Who would have guessed that the latest international incident to
make headlines this week would revolve around 12 cartoons?
The cartoons in question were originally solicited and published
by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten because its editors felt
the media were practicing self-censorship when it came to Muslim
issues. The cartoons were controversial because they portrayed
images of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, a practice that is
against Islamic belief. The drawings also depict Muhammad in ways
that virtually guaranteed they would upset Muslim sensibilities:
One picture shows the prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a
lit fuse.
With protests ““ both violent and nonviolent ““
spreading across the Muslim world, other European papers
republished the cartoons to show their solidarity with the Danish
paper and the broader principal of freedom of speech.
And while the controversy began in the pages of private
newspapers, governments have started intervening. In Jordan,
editors of two tabloids that published the cartoons have been
arrested by their government. A court in South Africa banned
newspapers there from reprinting the cartoons. And Muslim
governments have demanded that European governments apologize for
their press.
In essence, the conflict is the result of a series of serious
misunderstandings. The protestors, some of whom on Sunday burned
the Danish embassy in Beirut, are calling for an apology from the
wrong people ““ European government officials who had no hand
in running the cartoons. The European governments are defending
their right to publish the cartoon, but they’re focusing on
the wrong question.
The right to publish the cartoons is not the issue here. Though
this board disagrees with these cartoons’ characterization of
Islam, we defend fellow journalists’ right to freedom of
expression. And no government, from South Africa to Jordan, should
be able to tell journalists what they can and cannot publish.
A better question to ask, then, is did the editors of the
Jyllands-Posten make the right decision? Because, while freedom of
the press entails all kinds of nice things, journalists also have
the responsibility to publish material that encourages thoughtful,
productive debate. Controversy is fine as long as it has a better
end.
It’s hard to figure out what better end the Danish editors
were envisioning when they OK’d this cartoon. If they wanted
to counterbalance the perceived self-censorship of European
newspapers when it came to Islam, fine. But do you counterbalance
by throwing a 10-ton boulder on the scale?
Moreover, the cartoon implies that Muhammad’s teachings,
and by extension the very foundations of Islam, are set to explode.
But even President Bush could tell you that the problem (or, at
least, one of them) in the Middle East is not Islam; it’s
people who have interpreted Islam in a radical, violent way. So
instead of being insightful, the cartoon perpetuates an inaccurate
stereotype.
All this throws the Danish newspaper’s decision into
serious shades of doubt. And while that’s easy to say in
retrospect, now that we’ve had mass protests, arrests and
threats of violence, it’s hard to believe that the editors
could not have anticipated this mess ““ or at least some of it
““ beforehand.
Did the Danish newspaper have a right to publish the cartoon?
Sure. Did it make the responsible decision ““ as an
institution of journalism, as a contributor to the ongoing debate
on Middle East policy ““ by in fact publishing it?
No, it did not.