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rfmcdonaldThe thing that struck me when I saw the controversial Muhammad cartoons from Denmark is that most of them aren't funny. Only this one, number 6 in the above gallery, made me chuckle, with Muhammad's greeting of the souls of dead suicide bombers with the warning that the afterlife had run out of virgins. I chuckled in that one case only because of the fundamental incongruity of the situation, of the melding of fleshly sexual desires with supposedly lofty spiritual desires. None of the other cartoons were even that slightly funny. In many cases, the cartoons were downright racist, defining Islam entirely by veiled women and knife-wielding fanatics. It's not surprising that the cartoons were published in Denmark, where the rather racist Danish People's Party takes a significant and growing share of Danish votes, even constituting an informal ally of the governing coalition despite leaders who liken Danish Muslims to "cancer cells". Yes, I know that the cartoons were published, supposedly with the noble motive of challenging censorship of Islamic themes. In actual fact most of them are Islamophobic.
My initial sympathies might have been directed towards the people who were targeted by those Islamophobic cartoons. This quickly passed, not so much because of the remarkably stupid violence, or because of the cheap nationalism demonstrated by the renaming of Danish pastries as "roses of the Prophet", or even, necessarily, by adolescent retorts like the publication of cartoons showing Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler. All of the above are provocatively stupid things to do, but given that there are one and a half billion Muslims in the world one would expect there to be some crazies, whether individuals or states. No, I quickly stopped caring when I saw that the responsible Muslim leaderships demanded that the blasphemy implied by the cartoons be immediately criminalized. Never mind that it's a remarkably bad idea for religious minorities to call for the enforcement of laws against blasphemy, since after all, a sufficiently Christian Denmark could prosecute Muslims from denying the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and believing in the false prophet Mohammed. The simple lack of regard for the massive intrusions on individual conscience and public discourse that the enforcement of blasphemy laws would cause is shocking to me, as much of a child of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as anyone.
To me, the entire cartoon episode demonstrates not only that Voltaire's wolves live among us, but that they run things. The most depressing part of the entire affair is that the two major sides' proponents were talking past each other, the cartoon proponents talking about freedom of speech as if it was something innately and uniquely Danish or Western, the cartoon opponents talking about blasphemy as something that must be punishable by the state if we're to avoid a clash of civilizations. Very few people were talking about the intolerance of others that was present throughout the entire debate. More people should have.
My initial sympathies might have been directed towards the people who were targeted by those Islamophobic cartoons. This quickly passed, not so much because of the remarkably stupid violence, or because of the cheap nationalism demonstrated by the renaming of Danish pastries as "roses of the Prophet", or even, necessarily, by adolescent retorts like the publication of cartoons showing Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler. All of the above are provocatively stupid things to do, but given that there are one and a half billion Muslims in the world one would expect there to be some crazies, whether individuals or states. No, I quickly stopped caring when I saw that the responsible Muslim leaderships demanded that the blasphemy implied by the cartoons be immediately criminalized. Never mind that it's a remarkably bad idea for religious minorities to call for the enforcement of laws against blasphemy, since after all, a sufficiently Christian Denmark could prosecute Muslims from denying the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and believing in the false prophet Mohammed. The simple lack of regard for the massive intrusions on individual conscience and public discourse that the enforcement of blasphemy laws would cause is shocking to me, as much of a child of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as anyone.
To me, the entire cartoon episode demonstrates not only that Voltaire's wolves live among us, but that they run things. The most depressing part of the entire affair is that the two major sides' proponents were talking past each other, the cartoon proponents talking about freedom of speech as if it was something innately and uniquely Danish or Western, the cartoon opponents talking about blasphemy as something that must be punishable by the state if we're to avoid a clash of civilizations. Very few people were talking about the intolerance of others that was present throughout the entire debate. More people should have.
