Except for a few admirable exceptions, most American newspaper editors have not published the cartoons heard around the Muslim world for some variation of this type reasoning:
We don't want to offend anyone. It may be what we would normally call "news," and consistent with our mission to fully inform our readers about a story. But we don't want to offend anyone.
By the way, we still believe in free speech and freedom of the press.
Kathleen Parker calls "thinking" like that, "shameful appeasement" to mob rule.
Of course, one can always justify being offended because taking offense is always a subjective act of volition. What is appalling, meanwhile, is appeasing crazed radicals in betrayal of moderate Muslims courageously trying to speak truth to insanity. Appalling is our official genuflection to an irrational horde that has no interest in compromise or reason but only in submission. Ours.
While our government is issuing sanctimonious sympathy notes to the hysterical mobs, a Jordanian editor is arrested for publishing three of the cartoons and urging Muslims to "be reasonable." While President Bush and Clinton were feeling the pain of religious fanatics, marauders were burning Danish government buildings in Beirut, and Damascus, Syria, and promising Londoners a 9/11 of their own.
Such are the fruits of appeasement.
Parker continues, writing that just because there is a conflict of values at play in this story, does not mean the defenders of free expression are somehow wrong.
The cartoons, more prosaic than provocative, are deemed blasphemous to the Muslim world for reasons that aren't clear. Some believers of Islam forbid any depictions of the prophet, while others tolerate certain images. If lampooning Mohammed is forbidden, then certainly devout Muslims should refrain from drawing images of Mohammed. But exactly what does this have to do with the rest of us? One does not have to be Islamophobic to resist submitting to the vicissitudes of Islamic law.
By Western standards, the cartoons fall short of wildly controversial. One shows Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban. Another has Mohammed telling suicide bombers he has run out of virgins with which to reward them. Non-literalists understand the sentiment at play. The cartoonists' art highlights how fanatics have hijacked religion and used Mohammed to advance nefarious ends. Surely, modern Islam has no stake in defending bombers who praise Allah while killing innocents.
The history of political cartooning is a history of satire and outrage. We arrived at this level of fragile tolerance not by caving to the demands of every sensitive soul, but by struggling with principles — ideas rather than emotions.(emphasis added)
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