Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update

There's recently been a lot of stronger than usual rhetoric about the meaning of the Danish Cartoons incident, mostly opinion pieces in conjunction with a knighthood recently granted Salman Rushdie. The Danish cartoons make a cameo in the news stories about Rushdie-related protests, too. There's definitely a semi-dismissive "those crazy Islamic folks are mad again" feel in the air.

I've always been suspicious of the macho slant that the freedoms of the West were at stake with every action taken during the events surrounding the printing of caricatures of Muhammed in the Jyllands-Posten paper. I think it's a gross over-simplification, I think that the specifics of the actions taken by different folks at different times are important distinctions to make, and, frankly, I find a lot of the recasting of every action in the light of the violence and political turmoil that followed to be retroactive self-puffery. I do think there were elements to that story that spoke poorly to the strength of certain Western institutions, particularly the refusal of many newspapers to reprint the cartoons after they had ceased being a provocative stunt and had clearly become news that was driving violence. I found this particularly depressing in that what those cartoons looked like was a key, vital issue that needed to be communicated to people, and few with the responsibility to educate and inform chose to do so.

Although admittedly, I issued my own fatwa against Rushdie after reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet, so maybe I'm biased.
 
posted 1:14 am PST | Permalink
 

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