I don't think we have any discussion about the Danish Muhammad cartoons....

(a) Muslims who are offended by these images and don't think you have a right to print them (your enemy), and

(b) Muslims who respect your right to print them but are offended by them nonetheless (bystanders)?

Which is why, if I assume any brain-power went into this, I have to assume that there was actual underhanded intent here to conflate the two groups, to cast (b) as (a) -- (and incidentally, and in action, maybe even convert a few fence-sitting Bs into As).

But how would it be any different if I chose to satirize the belief that reproductive organs are somehow "dirty" by publishing pictures of dicks on the front page of my newspaper?

I demand more nude press conferences, UN gangbangs, Page 3 editorials, butt plug accessorized weather reports, etc... I'll draw the line at naked coooking shows, however. I happen to know how dangerous that can be.

This applies equally to both sides, as both sides feel strongly aggrieved.

[cues up Both Sides Now]

yes (I think, following your syntax)... I think I do

To echo Dada: this cartoon does not violate an "extremist" taboo.

There's a difference here between "fundamentalist" and "extremist" that you're eliding here.

Similarly:

And third, WTF, we don't let Christian taboos run the culture?

There's also a difference between "Christian taboos" and "fundamentalist Christian taboos" that you're also eliding. And half of your "Do you live . . . ?" questions have NOTHING TO DO with Christianit taboos in general and fundamentalist taboos in particular.

US media shy away from reproducing Mohammed cartoons

"If I were faced with something that I know is gonna be offensive to many of our readers, I would think twice about whether the benefit of publication outweighed the offense it might give," Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor at the Washington Post, told AFP.

Keith Richburg, the paper's foreign editor, said he had ruled out running the cartoons, even to better illustrate news articles about the row, as they would likely offend readers.

"This is a clear example where people would find those offensive so we don't see any particular reason to do it just for shock value," he said.

...

Peter Gavrilovich, foreign editor of the daily Detroit Free Press in the state of Michigan, which has one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East, said it was out of the question for his paper to reprint the cartoons, either to illustrate the story or to show solidarity with counterparts in Europe.

"I don't think we would run a cartoon in this newspaper that would be deemed offensive to any religious figure," Gavrilovich told AFP. "We're very careful in terms of any photo or any caricature that we run."

Why is this kind of common sense apparently so rare in the newspaper business?

No, ya big dope, that's the difference I'm saying you're ignoring. So far as I know about Muslims -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- it's not at all extreme or fundamentalist to be wary of depictions of Mohammed, especially if they're being done by Danish people to annoy you. So it's not equivalent to say fundamentalist Christian taboos don't affect our culture. Regular-old Christian values do.

but hardline muslims have already done that conflating! just as hardline christians in the u.s. purport (and are too often allowed) to speak for all of christianity. and the level of totally disproportionate, virulent anger engendered in this case doesn't exactly make moderate muslims seem like much of a presence, any more than moderate christians seem like enough of a presence in the u.s. these days.

but again, the issue isn't how tasteful or not the newspaper was. that's a side discussion. the question ultimately is which value is more important in a pluralistic society: freedom of expression, or respect for religious taboos? and you're right, nabsico, we have that same fight all the time in the u.s., and i'm on the same side of it in those cases that i am in this one. if we want to talk about the history of east-west relations, the legitimate grievances of the muslim world, the rank idiocy of the bush administration's policies, the endemic problems of european racism, fine, i'm all for that. but i'm suspicious of people using those things as excuses or cover for fundamentalist zealotry.

anyway, there's a pretty good op-ed in the nyt today -- about the pope and relativism, of all things -- which has a few grafs that seem a propos:

What Pope Benedict calls relativism are actually the values of secular liberalism: individual autonomy, equal rights and freedom of conscience. But it is easy to conflate what liberals affirm with the way they affirm it. Liberalism tells us that our way of life is up to us (within limits), not that the truth of liberalism is up to us. It entails that we tolerate even claims that we doubt, not that we doubt even the claims of tolerance. Many liberals themselves are guilty of this confusion, which can manifest as all-values-are-equal relativism (especially common among freshmen in ethics classes, at least until the instructor informs them that because all grades are equally valid, everyone will be receiving a D for the course).

...Perhaps a future encyclical will concentrate on the truly harmful kind of relativism. This is the misguided multiculturalism that keeps Western liberals from criticizing the oppression of women, religious minorities and apostates in Islamic societies for fear of being accused of Islamophobia. In such cases we should not shrink from the ideals of autonomy and equality but affirm them openly for what they are: objectively defensible principles of conscience.

