The Danish Cartoon Row

February 10th, 2006

I’m still in the UK, where it’s been a very exciting time for cartoons. I don’t know how much play this story has gotten in the US, but it’s been in the headlines here for over a week. Muslims all over the world have been protesting a series of cartoons about Mohammed published by a Danish newspaper. It’s all very complicated, and if you want the whole story, the Guardian has a comprehensive special report

The gist is that the cartoons were commissioned as part of a debate about freedom of speech in a climate where the press has felt a certain amount of fear and self-censorship around critiquing Islam. In 2004, a Dutch filmmaker who’d just made a film about violence against women in Islamic culture was murdered by a fanatic, and it’s had a predictably chilling effect on discourse.

The cartoons were actually published last September, but it took a while for the protests to build up steam. First the newspaper refused to apologize, then the government stepped in and apologized after Muslims called for boycotts of Danish products. It escalated last week with increasingly violent protests from Europe to Iraq to Indonesia. Danish embassies have been set on fire, and yesterday four demonstrators were killed in Afghanistan.

But there’s some question about whether the cartoons were deliberately provocative, or an earnest effort at opening a dialogue. No one was reprinting them, for obvious reasons, so it took me a while to see what the fuss was all about. Then the Guardian posted this link to them on Wikipedia. Some are tame, some are offensive, most are mediocre. but part of the problem is that in Islam, you’re not supposed to show ANY visual images of the prophet. So negative images are exponentially offensive.

Ted Rall has a good column about the ensuing diplomatic crisis on the Common Dreams site. He quotes a Kuwaiti oil executive who says, “America kills thousands of Muslims, and you lose your head and withdraw ambassadors over a bunch of cartoons printed in a second-rate paper in a Nordic country with a population of five million? That’s the true outrage.”