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JANUARY 7, 2006
Cartoon Jihads
By Daryl Cagle
Nothing generates anger in the Muslim world
like a cartoon. The most recent cartoon-Jihad comes from a Danish
newspaper that printed cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.
The Jyllands Posten, Denmark's biggest newspaper, has been bombarded
by street protests, international diplomatic incidents and death
threats against cartoonists who have gone into hiding, fearing
for their lives.
I'm fond of the Jyllands Posten newspaper
because they run my cartoons. Reporter Anders Raahauge wrote
the report below to cartoonist Doug Marlette who alerted me to
the ongoing events:
 "To
test the limits of self-censorship, we asked all Danish cartoonists
to draw Muhammad. We were provoked by the fact that a Danish
author of children's books couldn't find any illustrators for
his planned, decidedly non-polemic book on the prophet. Twelve
cartoonists dared.
"There has been a great uproar. 5000
Danish Muslims protested in the streets of Copenhagen, 12 Muslim
ambassadors demanded that our Prime Minister should take immediate
and harsh action against (us) which he firmly declined (to do).
The ambassadors then complained to the "Organization of
the Islamic Conference"; there has been a general strike
in Kashmir, and a political party in Pakistan, with Danish affiliations,
has put a bounty on the heads of the 12 Danish cartoonists: 50,000
Danish Kroners for each execution."
Danes treasure their press freedoms. The
newspaper ran the Muhammad drawings as part of an article about
self-censorship in the press, noting that even with a free press
defined by law, there are other constraints regarding what can
or can't be published. The Danish prime minister refused to meet
with ambassadors from 11 Islamic countries, led by Egypt, who
objected to Denmark's "smear campaign" and demanded
punitive action against the newspaper. The ambassadors then announced
a general boycott against Denmark. The United Nations weighed
in, conveying sympathies to the offended Islamic countries. Last
week, in an apparent concession to the angry Muslims, Danish
Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen urged Danes to exercise
their rights to free speech without inciting hatred against Muslims.
The Danish government had the prime minister's words translated
into Arabic and distributed to Middle Eastern countries in the
hope of easing the diplomatic crisis. Jyllands Posten's editor-in-chief
is quoted as saying, "the next step will be giving orders
to suppress the newspaper."
I found the offending cartoons on the web;
they are disappointingly dull and it is hard to see how they
could make anyone angry (see the cartoons here). Muslims consider
any graphic depiction of Muhammad to be taboo. For the Muslim
countries, it is a matter of imposing their sensibilities upon
the infidels in the West. For the Danish "infidels"
at Jyllands Posten, it is a matter of press freedom and an unwillingness
to accept restrictions on an absolute and treasured freedom,
which includes the right to offend anyone they choose to offend.
In America we take our freedom to offend seriously; we would
never threaten the lives of artists who paint the Virgin Mary
with animal dung, or put a crucifix into a jar of urine -we limit
the argument to whether our National Endowment for the Arts will
subsidize these artists.
Depictions of Muhammad are not the only
cartoons that inspire Islamic rage. Montreal Gazette cartoonist
Terry "Aislin" Mosher had a similar experience. In
response to a deadly terrorist attack against foreign tourists
in Luxor, Egypt, Mosher drew a dog wearing Arab headgear; the
dog was labeled "Islamic Extremism" and the caption
read, "With Apologies to Dogs Everywhere." Mosher and
his newspaper received a flood of Muslim threats and vitriol
in a Jihad similar to the situation in Denmark.
 A
cartoonist whom I syndicate, Sandy Huffaker, drew a cartoon showing an
Iraqi holding a book titled, "The Koran for Dummies,"
and an American soldier asks, "Anything in there about GRATITUDE?"
I was bombarded by many thousands of e-mails in a flame campaign
instigated by the Council
on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which asked readers
on their Web site to e-mail me. The e-mails were hysterical,
filled with colorful threats and demands that I fire and punish
Huffaker. I posted a big batch of the emails on my Web site and
asked my own readers to respond to CAIR. (My Web site has a rather
large audience, so I flamed CAIR back.) Being on the other end
of a flame campaign may have been a new experience for CAIR,
because their flame campaign against me stopped abruptly -or
more likely, CAIR saw that the hysterical rantings of their supporters,
displayed on my Web site, did not speak well for their cause.
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette of the Tallahassee Democrat,
found himself blasted by a CAIR e-mail Jihad when he drew a cartoon
with the caption, "What Would Muhammad Drive?" The
drawing showed a man wearing Arab headdress and driving a Ryder
truck (a reference to Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh).
In response to an inquiry from Jyllands Posten, Doug writes,
"I was used to negative reactions from religious interest
groups, but not the kind of sustained violent intensity of the
Islamic threats. The nihilism and culture of death of a religion
that sanctions suicide bombers, and issues fatwas on people who
draw funny pictures, is certainly of a different order and fanatical
magnitude than the protests of our home-grown religious true
believers."
 Marlette
continues, "As a child of the segregated South, I am quite
familiar with the damage done to the "good religious people"
of my region when the Ku Klux Klan acted in our name. The CAIR
organization that led the assault (on me), describes itself as
a civil rights advocacy group. Among those whose "civil
rights" they advocated were the convicted bombers of the
World Trade Center in 1993. They cannot be taken seriously. For
many of those who protested my cartoon, recent émigrés,
many highly educated, it was obvious that there was not that
healthy tradition of free inquiry, humor and irreverence in their
background that we have in the west. There was no Jefferson,
Madison, Adams in their intellectual tradition. Those who have
attacked my work, whether on the right, the left, Republican
or Democrat, conservative or liberal, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish
or Muslim, all seem to experience comic or satirical irreverence
as hostility and hate. When all it is, really, is irreverence.
Ink on paper is only a thought, an idea. Such people fear ideas.
Those who mistake themselves for the God they claim to worship
tend to mistake irreverence for blasphemy."
Muslim countries expect the press in Denmark
to suppress cartoons that would be offensive to them, but they
don't extend the same cartoon courtesy to others that they demand
for themselves. Cartoons in the Arab press are typically so ugly
and racist that American audiences have never seen anything like
them. Middle Eastern cartoon venom is targeted toward Israel,
often depicting Jews with hooked noses and orthodox garb, sometimes
with fangs and bloody teeth, often in the roles of Nazis. The
Jews are sometimes shown crucifying Arabs in a "Jews killed
Jesus" scenario, or enacting their own concentration camp
Holocausts on their neighbors, along with their henchmen, the
Americans. The cartoons are designed to be as offensive to Jews
as possible, and are seen as nothing out of the ordinary by Middle
Eastern newspaper readers.
Unless we defend our funny little drawings
with the same zeal that we see from the victims of our irreverence,
we'll continue to see our freedoms constricted by the loud voices
of those we offend.
See the offending cartoons here.
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