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

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.

I agree, this was an inflammatory action - I see the attraction of Gypsy Mothra's theory but I don't really believe it. This was specifically targeting Muslims to widen an already huge cultural gulf. Because I can think of instances where British people would behave in just as ugly a manner. If the Indpendent published a provocative picture of a naked child tomorrow even if it had a stated reason for doing so, I'd bet everything I own there'd be a baying mob outside its office saying and possibly doing some pretty fucking ugly things. Would the editor stand there going "I'm going to defend my right not to be intimidated?" or would he be sacked?

This is a facile analogy I know, but then again I'm typing this in a country where footballers get death threats for moving from one club to another so maybe we're not all so fucking enlightened after all?

The other thing that depresses me is that the BNP are going to do really fucking well out of this.

Yeah, I probably made too much of that in my various analogies. I agree it's the sort of blanket insult against all Muslims that I find more offensive.

Hmmm. Everything I have found agrees with that. Only Allah should be worshipped.

I am going to work on shutting the fuck up now.

Also I'm glad you're reasonable and not devolved into ILX-snippy like I am: I'd have said the same thing to Bnad in a much ruder way. Which also has to do with the weird personal proximity stuff, but whatever.

my bottom line is, if i ran a newspaper, i wouldn't run the cartoons and would look for another way to make the same point. but that said, i respect the reasons for doing it if not the execution, and if we have to ultimately choose sides between the newspaper and the people waving banners saying "slay those who insult islam," i'm on the side of the newspaper. and if we don't have to choose sides and can just find fault all around, fine. but i'm still more with the newspaper.

'On the blackboard it says in Persian with Arabic letters that 'Jyllands-Posten's journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs',' Refn said. 'Of course we shouldn't let ourselves be censored by a few extremist Muslims, but Jyllands-Posten's only goal is to vent the fires as soon as they get the opportunity. There's nothing constructive in that.

Hee hee.

And there's where we slide into my personal stuff, of which I'll just give you the short version. I have a particular consciousness here: I grew up in a situation where the people "like me" were immigrants from a big bloc stretching from, say, Senegal to Bangladesh, a bloc not always much internally distinguished-between in the country I'm from. It's inevitable; it's much easier for white westerners to align themselves against that bloc, in parts or as a whole, than it's going to be for me. I can't take sides with myself (secular westerner) against myself (person from a place). And these cartoons, by aiming themselves at the religion instead of the extremism, ask me to do that. And more importantly, these cartoons read to me -- and this is talking-to-your-spouse "how I feel" part, not so much an argument -- to be very much in the same spirit as a lot of very indefensible insults and disdain that get directed more generally at my whole bloc. I guess some people here don't feel that. I don't even know if Horseshoe feels that, and she's closer in than I am. But that's what I feel lurking in this.

The general thing, on this thread and others, is that I'm not against reasoned criticism of other cultures. My problem tends to be that the people who are happiest to do this are often my enemies, and they often do it with a glee that I can't stand, and they do it in a way that promotes and leaves room for very bad things beyond the reasoned-criticism part.

I was proud of him.

I want this precious little bubble of freedom, that an infinitesimal number of humans have had the privilege to exist in, destroyed. Fk everyone else who is, or was, excluded from this. I've got this freedom and I take it for granted, so I should show it contempt.

I don't want freedom of speech, I don't wanna be free to satirise what I choose, I don't want my mum to do what she chooses.

What I want is to condemn the west.

I want girls to grow up and know they'll never be allowed to feel the sun on their face, and that they'll be kept ineducated and housebound. The concept of liberty means I'll defend this position even though it doesn't affect me, yet there are hundreds of millions of women living this life that I'm free from, yet I will defend to the death the rights of the people who keep these souls in such grim supplication.

At 7 I climbed trees, fished in the nearby stream, felt the sun shine on my gangly awkward limbs, kissed a boy, rode my bike, had my first crush, and even watched the Dukes of Hazzard. I'm proud that I support systems that will condemn girls like me to grow up beneath a black woollen rag, forever denied such pleasures and afraid to even contemplate them. My time could be better spent contemplating consumating my marriage at 9, like in Iran, following the teachings of the good book.

I say we give a government grant to assist in a fatwa for the cartoon protesters, like we should have done with salman rushdie. This freedom sh1t that the few of us have indulged in is crap. We should give in to the dogma of a preaching bully boys. I want my daughters to grow up under it's rule, rather than the freedom of the west.

Go boys, lets read the good book and figure out how to diminish and pollute this beautiful ephemeral tapestry we call life.