Ha, and yes, American newspapers outlining exactly the kind of pluralistic-minded reasons people don't print this stuff unless there's a specific line-of-duty reason to do so. (Unfortunately, they've been put in a trap, because as this discussion moves around the world it'll become more and more a part of a publication's "line of duty" to let readers see the offensive image for themselves.)

-- full frontal nudity on page one
-- a movie with Jesus getting gangbanged by men
-- peppering the newspaper with "fuck" and "shit"*

If something so innocuous as "artist's depiction of $DEITY" (YES INNOCUOUS ACCORDING TO OUR WHITE WESTERN CULTURAL STANDARDS I GET IT) is that level of shocking, maybe it's a taboo not worth adopting? I mean, all your "Do you live . . . ?" questions appear to imply that those are taboos you'd like to see dropped, as would I.

It's not that I don't see your points, I just think you're making too strong an argument towards accommodating cultural restrictions that aren't always a net plus and are sometimes actually inimical towards the values we purport to hold.

*Interestingly, I have seen the latter in a routine news article in the Washington Post, uttered by the DC police chief; the former gets asterisked out.

x-post to nate: The Post has problems of its own, seemingly.

TOMBOT: Yes, I can. Did you have another pointless question, or was that pretty much it?

as for using legitimate grievances as a cover for extremism, i don't think anybody on this thread is doing that. but i think an awful lot of imams and muslim religious/political leaders are, and that's a big part of all this outrage and protests.

This isn't argumentative, it's a genuine question: please explain to me why the solution to this issue is to deliberately do something that might be deemed offensive to Muslims. For the time being I won't comment beyond asking the question.

This is argumentative: Phil, why are you unwilling to accept that a depiction of Mohammed -- lines on a page -- might be as offensive to members of one culture as the word "cunt" -- lines on a page -- might be to another? Why is it so hard to accept that -- just as an innocuous word like "cunt" can be used as a weapon to act aggressively toward people, a cartoon can be used for the same (bad) purpose? And why do you insist on perching up in the black-and-white space of "rights" and "restrictions," instead of accepting that we live in societies of people, who believe all sorts of different things, and this confers on our actions meaning? Liberties mean that we can take certain actions. Culture means that those actions have a context, that they don't happen in a vacuum, and that we have to actually think about whether taking them is good or bad, worthwhile or not-worthwhile, in keeping with the spirit of a pluralistic society or in attacking them.

xpost: Gypsy I don't in the least disagree with you that frothy-mouthed outrage over this is (a) immoderate, (b) being misdirected by plenty of people, and (c) in most cases not in keeping with the principles of a secular society. I'd like to think this was clear from the beginning. I'm mostly attempting to move beyond that point -- because I imagine every single person on this thread takes it for granted -- and talk about something slightly different.

Yes, the citizens of Denmark are under daily danger of being harmed by their enormous Muslim community

to preserve the principle of being able to. because, yes, i think the principle of being able to print things offensive to muslims, christians, jews, buddhists, atheists and commie pinkos is important. like i said, if it was my newspaper, i would have preferred a less gratuitous demonstration, like a simple portrait of muhammad.

Yes, the citizens of Denmark are under daily danger of being harmed by their enormous Muslim community

again, see the paper's own stated reasons for the cartoons. it didn't take an enormous community to kill theo van gogh, and it doesn't take many theo van goghs to scare the shit out of people. intimidation is not just a matter of numbers.

I'm not unwilling to accept it -- I accept that it does, and as such I'm saying that sometimes there are taboos where people are going to have to suck it up and realize they aren't going to be catered to. Christians are going to have to accept that they're going to be egregiously offended sometimes, and so are Jews, and so are Muslims.

I understand where you're coming from as far as having a good reason; I think gypsy has done a good job in explaining in this particular instance what some of that reason was. Along with your arguments about culture, we all have to understand that the Danes and other European cultures have their own, too, and are dealing with problems with their Muslims populations that we aren't, so if we're going to judge, judge from within the perspective of their culture, not America's. Does that make what they did provocative? Yes. Unnecessarily so? Mmmmmmaybe, maybe not.

(I am not, btw, unaware this all makes me sound kinda shitty, nor am I unaware how much of it stems from my own personal bugaboos about religion generally.)

