The
Meaning of the Cartoon War
By
Chilton Williamson, Jr.
iewed
in one of its aspects, the continuing saga of the Cartoon
War appears as a tempest in a teapot; in another, a raging
storm of Biblical proportions. What little remains of Western
civilization needs to harness the whirlwind and direct it
against its enemies, if it wishes to preserve that little.
Yet
the fact that the wind arose at all provides modest encouragement,
at least, for defenders of Western Europe and its extensions
throughout the Western Hemisphere. True, in its determination
to challenge and defy the Mohammedan world by defending
and justifying the publication of cartoon drawings of their
Prophet by the Danish publication Jyllands-Posten, the West
seems scarcely to understand what it is doing. Flemming
Rose, the paper's cultural editor who commissioned the drawing
in the first place, made no claim to be acting in defense
of the foundations of Western civilization (such as Christianity)
but rather one of its derivative and relatively late-developing
institutions, freedom of speech and of the press. As no
other civic freedom has been more effectively employed than
this one by Westerners themselves for the purpose of destroying
the civilization that gave it rise, the Europeans' chosen
line of defense is--shall we say--fraught with irony.
In protesting the forbidden depiction of Mohammed, Moslems
in Europe, and around the world, are consciously defending
the inmost core of their religion and their culture. European
commentators, resisting them, are upholding only the outer
layers of theirs. Had the Jyllands-Posten cartoons represented
Miriam with bare breasts and wearing thong underwear, the
grounds for defense would have been precisely the same,
even though the majority of liberal journalists would likely
not place freedom to publish obscenity quite on a level
with freedom to print outspoken political commentary. For
the time being, Islam and the West, in opposing one another,
are scarcely offering equal opposites, though the situation
may change as the European culture war unfolds.
In
fact, it has already begun to change, as the West becomes
aroused at a deeper level of consciousness and self-awareness-and,
therefore, of resentment and righteous anger. If the process
is to become a sustained and progressive one, the Moslems'
self-obsession, fanaticism, and aggression must accelerate
to the point where their outrageous and almost insane demands
are recognizable by nearly everyone in Europe for what they
are. Then perhaps-though for the moment it remains no more
than a cautious hope-Europe will be capable of answering
a Moslem outrage on the order of the French riots last year
with the threat of its own "fire next time." Hence,
the present conflict between Europe and the Moslem world
is a conflagration needing to be fanned, not dampened. Time
is not on the side of the West. The sooner European indignation
is enflamed to fury, the more likely it is that a Second
Expulsion of the Moors from Europe will indeed come to pass.
In
the first days of the standoff, the nearly universal Western
response to Moslem protest was purely defensive: to assert
the right-in fact, the duty-of the Western European democracies
to uphold Western liberal institutions like freedom of speech
and the press in the context of dissent by unlike minority
cultures embedded among them. It did not take long, however,
before defensiveness began to be diffused by a markedly
offensive tone: Just who do these non-democratic adherents
of an authoritarian and puritanical religion think they
are, coming into our country and demanding that we change
our societies to suit them? Here, of course, is the crux
of the matter: To what extent are the receiving countries
obligated to accommodate their own longstanding traditions
and values to those of the indigent, importunate, and frequently
illegal immigrants in their midst? The obvious answer is,
None at all. So far, neither their historical religion,
nor their historical institutions, nor the relics of their
once glorious culture (the most glorious the world has ever
seen), nor the memory of that culture before it was a relic,
has been sufficient to inspire the peoples of Europe to
resist the presumptuous invader. If anger arising from the
affronted territorial instinct and the animal resentment
at being pushed around by aggressive outsiders is really
their sole motivation to resistance, so be it--if the motive
works.
If
it accomplishes nothing else, the Cartoon War has dramatized
the fundamental absurdities inherent in the permitted development
of vast Muslim barrios within the boundaries of Europe,
the immediate juxtaposition, cheek by jowl, of the anti-democratic
East and the democratic West. On 8 and 9 February, the New
York Times ran a pair of articles that together point up
the lesson. The first quoted a 50-year-old salesman employed
by an Italian specialty deli in Berlin as saying, "We
have to make a point here. Personally, I would expel all
Muslims in the concerned countries because they simply don't
accept democratic rules here." The second article referred
to a professor at the American University in Beirut, who
argues that the fury provoked in Europe by the Jyllands-Posten
gave authoritarian Arab governments hectored by Washington
democratists the opportunity to say to Muslims, in Europe
and elsewhere, "'Look, this is the democracy they're
talking about'"-that is, one whose freedoms permit
insult to Islam.
In
the history of the West, religious fanaticism has expressed
itself chiefly (the case of the Jews being the main exception)
in the demands of religious leaders and fervent believers
for the imposition-by force if necessary-of orthodoxy on
their fellow-believers. It is left for Moslems to stretch
fanaticism to a form of insanity by insisting, as an article
of faith, that what they call "infidels"-billions
of people faithful to another religion, as well as agnostics
and atheists-respect the tenets and observe the taboos of
their own, on penalty of mass extermination. Their demand,
to my knowledge, is nearly without precedent in the religious
history of the world. A Western parallel to the Muslim furor
over the depiction of Mohammed wearing a turban in the form
of a bomb would have been rioting by Christians the world
over to protest Robert Mapplethorpe's "Piss Christ,"
a Crucifix immersed in a bottle of the "artist's"
urine. Morever, Moslems are not content with enjoining the
kafirs from blaspheming Islam: They insist on being spared
the hurt and humiliation caused by disrespect to their faith
shown by non-Moslems. The obvious response is that the West
is no proper home for people of their peculiar belief and
extreme religious sensitivity; a response should have been
handed to them long ago. Perhaps, if they keep on as they
are going at present, it will be--and sooner rather than
later, at that.
Polite
European opinion represents the Cartoon War as putting at
stake democratic freedoms, some of which have only recently
been recognized as freedoms at all, even by the West. Of
course, there is far more to the contretemps than that:
We are witnessing a revival of the epic civilizational struggle,
lasting fourteen hundred years now, between East and West--ironically,
in the guise of the renewal of the inter-faith religious
wars of early modern Europe. Of this fact, few Europeans
seem to have a clue. For now, anyway, it hardly matters.
If they can muster the courage and stamina to oppose the
enemy in the name of their current idol, democracy, that
is enough. The more they fight--and the longer--the more
they will rediscover their past and learn to revere it,
once again, in all its breadth and fullness.
Chilton Williamson, Jr. is the author,
most recently, of The Hundredth
Meridian: Seasons and Travels in the New Old West.
He can be visited at his new website,
chiltonwilliamson.com
