Chapters (11)
In February 2006, notorious British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years for denying the Holocaust, and radical British Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al Masri was jailed for, among other things, inciting hatred. It was about time. Yet there were few protests against the curtailment of their freedom of speech. How does a democracy decide which hate is worse?
A few months earlier in France, the Catholic Church won a lawsuit against a fashion designer who had depicted The Last Supper with semi-nude women instead of the apostles. Where were the advocates of freedom of speech then? Or do they pop up only to claim the right to bash Muslims?
Beyond the restrictions imposed by law, there is self-restraint. Newspapers and magazines routinely reject cartoons that may be unfair or unnecessarily hurtful or racist. That’s why we no longer see the caricatures of savage aboriginals, fat-lipped blacks, hook-nosed Jews or cross-eyed Chinese. That’s why none of the mainstream newspapers in the US and Canada would reprint the Danish cartoons. That’s why even Jyllands-Posten had rejected caricatures of Christ three years earlier, saying they were offensive and “will provoke an outcry.”
The lesson Muslims drew was that for many in the West, freedom of speech meant mostly the freedom to malign Muslims. This was summed up in a cartoon in the Al-Quds al-Arabi, the pan-Arab daily from London, showing an artist at work at Jyllands-Posten. In the first panel, he rejects a grotesque drawing of a black person: “This is racism.” He rejects the second, which equates the Star of David with the swastika: “This is anti-Semitism.” He keeps the longer third panel, of the Prophet’s cartoons, saying: “This is freedom of speech.”
This issue of double standards is at the heart of the repeated conflicts between the West and the world of Islam over how far anti-Islamic provocateurs can go in baiting Muslims, secure in the knowledge that they will get away with it. In the Danish case, they didn’t. Our inconsistencies finally caught up to us.
That was not all the cartoon controversy exposed. The debate on the issue revealed two overriding aims: minimize the offense caused or discredit the Muslim response. As Gary Younge, the New York-based black British columnist, wrote in The Nation: “Muslims have been vilified twice: once through the original cartoons and then again for having the gall to protest them. Such logic recalls the words of the late South African black nationalist Steve Biko: ‘Not only are whites kicking us, they are telling us how to react to being kicked.’”15