Cartoons and Hypocrisy

Danes Finally Apologize to Muslims (But for the Wrong Reasons)

By RACHARD ITANI

In many European countries, there are laws that will land in jail any
person who has the chutzpah to deny not only the historicity of the
Jewish holocaust, but also the method by which Jews were put to death
by the Nazis. In some of these countries, this prohibition goes as far
as prosecuting those who would claim or attempt to prove that less than
6 million jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. In none of these countries
are there similar laws that threaten people with loss of freedom and
wealth for denying that large percentages of gypsies, gays, mentally
retarded, and other miscellaneous "debris of humanity" were also
eliminated by the Jew-slaughtering Nazis.

Quickly now: what defines a hypocrite? Answer: a person who follows the
letter of the law, but not its spirit. The laws against anti-semitism
are just that: laws against anti-semitism enacted by hypocritical
Europeans with blood on their hands from the genocides in their recent
and distant past, and much guilt to atone for in their hearts and
minds.

The spirit of the law, which would extend this protection to Muslims as
well, if not indeed other religious groups, is nowhere to be found in
the Western legal code. You can curse the Prophet of the Muslims at
will and with total impunity. However, approach the holocaust at your
own risks and perils if you do not include in your discussion the
standard, ritualistic incantations about the six million Jewish victims
of the European Nazis. There is a word for this in the English language:
hypocrisy.

I used to have a lot of respect for the Dutch, the Danes, and the
Norwegians, and still do. However, I cannot claim that this respect is
not more nuanced today. The coloring started when the Dutch, who are
invariably and automatically described as being amongst the most
"tolerant" people in the West, if not the world, proved that their
tolerance was little more than skin deep. Their reaction to the murder
of Theo Van Gogh was anything but driven by tolerance. They behaved as
a mob in reaction to the criminal, despicable action of an extremist
and murderer, by painting the whole Dutch muslim community with the
same broad brush that Vincent Van Gogh would have eschewed. They burnt
Muslim schools and mosques. They directed opprobrium at Muslims in
their midst, calling on them "to go home" though many had been born in
the Netherlands. No subtlety in the Dutch reaction. Just collective
anti-semitism which they directed not at the Jews, but at the Jews'
cousins, the Muslims.

Then the Danes, who must have felt left out, decided to go the Dutch one
better: a Danish paper published cartoons that are no less offensive to
Muslims than anti-semitism is to Jews. The cartoons were described by
Danish politicians and the press as not provocation, but a principled
case of free speech, although many Danish and Scandinavian newspaper
editors are on record stating that they published the cartoons as an
act of defiance against "radical Islam." This is akin to these ignorant
morons recommending that the U.S. ought to nuke Tehran because that
would teach Iranian President Ahmadinejad a lesson.

What free speech are we talking about here? The law says thou shalt not
utilize or publish anti-semitic language or imagery. Consequently,
Danish (and other European) papers will refrain from doing so, lest
they fall foul of the law and offend Jewish sensitivities. The law does
not say: thou shalt not offend muslims or use imagery that may be deeply
offensive to them. So Danish papers will not refrain from doing so, in
fact they will go out of their way to offend Muslims both in Denmark
and around the world, in the name of "free speech." And the Norwegians?
Well, they just decided to follow the Danes down perdition lane, all in
the name of holy hypocrisy, so a Norwegian paper also published the
offending cartoons. The statement about "confronting radical Islam" was
in fact made by the Norwegian editor of a newspaper that is described as
a "Norwegian Christian Paper." And now that other European papers and
Magazines have also followed suit, if there was any doubt that this
affair is one of anti-Muslim bias, it was swept away by the statements
of the Editor in Chief of Die Welt, the German magazine, who declared
that the right to publish the cartoons was "at the very core of our
culture" and that Europeans cannot "stop using our journalistic right
of freedom of expression within legal boundaries." It's the "legal
boundaries" qualifier that gives the game away: there are no legal
boundaries in Europe protecting Muslims from the same ignominies that
the law protects Jews from.

And what further argument does Die Welt put forward to justify its
"legal" action? " It pointed out that "Syrian TV had depicted Jewish
rabbis as cannibals." You can imagine how helpful a similar argument
would hold up in a court of law: "But your honor, I only killed one guy
and raped two women: the other guy killed four and raped 10!" That a
German editor-in-chief of a major German paper should use the "legal"
argument to justify offending the religious sensitivities of Muslims,
when that same "legal" framework would see him thrown in jail faster
than he could spell the word legal if he offended the sensitivities of
Jews, may be a testament at least of his own deep-seated contempt for
Muslims. That so many European papers have now reprinted the offensive
cartoons is an indication that the contempt for Muslims does not stop
with the editor-in-chief of Die Welt.

This whole affair is nothing but an over-reaction to a simple cartoon,
you say? Not if you remember a certain other cartoon that appeared in
the British newspaper, The Independent, on 27 January 2003. It depicted
Prime Minister Sharon of Israel eating the head of a Palestinian child
while saying: "What's wrong? You've never seen a politician kissing
babies before?" Jews in Britain and around the world erupted with
indignation, arguably because the depiction reminded them of millennial
charges levied against them by Christians who accused them of using the
blood of babies in ritualistic killings. You see, Sharon can actually
kill, maim and spill the real, actual blood of Palestinian babies: that
is not offensive to Zionist Jews and their apologists in the West. But
let Sharon be depicted in a cartoon metaphorically as the ogre that he
has proved to be in his real life, symbolically eating a Palestinian
child, and the world will erupt in offended indignation. A cartoon that
is offensive to Muslims, on the other hand, is depicted as nothing but
an expression of "free speech." There is a word for this in any
language: hypocrisy.

