[Photo: AFP/Arif Ali]

[by Nathan Means]

Everybody here in New Zealand likes to say we're a few steps behind the rest of the world, but not having newspaper editors hotly defend their goddamn right to blasphemy while local Muslims angrily protest was refreshing while it lasted. In a country where every candy bar is halal, the only talk was all about losing Middle East dairy contracts.

This past weekend, however, a few local newspapers republished (re-republished?) the caricatures and we joined the whole garishly cartoonish “crisis.”

When was last time you thought to yourself, “My local newspaper really put on the kid gloves for that article – I guess they were trying to avoid a Fatwa”? I'd guess never, but replacing “a fatwa” with “pissing off their advertisers/the publisher's buddies/the Pentagon” might bring a few glimmers of recognitions.

Now we've got an explosive showdown of absolutes that is so pathetically programmatic -- both in the engineered eruptions of protest months after the cartoons' initial printing and the self-righteous flurry as newspaper after newspaper reprints -- that the most interesting question is why British and American newspapers have mostly abstained.

Perhaps, Anglo-American journalists cynically accept we live in a diseased universe where a 40-year-old Rolling Stones song is still so dangerous it needs to be byzantinely censored during Super Bowl halftime. So, fresh from their catastrophic failure to do anything but encourage us into the Iraqi mess (and maybe accepting themselves as permanently embedded), the mainstream press at least has either the decency or despair to not dream that suddenly running the First Amendment freedom flag up the mast will clear their slate.

I am little more hopeful that that. Is it possible that the Anglo-American reaction realizes that, although we must always stand for the right to publish whatever whenever (especially in times of war) there was nothing to be gained from publishing at worst offensive at best not-funny images of a major world religion's prophet at a time of extreme tension with some adherents to that religion? Is it possible that after a few centuries of bulling and blundering about the globe, Americans and Brits have actually learned something useful about living in a multi-cultural society? That we can accept the contingencies and sometimes awful responsibilities that undergird and limit our freedoms?

The steep downside to this possibility is that the Continental response bespeaks a creeping intolerance. The editors at these European newspapers - now proudly leading the world in provocatively probing Islamic wounds - almost seem to have been spoiling for a fight almost as much as the organizers of the original anti-cartoon protests. If they really feel left out for not joining the original agent provocateurs, good news: The coalition of the willing has a few spaces open.

OK: my dislike of the Danes started when they refused my plastic for a few ridiculously expensive drinks (I was told because it wasn't a “Danish” Visa card - talk about being provincial) but is there not paranoia oozing out in the Continental reaction?

Apparently a careful Continental societal calculus has been stressed (by the intruding values of a small group of immigrants? by the “global Islamic threat”?) causing Fortress Europe's media to freak out and, swelled with pride of “real freedom,” start swinging their own big absolutes around on a small crowded planet. Instead of republishing the cartoons again, why don't they just roll up a copy of Jyllands-Posten and beat some tolerance into their minority populations?

And where is the religious right when you need them? Shouldn't these Christians make a principled stand with their Muslim brothers in the face of an assault by the secular forces of Europe? Isn't Europe's masturbatory flexing of their freedom not just a big sneer at caring passionately about any faith?

Often invoked “freedom” has sagged a bit every time it passed through W's poisonous lips. Now the Europeans have propped the syllables up to defend the right to relentlessly tweak others when almost nothing is at stake. Janis Joplin sang “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” Now, if its semantic fiber can recuperate enough to hold any form, freedom apparently means a triumphalist but empty bragging on our increasingly mystified liberties.

February 14, 2006

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