Pictorrhea

You can tell I'm worked up about something when I walk for half an hour before noon on a February morning to get to a talk about it. The talk in question was a "Chaplain's Noontime Discussion" entitled The Mohammed Cartoons: Free Speech, Racism or Blasphemy? I've already said why that "or" doesn't belong, so let's move along...

( I wrote a lot, so have a cut. )

The Wikipedia article has been helpful to me this week; I recommend taking a look. (Wikipedia itself has become a battleground of free speech vs. blasphemy for posting the cartoons on that page. Fortunately, they are being bold.)

[Update: the cartoons apparently appeared in an Egyptian newspaper last October. The editors were Muslim. There were no protests, no death threats, no firings. This lends support to the idea that it's less of a free speech issue and more of a "some idiot is fanning the flames of controversy for his own foul purposes" issue—it probably is possible to mock Mohammed, in general, without the world exploding. Hooray. See the Wikipedia discussion page for verification.]

Analogize

To add to my previous post (because, really, it needed to be longer), consider these cases:

• During a time of racial strife in America, a newspaper runs a story about how white people no longer feel safe walking the streets, because blacks are innately violent. As a supporting feature, they publish cartoons illustrating this point. Rioting ensues, and the paper is burned down.


• During the Janet Jackson Superbowl kerfuffle, a major newspaper gets sick and tired of the inanity and publishes a topless group photo of their (partly female) editorial staff. They consider it an act of nonviolent resistance to what they see as an overly oppressive culture. They are fired, the Christian right lines up to try to get the paper shut down, and some nut throws a Molotov cocktail into their offices.
  

Our reactions to these two sets of images would probably be different; the latter is more clearly a free speech issue, I think, and the former more clearly an incitement to violence without any valid point to make. I don't think it's at all clear, given the information we (I) have, which category the Jyllands-Posten cartoons fall into, or if they're somewhere in the middle, or off on a different axis. And that legitimately affects how we'll feel about Jyllands-Posten.

However, it's important to point out that in both cases the newspaper would be exercising their right to free speech, and in both cases the violent reaction would be insupportable. We might feel more sympathy for the second set of editors, and the first set of editors might legitimately be called idiots, but in both cases the line between legally acceptable and inacceptable behavior is clear.