Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update

Debra J. Saunders meets with Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose and comes away basically adopting his point of view on the Danish Cartoons Controversy. I really disliked this article. The use of the phrase "mostly unflattering" seems to me an untenable one, and this is the first time I'd heard the recent plot to kill Kurt Westergaard involved beheading him, which I guess could be true but the emphasis of which also seems like loaded language to me. It's probably also worth noting that as far as I know, there hasn't been a trial yet.

Mostly, though, I think she fumbles a lot of her points outright. Criticizing Rose and Jyllands-Posten for their asinine free speech stunt is in no way the same thing as absolving the alarmist imams for their much more significant, crucial and direct role in fanning the flames that led to the riots and deaths, as her article suggests. On the flip side, her logic in suggesting that the Chronicle and papers like it might possibly be absolved of their abandonment of their journalistic mission because they routinely don't want to offend anyone is ridiculous. As she points out in noting the role of the imams and their addition of fake imagery to what they presented around the world, what the Danish cartoons looked like was at the heart of that news story; people who saw them were crucially informed in a way that people that didn't were not. News organizations that failed to provide this information to their readers failed them. That's simply not the same as intentionally insulting a religious group in service of presenting an opinion -- which is more along the lines of what Jyllands-Posten did, if you stop and think about it.
 
posted 7:57 am PST | Permalink
 

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