The Right to Be Offended

I was disappointed in the editorial, The Right to Be Offended, that The Nation chose to run in response to the Muhammad cartoon controversy. I've excerpted passages from the essay where I think the author's reasoning is faulty or just plain wrong.

The Right to Be Offended
by GARY YOUNGE
[from the February 27, 2006 issue]

Four months after the cartoons were published, Jyllands-Posten's editor apologized. In the intervening time Muslims engaged in mostly peaceful protests. Several Arab and Muslim nations withdrew their ambassadors from Denmark while demonstrators picketed embassies. According to Denmark's consul in Dubai, a boycott of Danish products in the Gulf would cost the country $27 million in sales.

All of this went largely unnoticed in the West, apart from critics who characterized the protests as evidence of a "clash of civilizations." In their attempt to limit free speech, went the argument, the demonstrators proved that Islam and Western democracy were incompatible.

1. It is misleading to claim that cartoons "went largely unnoticed in the West," except by critics seeking "evidence of a 'clash of civilizations.'" The reports I recall reading last fall took care to explain the context in which the cartoons were first printed - as the publisher's response to learning about the reluctance of artist's to illustrate a children's book about the Koran for fear that doing so would make them potential targets of violence from Muslim extremists. The reports also dutifully noted that the Jyllands-Posten was a right-leaning paper and expressed concern that its editors were appealing to a xenophobic, anti-immigration movement in Darkmark and in so doing creating unnecessary problems for Danish Muslims. One of the cartoons, the one featuring Muhammad as a schoolboy in front of a chalkboard on which is written - in Arabic script - something like 'The Jyllands-Posten editors are poseurs and provocateurs.' (I'll have to look up the translation.)

2. Note the use of the adverb 'mostly' in the phrase "mostly peaceful protests." The un-peaceful, i.e. violent protests in response to the caricatures are precisely the problem that Younge tries to downplay.

Even on its own terms this logic is disingenuous. The right to offend must come with at least one consequent right and one subsequent responsibility. People must have the right to be offended, and those bold enough to knowingly cause offense should be bold enough to weather the consequences, so long as the aggrieved respond within the law. Muslims were in effect being vilified twice--once through the original cartoons and then again for having the gall to protest them. Such logic recalls the words of the late South African black nationalist Steve Biko: "Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked."

3. No one is disputing the claim that those who make potentially offensive claims must take responsibility for their actions and be prepared to address those whom they might have offended. The issue, as Younge seems to recognize but quickly passes over, is whether the responses are "within the law."

4. Muslims were not vilified by the original cartoon, only, perhaps, Muslim extremists whose violent outbursts against Denmark, etc. have ironically confirmed the very stereotype of the bearded, bomb-throwing extremists that one of the cartoons might appear to promote.

5. The analogy Younge makes between Steve Biko's statements on behalf of the anti-apartheid movement and the Muslim extremists is misleading insofar as it equates the cartoons of Muhammad to be a violent act, equivalent to the brutal subordination of black South Africans. Biko's statement can be paraphrased as suggesting that whites have no right to tell the black South Africans how to react to being violently and forcefully repressed. People (not necesarrily whites only, I should add, since Younge's figuration suggests that the cartoon controversy is necessarily about race, which it shouldn't be) aren't denying that Muslims have a right to disagree with the publication of the Muhammad cartoons. What they are saying is that this disagreement must not assume a violent form - burning embassies, attacking ambassadors, etc. It is a huge mistake to equate discursive disagreement with physical violence: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words...

There seems to be almost universal agreement that these cartoons are offensive. There should also be universal agreement that the paper has a right to publish them without fear of violent reprisal. When it comes to freedom of speech, the liberal/left should not sacrifice its values one inch to those who seek censorship on religious grounds. But the right to freedom of speech equates to neither an obligation to offend nor a duty to be insensitive. If our commitment to free speech is important, our belief in antiracism should be no less so.

6. No, there is not "almost universal agreement that these cartoons are offensive." While the Bush Administration and Bill Clinton, to name two prominent U.S. sources, have endorsed this view, commentators have noted that the prohibition on representing Muhammad is limited to practicing Muslims only and that these cartoons are no more offensive than the caricatures critical of the pope that regularly appear in Western newspapers.

The acts of violence, including death threats to Jyllands-Posten's editor, should be condemned. The fact remains, however, that the overwhelming swath of protests, particularly in Europe, where crass banners and suicide-bomber attire were the worst offenses, have so far been peaceful.