Before the Danish cartoon incident started to evolve into a growing
international crisis, the Danish Prime Minister and the publisher of
the Danish newspaper that first published the offending cartoons both
declared that they would never apologize on grounds of free speech and
because publishing the cartoons had not broken any Danish laws. (Yes,
the "no law broken" argument again.) Yesterday, however, they both
ended up apologizing in the face of a growing tsunami of protests on
the part of Arab and Muslim governments, some of whom withdrew their
Ambassadors from Copenhagen. The Danish prime minister did not
apologize because his moral compas suddenly found True North again. The
real reason, of course, is that he understood, though a tad too late,
the potential economic consequences of a widespread boycott of Danish
goods on the part of one billion people. There is a word for this in
the Danish language: realpolitik.

Muslims and other reasoning people around the world understand well that
European laws against anti-Semitic speech, writing, and behavior, were
enacted for two reasons. The stated reason was to protect the Jews from
the continued onslaught of anti-Semitic attacks, both verbal and
physical, which culminated historically in the repeated pogroms that
Christian Europeans launched against Jews repeatedly through the
centuries. (Historically, it was the Arabs who protected the Jews and
took them in whenever they fled Christian barbarity, especially in the
Middle Ages.) The real reason, of course, is to protect the Europeans
from the pangs of their own conscience, which has very good reason to
feel guilty indeed, given what Europeans did to Jews in the last
millennium, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, not to mention
what they did to the indiginous people of the Carribean and the
Americas since the 1600s, and to the people of Asia, Africa and Oceania
as well. I have long thought that it's European Christians, more so than
Jews, who ought to observe Yom Kippur, or adopt a similar atonement
observance of their own.

While the spirit of the law is that Europeans shalt not offend any
ethnic or religious groups including Muslims, this seems to be lost
only on the Europeans themselves, or at least the Danes, the Germans
and their ilk amongst them, who only care about, or fear, the letter of
the law. Why should we therefore be shocked when Muslims depict
Europeans as nothing but a bunch of hypocrites? Why shouldn't
Governments of Muslim countries recall their Ambassadors to Denmark in
protest, as some did? The only disappointment is that no Western or
non-Muslim government, the meek complaints to a French newspaper by the
French Foreign Office excepted, had the moral and ethical courage to
publicly, unequivocally and forcefully condemn an act that is as deeply
offensive to Muslims as the desecration of a Torah scroll, or of a
Jewish cemetery, is offensive to all civilized people in the world, be
they Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Animist, or Atheist.

There are two ways for Europeans to redeem themselves: the immediate
temptation would be to call on their national parliaments to extend the
protections of the laws against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denying to
Islam and Muslims, as well as any other religious group . That would be
the wrong recommendation however. The right recommendation would be to
repeal the laws that govern holocaust denying and other laws that favor
one group over another, so that the issue truly becomes one of free
speech. And if Europeans are the civilized people they claim to be,
then their politicians and newspaper publishers ought to find it easy
to immediately apologize when they have unwittingly offended the taboos
of any human community, be it religious or otherwise.

Muslims and Arabs have suffered enough hypocrisy on the hands of
European Christians, just as Jews suffered in the past on the hands of
these same Europeans, and as Palestinian Muslims and Christians alike
are suffering today on the hands of Americans, Europeans and, of
course, Zionist Jews, both Sephardim and Ashkenazi. If Europe thinks of
itself as a civilized society, then it ought to do its utmost to redress
the wrongs that too many people around the world have suffered as a
result of European misbehavior and often outright criminal actions,
most especially since the 1400s.

Muslims deserve nothing more nor less than for Christians in the U.S.
and Europe, and Zionist Jews in Israel, to simply abide by the golden
rule: treat others as you would have others treat you. So far,
Christians and Zionist Jews have proven that they only abide by the
alternative definition of this rule: "They who have the gold, make the
rule." The gold in this case is a combination of economic and military
might. Of this, Europeans, Zionist Jews and their American overlords
have aplenty in reserve. Were it that they also had an equal reserve of
un-hypocritical, civilized morality and ethical behavior to underpin
their feelings of sanctimonious superiority.

And the other measure that Europeans can adopt to redeem themselves? The
European people can start by throwing out of office, and initiating
criminal proceedings against, any politician responsible for sending a
single soldier to invade, occupy, and initiate pogroms against the
people of Iraq: these politicians have been guilty of war crimes and
crimes against humanity, which makes them unfit for the honors that
continued office holding bestows upon them. Europeans can also give the
boot to any politician who has approved or turned a blind eye to a
single rendition flight that sent any person to the torture chambers of
the Americans or their surrogate torturers in some Arab or Muslim
countries. These are the same countries whose religious sensitivities
we should all respect as strongly as we respect Jewish sensitivities
when it comes to the Jewish holocaust, not because the law says so, but
because it's the right thing to do. These are also the same countries
whose human rights trespasses Europeans ought to condemn as equally and
vehemently as they should condemn the continued human rights abuses and
state terrorism perpetrated by the Israeli government in
Palestine/Israel, and by some European governments in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and in other out-of-sight/out-of-mind places like Haiti,
Africa, and elsewhere.

In other words, Europeans can start by applying the simple rule of one
weight and one measure to both friends and foes, equally to themselves
and to the rest of the world, because policy and politics, both
domestic and foreign, ought to be based upon and subject to principled
moral considerations, not expediency of the economic, financial or
religious kind.

Is that such an unreasonable moral proposition to consider?

Rachard Itani can be reached at: racharitani@yahoo.com
mailto:racharitani@yahoo.com