Paul Thomas: Cartoon fallout lands in familiar territory

As is often the case when the world is plunged into a crisis that no one saw coming, it's tempting to assume that we're witnessing an event of historical significance, perhaps even a turning point in the affairs of men.

But we have been here before.

In 1969 the satirist Auberon Waugh wrote a column in the Times in which he recycled an old army joke about the sort of trousers worn by men in parts of the Middle and Near East.

The paper was bombarded with furious letters from the embassies of Islamic countries, there were demonstrations in London and the British Council Library in Rawalpindi was burned to the ground. (Interestingly, when he recounted this incident in his autobiography, Waugh chose not to repeat the joke).

Then there was the fatwa - sentence of death - complete with multimillion-dollar bounty imposed on writer Salman Rushdie whose novel The Satanic Verses was deemed disrespectful of Islam. Rushdie was forced to hide for more than a decade.

The fatwa wasn't imposed by some shadowy terrorist outfit, but by Iran's spiritual leader and de facto head of state, Ayatollah Khomeini. It was subsequently and repeatedly confirmed by the Iranian parliament and government officials.

Perhaps historians will identify the West's passivity when confronted with this chilling assault on freedom of expression as a turning point. Having finally discredited and rolled back state censorship of the arts, the West could only manage a muted protest when a foreign government sought to impose the ultimate censorship on one of its leading writers.

And as is often the case with moral debates, the Danish cartoons unleashed an extravaganza of paradox, hypocrisy and unconscious irony. Gusts of hot air were expelled on the related themes of freedom of the press and media responsibility. Some of the most strenuous huffing and puffing took place in parts of the world where the media is neither free nor responsible.
Lectures on this subject from newspapers which routinely reprint that anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or peddle inflammatory misinformation such as the claim that the September 11 attacks were the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, are of curiosity value only.

Cue the inevitable claim - this time from a high priest in the Iranian theocracy - that the caricaturing of Mohammed was a Zionist plot.

After the Dominion-Post published the cartoons, it featured a piece by a Muslim law student who asked whether the newspaper, in the name of free speech, would run an article by professional Holocaust denier David Irving repeating the assertions that have landed him in an Austrian jail.

A good question given that Irving was denied entry to New Zealand, thus sparing editors that very dilemma.

The following day an Iranian newspaper announced it would sponsor an international festival of cartoons about the Holocaust with a view to challenging the Western media to publish them. It'll be interesting to see if this provocative notion has legs.

Given the looming confrontation over Iran's nuclear programme and the fact that the new Iranian President has already indulged in Holocaust denial and expressed his desire to wipe Israel off the map, it's already in danger of being overtaken by events.

Next a Muslim cleric in London was jailed for preaching that the killing of non-Muslims was a religious duty. His lawyer admitted some of his client's statements were a bit over the top, but the British Attorney-General took a sterner view: free speech was important, he said, but encouraging murder and inciting hatred on the basis of race was intolerable.

One of the guilty pleasures of this ongoing drama is watching the intellectual contortions of the post-Christian, anything-goes society as it attempts to accommodate religious fundamentalism.

The law student also asked if the Dominion-Post would run a cartoon of the late Pope sodomising a boy in St Peter's Square. Probably not but I'd be amazed if the Dom, like most papers in the Western world, hasn't at some point run savage comment, perhaps in cartoon form, on the Catholic Church's paedophilia scandals. I'd be equally amazed if many a blameless priest hasn't felt tarred by that brush.

Our media routinely portrays fundamentalist Christians as simple-minded or sinister or both - witness the Exclusive Brethren's involvement in last year's election.

Their core beliefs - for example, creationism and the sanctity of the unborn child - are derided as primitivism, even as we accord the utmost respect to ethnic myths and legends.

Perhaps the lesson in all of this is that because the sceptical, humanist, liberal West no longer believes in anything much beyond its standard of living, it has great difficulty in knowing how to respond to those who take their beliefs very seriously.

As a result we vacillate between disrespect and appeasement.

Islamic extremists hate our freedom, our secularism, our indulgence of individualism and diversity, our robust and sometimes wounding give-and-take, all of which they see as licence and decadence.

They'll maintain the pressure with the aim of eroding our commitment to those values and our willingness to defend them. Faced with that pressure we as a society must have the confidence and clarity to know which battles are worth fighting.