7. Here Younge's desire to portray the protests as peaceful cause him to overlook the fact that several foreign embassies have been attacked and burned and that people have been injured and even killed in the protests! Moreover, even though the European protests "have so far been peaceful," the fact that 500 people took to the streets of London calling for another 7/7 does not strike me as a particularly positive or peaceful development.

But those who see this episode as freighted with weightier cultural meanings have another agenda. "This is a far bigger story than just the question of twelve cartoons in a small Danish newspaper," Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten's culture editor, told the New York Times. Too right, but it is not the story Rose thinks it is. Rose claims that "this is about the question of integration and how compatible is the religion of Islam with a modern secular society." In the mistaken belief that Europe is a monoethnic continent to which nonwhite people have just arrived, Rose is not alone in refracting every protest by a minority through a racial, ethnic or religious lens.

8. While I'm sure that there are members of the far-right in the West who are using this episode to advance a racist or xenophobic agenda, I am not convinced from the quote that is provided that Flemming Rose is one of them. In any case, I'm not sure how Rose's doubts about the compatibility of "the religion of Islam with a modern secular society" get glossed as being an assertion about Europe being "a monoethnic continent to which nonwhite people have just arrived." It is Younge, not Rose, who appears guilty of playing the race card and racializing a debate about belief. Note that Rose's remark expresses concern about the "religion of Islam," not any particular ethnic group, and whether some of its core beliefs are incompatible with the West's secular way of life. As the whole debate about freedom of expression suggests, this is a legitimate question. As feminists have noted, there are many sexist practices endorsed by Islam that we Westerners regard as wrong and illegal.


In so doing he displays his ignorance of both modern secular society and the role of all religions within it. Without anything as explicit as a First Amendment, Europe's freedom of speech laws are far more piecemeal than those of the United States. Many were adopted as a result of the Holocaust--the most potent reminder of just how fragile and recent this liberal secular tradition truly is in Europe. Last year the French daily Le Monde was found guilty of "racist defamation" against Israel and the Jewish people. Madonna's book Sex was only unbanned in Ireland in 2004. Even as this debate rages, David Irving sits in jail in Austria charged with Holocaust denial over a speech he made seventeen years ago, Islamist cleric Abu Hamza has been convicted in London for incitement to murder and racial hatred and Louis Farrakhan remains banned from Britain because his arrival "would not be conducive to the public good." Even here in America school boards routinely ban the works of authors like Alice Walker and J.K. Rowling. Such actions should be opposed; but no one claims Protestant, Catholic or Jewish values are incompatible with democracy.

9. Actually, Younge, there are people who question whether certain Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish values are incompatible with democracy. Such debates go on all the time. Think about the tiresome debates about whether or not the ten commandments can be posted in public courthouses, etc. Generally, the standard line of reasoning is that members of a particular faith cannot impose their beliefs on the population at large. Moreover, just because some Christians and Jews have banned various works on the grounds that they are offensive doesn't make this practice right. One wants to say that those groups, like the Muslims who have protested violently, are mistaken in believing that Western secular democracies must endorse their religious values. Finally, the fact that the "liberal secular tradition" is fragile only means that we should be more vigilant in responding to the recent attacks on it.

Which brings us back to Zieler. We will never know what the response to his Christ cartoons would have been because they were never published. (The paper's announced plan to reprint some cartoons about Christ fails to mitigate its double standard.) That fact alone shows that the question has never been whether you draw a line under what is or isn't acceptable to publish, but where you draw it. There is nothing courageous about using your freedom of speech to ridicule the beliefs of one of the weakest sections of your society. But Rose and others like him clearly believe Muslims, by virtue of their religion, exist on the wrong side of the line. That exclusion finds its reflection in the Islamist rejection of all things Western. And so the secularists and antiracists in both the West and the Middle East find their space for maneuver limited, while dogma masquerades as principle, and Islamists and Islamophobes are confirmed in their own vile prejudices.

10. The Jyllands-Posten editors are and were not obliged to publish the cartoons of Christ in their private newspaper. It is their editorial right to choose what material they want to publish. Moreover, nobody in Denmark or any other Western country is required to read what is published in this private newspaper. Whether or not the editors of the Jyllands-Posten are courageous is not the issue. That said, I think we shouldn't rush with Young to conclude that the editors were intending simply to "ridicule the beliefs of one of the weakest sections of [their] society." As I understand it, they were ridiculing the Muslims who believe that anyone choosing to represent Muhammad deserves to be punished violently. Hopefully, not all Muslims believe such extreme responses are justified. Those that do, we might add, have chosen to exclude themselves from Western societies where the right to disagree publicly about matters of belief is sacrosanct.