Forgive me if some of us have some problems respecting (or swallowing) provocative right-wing rags' stated reasons for some of their actions

For once, I'm going to disagree with you Nitsuh. I think this is a rhetorical conceit in the extreme. I understand the argument and agree that Western culture and values are incredibly powerful ideologically (especially on an unconscious level), but I don't think anyone can argue the real physical consequences of these actions (and other similarly 'outrageous' acts) are very different in Karachi and Los Angeles. I would more likely say that Western culture's tolerance can be insidious in a different way (i.e. it's a sieve for dissent and leads to apathy etc).

yes i do! maybe not the tits thing, but otherwise, yes.

Okay. We live in a country (the U.S.) with various cultural constituencies, including, let's say, Catholics. We have a country in which people are at liberty to criticize the actions, thinking, or culture of those constituencies. Let's imagine for a second that some Catholics -- like some Muslims -- did not respect that liberty when it came to criticizing them. Let's imagine that a Catholic man murdered a filmmaker who made an expose about priests abusing children, and that extremist Catholics threatened to firebomb newspapers for running editorials criticizing Catholic opposition to contraception. This would be a very large problem. Let's even say that this had a chilling effect on free speech, such that people were afraid of offending Catholics for fear of violent reprisal.

If I owned a paper in this environment, and I wanted to stand up for free speech against the actions of these extremist Catholics, I would do that specifically. That would strike me as the moral, dignified thing to do. I'm not sure it would cross my mind to deliberately run an image that would be offensive to Catholics -- say, the Pope wearing a condom -- simply to stand up for my right to do so. Nothing in the situation would seem to call for me to do that. Beyond which it would be childish and counterproductive, because it would be bizarrely misdirected. I would be fighting these extremist, violent Catholics by opposing myself to all Catholics -- by going out of my way to exhibit my disdain for the beliefs of even the ones who support my rights! I would be making enemies of my friends. And all when there were a million very specific things I could have done to (haha) "fight the real enemy," and address my actual issue of extremist violence and my freedom to do something I actually want to do, on my own -- which is to publish reasoned criticism of this theoretical Catholic extremism and maybe even Catholicism itself. In the process, I'll be standing up for people's right to publish the Pope-with-condom picture, even though I don't feel a need to print it myself. I'll stand up for people's rights to do lots of things I'd never personally dream of doing; I don't have to actually do the things in question. The fact that extremists would violently assaults someone's right to do something doesn't make the thing itself a good or necessary idea.

To follow up two ideas that have been cross-posted with mine. Gypsy, you're exactly right about the neo-Nazis, which I've mentioned upthread. If extremist blacks, Latinos, and Catholics were murdering neo-Nazis -- infringing on their given right to distribute neo-Nazi literature -- it would not occur to me that one way to make a noble stand against this violence would be to ... distribute neo-Nazi literature! And concerning violence against abortion doctors: these cartoons strike me as the equivalent of the editor of the New York Times, at the peak of those abortion protest shootings, going out, getting a woman pregnant, having an abortion, and then printing a big article about it -- "we have every right to do this! haha!" Which would offend people well beyond pro-life extremists, especially when the implied follow-up story was "look at them get all mad, see how they have no place in our society."

Sorry, but I do pick and choose my cases. I don't defend the right of a white college professor to call one of his black students a "N******". He might call it free speech, but I don't think it's right.

And Nabisco's long post above is OTM. I'm not disagreeing about the right of free speech in general, I'm disagreeing with this particular instance of it. I think these caricatures were designed to sow division, not understanding, and I think that publishing them was neither admirable nor wise.

(Not all protected speech is good speech, is I think most of what Nate and I are saying, and the good news is that with Gypsy at least I think we're on the same page about being suspicious of the paper's speech-choices here, if to different extents.)

Because there's been a lot of useless bickering about this so far: by saying this I'm not defending the reactions to the cartoon that involve sanctions, measures against the Danish government, etc. Some of the comments on this thread read to me as, "that's it, Muslims have to learn to stop being so Muslim." As hstencil points out upthread, that is not going to happen. If relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West is going to get better (and the contact between the two is a given: there's no undoing that), both groups are going to have to drop the posturing of the utter insupportability of all of the values of the other group. That's why the cartoons are so unfortunate, on my view. (There are, of course, hundreds of stances that have been taken by various groups of Muslims that are similarly unfortunate.)

It's the toxic portrayal of Muhammad that is really driving the outrage

The radicals aside, this is what most of my Muslim friends are saying.