Re: Light fuse and retire

To: Retort


Robert Proctor writes: 
Cartoons such as these in the present climate are incendiary, like the proverbial yelling of "fire" in a crowded theater.  It's important to realize, though, that nothing could please the Bushites more than having this be some kind of line in the sand:  the response proves that Islamists are fanatics, illiberal, anti-free speech.  Suddenly the coalition of the willing (or victimized) includes Denmark.  Denmark?  A conspiracist could say this has agent provocateur written all over it: how better to unify the free world than to have the unfree killing over cartoons?  Cartoons.  

Robert
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Eddie Yuen writes from Napoli:
I've been away from the media for a while, but it looks like the cartoon riots are a very big deal.  I think Iran's provocation about offering holocast denial cartoons gets to the heart of the matter, which is that it's not really about free speech so much as gratuitous insult.  Everyone knows that it's forbidden to even portray the prophet, so ANY cartoon is insulting, regardless of content.  But I think the insult is not so much to believers as it is to anybody from a muslim part of the world, at least that's how it's been interpreted.  Obviously, all states, no matter how liberal, have limits on what they allow to be published, child porn being the most obvious example.  Germany and other countries forbid Nazi propaganda, and overt racist and/or anti-Semitic cartoons simply would not be published in any mainstream western publication.  So I think the issue is about power, once again, not the purity of free speech.  It's easy to make fun of people who are down, and, while an atheist who of course enjoys blasphemy now and then, I think that's what this is about.  It would be like American cartoons vilifying Japanese in 1942 while they were being interned in camps.  Oh, but that actually happened.

The whole thing makes fundamentalists everywhere happy, which is ominous.

Eddie
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Ignacio Chapela writes:
Where to find lucid anythings about the cartoon events?  I do not have any, because it is the things that I have not seen that really strike me: I have not heard any talk about the misplacement of this whole discussion.  This discussion did not have to be about the rights or wrongs of an editorial decision by a provincial Danish paper.  We could be talking about the causes that unify so many people to come out on the street and burn flags of countries they might or might not want to place on a map of the world.  We could be talking about the relationship between these demonstrations and the famine, sickness, torture and mindless death coming from the skies for millions.  Instead, like the proverbial fool, we insist on looking at the finger when something is being pointed out by demonstration.

I agree with IB's sharp insight.  To have safeguards against stigmatizing people for their innate qualities -such as race, gender, birthplace, genetic makeup, things that they cannot choose or change- is clearly in a different place for me than to expect that we should tolerate ("respect") any and all attempts at ideological domination, especially when they overflow onto our common life and space.  I believe that religious intolerance in public life should not be tolerated.  But again, I do not think this is really what is being contested here.

I intend to be there with Gray on his vigil outside Yoo's lecture today.

Ignacio
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Dick Walker writes: 
Sorry, Iain mate, but Mohammed with a bomb in his turban (did he wear a turban? doubtful...) is stupid and implies religious bigotry on the part of the cartoonist.
This quote is interesting: "it does not mean that religious feelings should be made fun of at any price, but that is of minor importance in the present context..." Then, at what price?
DW
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> [Dick suggests below that the issue is hate speech, though to identify anti-clericalism or the satirizing of religious bigotry with verbal expressions of racism is surely confusing. Please send along anything particularly lucid you have encountered in the aftermath of these over-determined events. If anti-violent anarchists went incendiary every time we were cartooned as bearded bombers in capes, the world would be a smoking ruin. IB]
>
> Dick Walker wrote initially:
> In my view, it's the same issue as hate speech, which exercised Americans 10 years ago.  There are some things that one really shouldn't say because they go beyond the bounds of human decency and free speech. It's like a white person calling a black one a 'nigger' to his/her face.   And images carry an especially loaded significance in Islam.  I think the Europeans are way behind on this -- though it's hardly settled here, either.DW