Let me get this straight. Most Muslims are darling and gentle.
Just a few baddies cast an ugly shadow over the mass of sweeties.
Then an awful cartoon in Denmark gave the impression
that they’re all meanies. This grotesque image distorted the truth
horribly. It showed the prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb, implying
that the religion itself promulgates violence. No wonder all the
shy, retiring, unsung heroes of Islam were annoyed. So therefore
they started rioting in the streets and burning Danish consulates.
Is there anything wrong with this picture?
Well, yes, I suppose there is. The pious don’t riot. Meditative
types don’t premeditate destruction. Then it must be the bad guys
who are causing the upheaval. But if so, isn’t the cartoon
accurate? Aren’t they a bunch of violent buffoons? Isn’t the proof
in the putting to flame of peace-loving embassies?
The media, ever the apologists for all non-American mayhem
artists, are peddling an alibi: it seems that it is “against Islam”
for any representation of Muhammad to be published. To which bit of
wisdom I respond that — forgive the cynicism — they should tell
it to the Marines. Do you mean to say that if the same newspapers
published a portrait of Muhammad surrounded by a halo and feeding
the starving masses, we would get the same uprising? Puhleez.
It occurs to me that Fate has delivered a trenchant message at a
time when it was needed rather urgently. To flesh this out, we need
to pause a moment to examine the “other” cartoon. On Thursday,
February 3, on the very day that the Islamic hysteria began to
roil, there was an American protest about a newspaper cartoon. In
fact, when Senator McCain was asked by Bill Bennett that morning
“Have you heard the uproar about the cartoon?” there was a moment
of mix-up when the two men were discussing two different
events.
Our homegrown story involved a cartoon published in the
Washington Post. It depicted a soldier who had lost limbs
in battle and featured a likeness of Donald Rumsfeld calling him
“battle-hardened.” The heads of the various military services were
so offended that they sent a collective letter as the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, something that rarely occurs (as they note in the note).
When I saw this startling juxtaposition of two stories involving
unseemly caricatures, I immediately thought: “There must be a
message here.” For three days on and off I pondered. Suddenly a
light bulb went on over my head: how obvious! This was a stark
tableau contrasting the two cultures.
Each society had faced a derisory portrayal of a treasured
component of its ethos. The military and the Secretary of Defense
occupy a lower rung in our hierarchy than religious beliefs, true,
but they are the thin green line that separates us from anarchy. To
ridicule them is to derogate something of true value. Yet even the
unusually unanimous condemnation that branded this as beyond the
pale of journalistic discourse… took the form of a strongly
worded letter to the editor! The pen may be mightier than the
sword, certainly when it’s wielded by G. Gordon Liddy, but no one
poked anyone’s eye out. If anything, the protest modeled the sort
of civility that it was demanding.
All of this follows the premise that the cartoons were not
appropriate and argues that the response by rampaging Muslims is
entirely abhorrent. The truth is that a further argument can be
made to defend both pieces of editorial art. There is a reason why
this form of artistic expression is known as caricature. Its medium
is exaggeration. It works by taking ideas to their extremes. It is
effective if it succeeds in tapping into a bit of truth that
manages to hide beneath the placid surface of the routine picture.
Takes an awful lot of distortion before anyone has right to take
offense.
One of the sad byproducts of totalitarian governments is the
silencing of true reportage. Newspapers and television networks had
people in the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq who were
constrained by governmental censorship from delivering the truth to
their readers and viewers. Much the same occurs even today in China
and Cuba. What ends up happening is that they become de facto
propagandists for those rulers by conveying the good news and
scuttling the bad.
Now the same thing is happening via the Muslim riot. Western
media will be intimidated into silence by the fear of mischief.
Which is to say that Islamist thugs will achieve in communications
what they achieve in politics, winning by terrorism what they
cannot win by war. Those Danish publishers are on the front lines
of the War on Terror just like our soldiers; they deserve our
support. As for the Muslims’ claim that they’re really mostly nice
guys, it’s like that old lawyer joke: it’s a shame that 90 percent
of lawyers are giving the other 10 percent a bad name.
