was no accident that Jack Straw, with his Blackburn constituency and a substantial following of moderate Muslim voters, was the first minister to denounce the cartoons. He knew how offensive his constituents found them. No doubt the Foreign Office's Arabists also put in a word, and this time were listened to.
Denmark is still at the spectrum's prejudiced end, a traditionally mono-ethnic country that has not yet accepted the new cultures in its midst. Public discourse is stuck where it was in Britain a generation ago, with angry talk about "guests" who ought to conform to the "host country" or go home. Try telling that to a Kurdish refugee from Saddam Hussein's Iraq, let alone to his Copenhagen-born son.
In an excellent piece in Der Spiegel, Jytte Klausen, a Danish political scientist who has interviewed more than 300 Muslim leaders in western Europe over the past five years, says "religious tolerance and respect for human rights have been sorely lacking in Denmark". She quotes Brian Mikkelsen, the minister of cultural affairs and a fierce advocate of cultural "restoration", as saying just before the cartoons appeared: "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid."
When the demonstrations started and other papers in Europe printed the cartoons in "solidarity" with Jyllands-Posten, they compounded the initial anti-Muslim error by trying to stir up a continental clash of civilisations. But why should a progressive paper in Britain feel "solidarity" with anti-immigrant Danish editors who made a major error of judgment rather than with British Muslims who universally deplored the cartoons?
Now the issue has moved beyond the decision to print the cartoons and become a question about the limits of protest. However justifiably outraged, should demonstrators boycott a country's products, let alone carry slogans calling for beheadings? Overreaction may be more offensive than the initial provocation. It is also counterproductive. It is likely to create even more Islamophobes.
Here too it is important to keep cool. The cartoon row is being seized on by people with a gamut of special agendas. In Gaza, the first protesters who attacked EU offices were not from Hamas but were hotheads linked to the defeated Fatah movement as well as Islamic Jihad and others who never contested last month's elections. The protesters may have wanted to embarrass Hamas or snatch the limelight for their own movements.
In Iran, the deliberately confrontational new president is exploiting what he sees as yet another way of keeping grassroots support. He came in on a platform of promises to help the economic underclass but has failed to deliver, even as Iranian capital flees the country, the stock market falters and investors hold back on new projects in fear of war with the United States. What easier diversion than despicable denials of the Holocaust and synthetic tirades about the cartoons being a western conspiracy?
In Lebanon, anti-Syrian politicians use the crisis to denounce Damascus for allegedly getting marchers to burn the Danish embassy in Beirut - a charge which feeds into the frantic internal power struggles that are paralysing Lebanon's current government. And let us not forget that the protests against Denmark began in conservative Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, which has a broadly pro-western foreign policy. Even the Saudis only reacted after Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, refused to receive a protest delegation of Danish Islamic leaders and ambassadors from Muslim countries. The Danish government's insensitivity and rudeness were almost as offensive as the cartoons.
Several days after the dispute erupted, Bush rang Rasmussen to express support. But he was careful to say he was acting "in light of the violence against Danish and other diplomatic missions", not in solidarity with the phoney free-speech issue.
A huge responsibility now rests on the mainstream European media. The extremist slogans carried during the anti-cartoon protests do not represent the views of all Muslims and should not be portrayed as such. Moderate Muslim leaders in European countries have been speaking out all week to urge restraint and condemn the protesters' violence, just as in Britain they condemned Abu Hamza's incitement to murder long before the courts did. The trouble is that these long-standing tensions and arguments in Muslim communities where voices of moderation have consistently sought to counter the radicals were rarely reported. Extremism is a better story.
Muslims are not only an important part of Europe's new diversity. They are diverse among themselves. To suggest that, because almost all of Europe's Muslims felt offended by the cartoons, they all support slogans calling for revenge and beheadings is as inaccurate as it is for people in Muslim countries to claim that every European approved the cartoons' publication. There are liberals, conservatives, modernisers and traditionalists in all communities, just as there are those who know the bounds of good taste and bigots who do not.
guardian.co.uk
