Then there was the Danish cartoon controversy, the broad outlines of which are by now familiar. A Danish publisher reported having trouble finding an artist to illustrate a children’s book about Prophet Muhammad, given Islam’s prohibition against depicting him. Jyllands-Posten, the conservative mass-circulation daily, commissioned forty illustrators to defy the ban. Of the dozen drawings it published on September 30, 2005, the one that acquired the most notoriety depicted the prophet as a terrorist with bulging eyes and a bomb-shaped turban with a burning fuse. Another showed him as a crazed, knife-wielding Bedouin. Another placed him at the gates of heaven telling suicide bombers, “Stop. Stop. We have run out of virgins!”

This drew understandable protests from Danish Muslims — at 180,000, the second-largest religious group after the Lutheran Protestants. But they were ignored, both by the newspaper and the government. They sent delegations to the Middle East to lobby other Muslims, a perfectly legitimate exercise. Airing one’s domestic dirty laundry abroad is the last resort of the marginalized — used, among others, by the aboriginal peoples of Canada to embarrass Canadians into behaving better toward them.

The delegations carried not only the published cartoons but also other more poisoned ones that were in circulation in Denmark. They said they never passed off the latter as the former. Including the unpublished drawings, too, was legitimate; after all, they did exist.

The lobbying efforts took time to catch on, as often happens with public grievances, especially by a marginalized group. Eventually, the Arab League and the Islamic Conference protested.

A grassroots consumer boycott of Danish products, another legitimate form of peaceful protest, spread from Saudi Arabia across the Persian Gulf. Arla Foods, the Danish dairy, said sales came to a “standstill.” Other Danish firms reported lost sales. In Copenhagen, the Confederation of Danish Industries accused Jyllands-Posten of jeopardizing $1 billion in annual sales, prompting a disingenuous apology from the editors: “We are sorry if Muslims have been offended” (my emphasis).

Soon there were mass Muslim demonstrations around the world, and some turned violent and ugly. Danish flags were burnt, a few Danish embassies attacked. This caused much consternation in the West. “What’s wrong with Muslims?” “Can’t they take a few offensive cartoons in their stride?”

No grievance justifies violence. But its biggest victims were Muslims themselves — nearly fifty dead, shot by police in Afghanistan and elsewhere. That speaks to the Muslim pathology of self-inflicted wounds. But the anger in the West was not over the Muslim dead but over the damage caused to Danish embassies. Such selective outrage bespoke prejudice, not principle.

Double Standards

The editors of Jyllands-Posten, and the other publications that reprinted the cartoons in an act of solidarity, invoked freedom of speech, of course. But it is not an unfettered right. It is circumscribed by laws of libel, hate and religious freedom.