Sayeqa Islam: Muhammad cartoons should not have been published here

Imagine three items hitting a newspaper editor's desk one Monday morning. The first is a cartoon of Muhammad depicted as a suicide bomber. The second is an article by David Irving, renowned Holocaust denier, claiming the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis did not occur, and that Hitler had no deliberate policy to kill Jews. The third is a cartoon depicting the late Pope John Paul II sodomising a crying young boy while standing above St Peter's Square, declaring to all Catholics present and all those around the world listening, "If it's okay for me, it's okay for every God-fearing Catholic!".

Does anyone believe a mainstream Western newspaper would ever print items two and three in apparent defence of free speech, without any condemnation of those items' themes? Yet many Western newspapers, including one in New Zealand, printed the Muhammad cartoons, some of which are certainly as offensive to Muslims as a Pope-as-child-rapist cartoon would be to Catholics.

The Pope-as-child-rapist image is similar to Muhammad-as-suicide-bomber because both equate the most heinous acts of some religionists with their religion's figurehead and their religion as a whole. Muhammad isn't simply Islam's last prophet. He is considered the exemplar Muslim: the person all Muslims should aspire to live like. After the Koran, it is the hadith - the sayings and doings of Muhammad - that give Muslims the greatest guidance in how they should live their lives. To depict Muhammad as a suicide bomber is to suggest Islam condones suicide bombers and that all Muslims aspire to being suicide bombers. It is to say Islam is, per se, murderous, vengeful, callous and cold-blooded.

It is hard to imagine a mainstream Western newspaper printing an article or cartoon which suggested similar things about any other religious, racial, or national group. Would New Zealand papers have printed an article by a vile, neo-Nazi group suggesting that all Jews are vermin? Would they have printed a caricature suggesting Asians were behind the deaths on New Zealand roads and the loss of Kiwis' jobs?

It is heartening that the Herald decided not to print the cartoons because, it said, "Cartoons that set out to give offence for no redeeming purpose leave a nasty taste in the mouths of most people, and media with mass circulation publications generally avoid them". It is likewise disappointing that another newspaper, the Dominion Post, decided in favour of publication, without so much as a phone call to a religious scholar to understand why they had caused such offence among Muslims.

It's important for a Muslim, such as myself, to enunciate clearly why I do not believe the cartoons should be reprinted by New Zealand newspapers. New Zealand, like most Western countries, respects both the right to freedom of speech and the freedom to express one's religion. These are freedoms from which New Zealand's Muslims benefit and would in no way wish to curtail.

But the freedom of speech is one that should be exercised responsibly by a news outlet that considers itself to be mainstream.

Newspapers in free societies choose not to print all kinds of material because they believe that the public good in not printing outweighs the informational/educational benefit from doing so. Freedom of speech certainly does not mean, in practice, that newspapers print absolutely anything, with no regard to the consequences. Suicides aren't reported, because of a fear of copy-cats. The private lives of politicians and their families aren't generally reported, because they are considered matters that don't intersect with politicians' public roles. Extremely graphic footage from war zones isn't aired, because they are considered to breach standards of good taste.

In all these cases, the free press has the right to report these things, but chooses not to because it believes it acts within certain standards of good taste and basic decency. These standards tend to see regard given to the sensitivities of those who will be affected by a particular publication.

So, it is not enough for a newspaper to argue "We have the right to print these cartoons", because next to no one in New Zealand would disagree. The real question is: Was the Dominion Post acting responsibly in exercising that right?

Which brings us back to what the cartoons in question depicted: one of which is a crude, grossly offensive caricature of Islam, and all Muslims, as mindless, murderous thugs. In part, the Dominion Post's justification for doing so is to point out that the state media in some totalitarian regimes in Muslim countries have in the past broadcast grossly offensive items about other religious groups. Indeed so. A lot has been said and done by extremists in the name of Islam - including outrageous, xenophobic depictions of Judaism and Christianity - which have horrified the more than a billion tolerant, peace-loving Muslims worldwide. But why would the Dominion Post or any other Western newspaper try to fight the extremists' bigotry by perpetuating bigotry against Muslims? What sort of message does it send to the millions of Muslims yearning to be free when the press in the West publishes a cartoon portraying all Muslims as murderers?

In printing the cartoons, the Dominion Post took the easy road. Hiding behind simplistic arguments about the freedom of speech, it indulged itself in a cheap publicity stunt designed not to defend and celebrate hard-won freedoms but to sell a few more papers.

Attempting to get to the bottom of why the cartoons were considered so offensive by Muslims, thus entering into a genuine cross-cultural dialogue, would have been much more courageous and, dare I say it, journalistic.

* Sayeqa Islam studies law and criminology at Victoria University