Trib: Media posturing lit cartoon fires

This morning's Chicago Tribune had very good backgrounder on the "Cartoon Wars" by Tom Hundley, a Trib foreign correspondent reporting from London. It's nice to have a morning paper in town that still sends reporters overseas. And it's doubly good to have someone explaining something as complicated and subtle as the row over the Danish cartoons.

Hundley notes the rioting throughout the Muslim world, from the Phillipines to Nigeria, and adds:

... in a bid to up the ante, an Iranian newspaper declared it would test Western notions of free speech by sponsoring a contest for the best cartoon mocking the Holocaust.

It may be a reach to call this a "clash of civilizations," but the international uproar created by the publication of a dozen cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper does seem to demonstrate that the Muslim world and the West know how to push each other's buttons.

That may turn out to be the most balanced assessment of the whole controversy to date.

In an well-reasoned editorial, the Trib defended the right of the Danish morning paper Jyllands-Posten to publish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. But the editorial noted the cartoons were "cheesy" and "about as juvenile as the stunt that produced them." I think that gets it exactly right. The editorial continued:

It's not surprising that Muslims, who believe any artistic rendering of the prophet is blasphemous, were offended. Offending them seems to have been the point of the exercise. The editor of the paper invited cartoonists to submit drawings of Muhammad to challenge what he said was a climate of self-censorship.

Angry Muslims demanded an apology. What they got was a simplistic defense of the right to free expression.

So, suggested the Trib's editorial board, Jyllands-Posten and the other European papers that published the cartoons share the blame for the uproar.

Newspapers across Europe reprinted the cartoons as a sign of solidarity. The German paper Die Welt printed the bomb-in-a-turban drawing on its front page and asserted defiantly that in free societies, "there is a right to blasphemy." The daily France Soir republished the drawings under the headline, "Yes, We Have the Right to Caricature God."

All of this indignant posturing overlooks the fact that nobody's stopping editors from publishing whatever they wish. Freedom of speech, after all, means, freedom from government sanction, not freedom from angry reactions by your readers.

Important point, in my opinion. It looks like Jyllands-Posten is reaping just about exactly what it sowed.

Nor did the Tribune spare the governments involved, either in Europe or the Middle East:

... Petitioned by Muslim groups who wanted the newspapers prosecuted, the [European] governments said they could neither control nor apologize for the actions of a free press.

The governments held to this position even as the flag burnings and boycotts of Danish goods escalated to mass demonstrations and the torching of embassies in Syria and Lebanon. Several Muslim countries recalled their ambassadors from Denmark, as if the Danish government were somehow to blame for the cartoons.

Many Muslims undoubtedly fail to see that distinction because their own governments dictate what is and isn't published. Some of those same governments aren't troubled by content that is offensive to other groups, regularly permitting or even encouraging the publication of anti-Semitic material.

Which, of course, leads up to the Iranian newspaper's offer to sponsor a Holocaust cartoon contest. And so it goes.