Why haven't the true Muslims, moderate religionists, men and women of good will, risen up to condemn those who so disgrace their faith? We constantly ask this question even though the answer is contained in the reluctance of our own civilization's instruments of free expression to confront the problem. "Fill the jails" was Gandhi's strategy of non-cooperation with a non-democratic system, for making society look at right and wrong in a fresh way, and it was one that Martin Luther King adopted in 1963 when he flooded the jails of Birmingham to defeat segregation. I submit that just as that nonviolent demonstration of solidarity and defiance exposed a corrosive political system and channeled the outrage of helplessness constructively, so would a form of cartoon direct action have advanced the true interests of Islam.
King wrote in his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," "Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with."
Here's what the American media might have done and could still do in response to the cartoon riots. In the spiritually expansive style of Gandhi and King, they could summon their aggregate moral authority and humbly dedicate a page of their newspaper or half a minute of their newscasts to showing the cartoons and explaining why they must, not as a taunt but as a restatement of democratic principle, as a prayer for coexistence. If everyone had stood up for Denmark's embattled cartoonists, then the taboo images might have lost their meaning, as going to jail lost its stigma when it was in the service of freedom. Collecting his Nobel Peace Prize on the heels of the Birmingham campaign, King noted that "every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities." Perhaps one day the Jyllands- Posten cartoonists will be recognized for their contributions to democratic health and a peace truer than the one they have disturbed.
Read the full article to see his 2002 "What would Mohammed Drive?" cartoon that drew a nasty response (yet, less than embassy burnings), and his Jesus/Grape Juice Fundie Test cartoon, plus considerable good commentary on the current situation with the "Mohammed cartoons."
Seriously, if I told you a year ago there'd be a major international crisis over political cartoons, would you have believed me?
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Comments: 8
For once we wholeheatedly agree. Bravo!! This is not a time to blink.
I heard Pete McCloskey on the radio today describe the Democrats as "the party of the people," and the republicans as "the party of the individual." I believe that civil society is all about the healthy tension between those two.
I didn't start working for the Democrats in any organized fashion until 2002, when Ashcroft started to step on our civil liberties, and the balance of power in DC became clearly compromised by a Republican lock on power, and especially the neocon ideological fundamentalism.
Some of my readers may feel shocked that I've been a registered Republican in my time, too. But I grew up in Vermont, where Jeffords represents my idea of a proper Republican. McCloskey and McCain aren't too far off my ideal either.
Above all, I believe in process and dialogue, and that's something we have missing in this country, and that I would like to see us encouraging overseas. Give people freedoms and democracy will follow. Suppress freedoms, and the democracy you get may look like Hamas, or the sectarian mess in Iraq.
In fact, I think I'm going to run off and write an article on illiberal democracies.
I fear the fear of government more than I fear the threat from government.
Maybe we will both meet in the middle for a while....passing as we reverse directions :)
So maybe you just passed center ahead of me, but I'm not going much further than this -- you may have noticed that I'm not fond of any extremes in ideology.
I too feel "I love my country, but I fear my government." It makes me look liberal to conservatives, because I believe I must work for the minority party -- but it makes me look conservative or sometimes libertarian to my more liberal friends.
If the Dems were in power, you'd be seeing more gadfly posts about the Dems. But until that day, I'll be strafing the Republicans until I feel that the neocon stranglehold (which neither favors the people nor the individual nor fiscal responsibility nor good global citizenship) is released. They can police themselves internally, or they can lose to the Democrats. At the moment, I see very little internal policing.
Actually, what I fear is fear of government. What pushes me toward the conservative side is the hysteria toward power. Now do not get me wrong, if no one was complaining about unchecked power I would be but I see more danger in the outright alienation of government and society in general than in the threat of authoritarianism.
Working as an analyst in Criminal Justice I have seen courts and police on the city, county, state and federal level bend over backwards to insure that even the most extreme fringes of civil liberties are well secured.
Then came 9/11.
Frankly, I am more than pleased with how well they have restrained themselves.
Looking back historically at the way these things have gone down in the past, I am flabbergasted about how well we have faired. Society does move to extremes and authoritarian positions when threatened and that is to be expected. Societies also move back, but none of that wisdom is reflected in the rhectoric that we see around here and in other venues.
I guess we all have our unique perspectives.
Good to agree with you, good to disagree with you, good to share opinions.
"What I fear is fear of government." I thought you were going to go into all the things government has done to improve American society - labor laws; the end of slavery, then segregation. Fear of government led to the militias and McVeigh's atrocity. Maybe fear is too strong for what you believe about the ability of government to be used for good for for not-so-good?
I, too, was once a Republican. Back in the 1960s, I considered myself a liberal Republican. This was partly because of the corruption of the Democrats in Massachusetts at the time. I wasn't old enough to vote yet in 1964 (the voting age was still 21), but with bumper stickers, campaign buttons, and arguments, I supported President Johnson over Barry Goldwater. And I supported the Republican candidates for governor (John A. Volpe), lieutenant governor (Elliot Richardson), and attorney general (Edward Brooke). In 1968 I voted for Nelson Rockefeller in the Presidential primary and Nixon in the general election. I still don't regret my vote for Nixon at the time. To vote for Humphrey would have been a ratification of Johnson's war policies, Mayor Daley's police riot, and Humphrey's disgustingly bad campaign.
By 1970, I was disgusted with Nixon and Agnew's campaign impugning the loyalty of "Radic-Libs" and changed my registration to independent. I became a registered Democrat when I voted for McGovern in the 1972 primary.
I can't forgive Nixon for Watergate, but in so many other ways, he was a really good President.
Not to suggest that Watergate was not a serious breach of ethics, but we need to look at the context of the times. My God, LBJ was several orders of magnitude more corrupt than Nixon and was far more prone to dirty tricks. I honestly believe that Nixon always felt "What is the problem?" because everyone was doing it.
What concerns me the most about the fall-out from Watergate is that Woodward, Bernstein and the media failed to put Watergate in the context of the time, to compare it to LBJ or even FDR for that matter, even to compare it to local corruption.
By isolating it, the media made a beneficial point and government at the federal level at least cleaned up its act....but in the long run a crippling alienation resulted with a certain naive self-loathing becoming prevalent in the country since.