2008 Woodie Awards
Mohammed cartoon extremism five months behind
Darwyyn Deyo
Issue date: 2/14/06 Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 1
|
That's when the cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammad were first printed in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Islam does not allow drawings of the prophet, and the cartoons which depict Mohammad in satirical positions, including one telling suicide bombers that there are no virgins left for them in heaven, are more than offensive. However, it is only upon their recent reprinting in Denmark that a fervor has swept the Middle East. Some of the countries most extreme in their response are Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria. To all these countries, Mohammad is more sacred than fellow humans, civil order, free speech, and international agreements. Libya and Syria have both pulled their ambassadors from Denmark, Saudi Arabia is risking a hearing before the World Trade Organization, and Iraq has frozen contracts with Denmark as well as Norway.
In addition to being chaotic, these Middle Eastern countries have no sense of perspective. Turkey's Prime Minister has stated that there need to be limits on freedom of expression, but there have been no comments about regularly printed anti-Semitic cartoons in these countries. On the contrary, an Iranian newspaper is holding a contest for the best cartoon depicting the Holocaust, in order to challenge the Western world's "bias" of free speech. What they will find is that the countries that they are testing will disdain them, but there certainly won't be riots in the streets and ten of our own dead, as in Afghanistan.
With the cartoons reprinting in Denmark, other Western countries have taken the liberty of releasing them as well, instigating more anger and calls for execution by the Islamic community.
What the Middle Eastern governments fail to understand, and thus fail to integrate culturally, is a clarification between government control and the peoples' free speech. Cutting off relations with businessmen and politicians in Denmark will bring no direct legal repercussion to Jyllands-Posten. Burning embassies and the Danish flag rile a population but achieve nothing in the long run. Iran, in particular, should be playing its cards close instead of calling for Holocaust cartoons. It's not like they don't print enough of the stuff already that we haven't learned to ignore them.