[Mb-civic] Tolerance Toward Intolerance - Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Tolerance Toward Intolerance

By Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff
Tuesday, February 7, 2006; A21

Last week the publication I work for, the German newsweekly Die Zeit, 
printed one of the controversial caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. It 
was the right thing to do.

When the cartoons were first published in Denmark in September, nobody 
in Germany took notice. Had our publication been offered the drawings at 
that point, in all likelihood we would have declined to print them. At 
least one of them seems to equate Islam with radical Islamism. That is 
exactly the direction nobody wants the debate about fundamentalism to 
take -- even though the very nature of a political cartoon is 
overstatement. We would not have printed the caricature out of a sense 
of moderation and respect for the Muslim minority in our country. News 
people make judgments about taste all the time. We do not show sexually 
explicit pictures or body parts after a terrorist attack. We try to keep 
racism and anti-Semitism out of the paper. Freedom of the press comes 
with a responsibility.

But the criteria change when material that is seen as offensive becomes 
newsworthy. That's why we saw bodies falling out of the World Trade 
Center on Sept. 11, 2001. That's why we saw the pictures from Abu 
Ghraib. On such issues we print what we usually wouldn't. The very 
nature of the discourse is to find parameters of what is culturally 
acceptable. How many times have we seen Janet Jackson's breast in the 
course of a discussion of the limits of family entertainment? How many 
times have we printed material that Jews might consider offensive in an 
attempt to define the extent of anti-Semitism? It seems odd that most 
U.S. papers patronize their readers by withholding cartoons that the 
whole world talks about. To publish does not mean to endorse. Context 
matters.

It's worth remembering that the controversy started out as a 
well-meaning attempt to write a children's book about the life of the 
prophet Muhammad. The book was designed to promote religious tolerance. 
But the author encountered the consequences of religious hatred when he 
looked for an illustrator. He could not find one. Denmark's artists 
seemed to fear for their lives. In turning down the job they mentioned 
the fate of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, murdered by an Islamic 
fundamentalist for harshly criticizing fundamentalism.

When this episode percolated to the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the 
paper's cultural editor commissioned the caricatures. He wanted to see 
whether cartoonists would self-censor their work for fear of violence 
from Muslim radicals. Still, the European media ignored this story in a 
small Scandinavian country. It took months, a boycott of Danish products 
in the Arab world and the intervention of such champions of religious 
freedom as the governments of Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya (all 
of which withdrew their ambassadors from Copenhagen) for some European 
papers to reconsider their stance on the cartoons. By last week it was 
not an obscure topic anymore but front-page news. And it wasn't about 
religious sensibilities as much as about free speech. That's when the 
cartoons started to show up in papers all over Europe.

Much of the U.S. reporting about the fracas made it appear as if 
Europeans just don't get it -- again. They struggle with immigration. 
They struggle with religion. They struggle with respect for minorities. 
And in the end they find their cities burning, as evidenced in Paris. 
Bill Clinton even detected an "anti-Islamic prejudice" and equated it 
with a previous "anti-Semitic prejudice."

The former president has turned the argument upside down. In this jihad 
over humor, tolerance is disdained by people who demand it of others. 
The authoritarian governments that claim to speak on behalf of Europe's 
supposedly oppressed Muslim minorities practice systematic repression 
against their own religious minorities. They have radicalized what was 
at first a difficult question. Now they are asking not for respect but 
for submission. They want non-Muslims in Europe to live by Muslim rules. 
Does Bill Clinton want to counsel tolerance toward intolerance?

On Friday the State Department found it appropriate to intervene. It 
blasted the publication of the cartoons as unacceptable incitement to 
religious hatred. It is a peculiar moment when the government of the 
United States, which likes to see itself as the home of free speech, 
suggests to European journalists what not to print.

The writer is Washington bureau chief of the German newsweekly Die Zeit.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/06/AR2006020601258.html?nav=hcmodule
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