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The new 'final outcome'
Bill Clinton called them "totally outrageous" and an "appalling example" of stereotyping. He was talking about the Danish cartoons that sparked the rioting and killings throughout the Islamic world. Similarly, Sen. John Kerry was appalled by the cartoon depictions of Mohammed -- one, for example, showing the prophet in a turban shaped as a bomb. "Inflammatory images deserve our scorn," he said. French President Jacques Chirac, likewise, urged caution in regard to upsetting anyone's apple cart, especially if it's a faith-based cart: "Anything liable to rub the wrong way the beliefs of others, particularly the religious beliefs, must be avoided." Fighting the same rub, the Vatican said that no one has "the right" to hurt anyone's feelings when it comes to religious commentary. We can think it, declared the Vatican, but we can't say it, write it or draw it, lest some overly delicate believer might take umbrage. From the Vatican's statement on the Danish cartoon fallout: "The right to freedom of thought and expression cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers." Really? What if you're an agnostic Inca who thinks the tossing of virgins into the mouth of a volcano won't produce a better crop? You shouldn't say anything for fear of offending the true believers? Where's the morality in that, particularly from the virgin's point of view? What about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and Lutheran pastor who became involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler? An avowed pacifist, Bonhoeffer nonetheless came to believe that killing Hitler was less evil than doing nothing and watching the trains go off to Dachau and Auschwitz. Should Bonhoeffer have done nothing, said nothing, written nothing, so as not to ruffle the religious feathers of his neighbors in Nazi-occupied Europe who obediently and piously rounded up and loaded millions of Jews, "race-mixers," gays and other "undesirables" into the trains, seeing their task as particularly pleasing to God? Should Bonhoeffer have said nothing when Lutheran theologian Paul Althaus called Hitler's rise to power "a gift and miracle from God"? Should he have muzzled himself when swastika flags began to decorate the altars of German churches? So as not to make his fellow churchmen uneasy, should he have kept quiet when they said nothing about the arrests of Jews and the trashing of their storefronts during Kristallnacht, the "Night of the Broken Glass"? On April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer, at age 39, was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp by his Nazi captors, 11 days before Allied troops liberated the camp. Today in Denmark, armed guards protect Carsten Juste, the editor of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that originally published the Mohammed caricatures. His wrap up of the entire episode: "My guess is that no one will draw the Prophet Mohammed in Denmark in the next generation -- and therefore I must say with deep shame that they have won." In New York City, former Mayor Ed Koch echoes a similar concern, noting that only a handful of major newspapers in the United States have reprinted the Danish cartoons, even though the caricatures are a key part of their front-page stories. Washington Post executive editor Len Downie says he won't publish the cartoons because of "general good taste." The New York Times, which daily trumpets "All the News That's Fit to Print" on its front page, finds the cartoons unfit to print because they're "so easy to describe in words." Koch sees a replay of Neville Chamberlain: "When the greatest, most important institutions in the land -- the free press -- get frightened and surrender, as the German press did under similar assault in Hitler's Germany in the 1930s, I worry about the final outcome." At the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has condemned the cartoons as "insensitive." Franco Frattini, the European Union's justice and security commissioner, says the EU is setting up a "media code" to encourage "sensitivity." In France, from Chirac: "I condemn all obvious provocations which could dangerously fuel passions." And what if a woman's bare arms "fuel passions"? What if a man is viewed as offensive if he's flying a kite or humming a tune? Do we cover ourselves, muzzle ourselves, to avoid offending, to keep the peace? At the Al-Omari mosque in Gaza, a cleric laid out the bottom line regarding the cartoons and retribution: "We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible."
Posted by: lotp 2006-02-20 |
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