Contest "Draw Muhammad as you see him" Was Bound To Inflame

[omega minimo]

:thumbsdown: The furious furor ignited by the publication of cartoons was the result of a decision by a hate-wing Danish editor to deliberately challenge what he knew was a taboo-- with a cartoon contest.

Turmoil Over Cartoons Began Quietly Among Danes --By Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post Foreign Service
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/07/AR2006020700499.html

“Rose, culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, suspected the art world was self-censoring out of fear of Islamic radicals. So he contacted 25 Danish newspaper cartoonists with a challenge: Draw Muhammad as you see him. Twelve responded, and the newspaper printed their submissions, including one that depicted Islam's holiest figure with a bomb in his turban.”

"We were astonished and extremely shocked," said Laban. One of Denmark's most prominent Muslim clerics, he said the faith's tradition forbids any depictions of Muhammad. He saw the crude drawings as the latest smear against Muslims in Denmark, a nation whose long history of tolerance has been tested in recent years by rising anti-immigrant sentiment.

:thumbsup: The NewsHour had a lucid discussion on the decisions of editors to print the cartoons or describe them instead.

CARTOON COVERAGE
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june06/cartoon_2-9.html

Robert Rosenthal, vice president and managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle;
Geneva Overholser, a professor of journalism for the University of Missouri, and previously editor of the Des Moines Register and ombudsman at the Washington Post.

Robert Rosenthal, starting with you, you chose not to show the cartoons. Why not?

ROBERT ROSENTHAL: Well, we made a decision here that we felt we could describe it in words. And we also made an attempt on the first day to purchase the cartoon from the Danish newspaper ....... And by that time, we ran a picture of people in Europe looking at it, being the cartoons in a European newspaper. We also felt that the description in words worked. And at that point, it would have been, we felt, gratuitous to run it in the sense that the news story was breaking, it was out there, the reason for the rioting in the Muslim world was very clear. And we knew that some segments of our community would find it very offensive. It doesn't mean we haven't printed or published pictures in the past that we knew might offend people. But in this case, really the decision was made, that as I said, it was probably going to be a little gratuitous and that words were sufficient to describe what was really setting people off.

JEFFREY BROWN: Geneva Overholser, what do you see as the key issues here, and is this a lively debate in newsrooms across the country?

GENEVA OVERHOLSER: You know, we are talking here about the clash of two really important tenets. And one is that we, in journalism in this country believe in telling the truth, not letting anyone suppress the truth, being forthright, giving the reader or the viewer the full story. But the other tenet is this very profound Islamic view that you don't picture the Prophet Mohammed and certainly that you don't picture him in negative situations. And so, what an editor has to do, and this happens all the time, editors weigh, you know, I want to tell the truth and yet I don't want to offend gratuitously. So you have to think about how much truth-telling you can do here and how much harm you can do if you run the images.

<snip>

ROBERT ROSENTHAL: I think for most American audiences and our readers, they would look at this drawing, which we've all seen probably by now somewhere, and said, what is the big deal? I'm not sure that would have added to our knowledge of why people of the Muslim faith would be so offended.

:think: Both these comments express why I OP'd on the relevance --for the sake of discussion --of knowing about the prohibition on images of Mohammed. Some replies include great background information on this.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2440485&mesg_id=2440485

ROBERT ROSENTHAL: And what we tried to do with words is explain why this was offensive and talk to a lot of people, talk to Islamic experts, and wrote about why this was so explosive an issue in the context not only of their religion but also in the politics that are happening in terms of geopolitics. So I'm not sure that showing an American audience what this was, consulting some of your readers, would have made that much sense because I don't think most Americans would see anything wrong with this drawing. So that was also part of our discussion.

:eyes: We need to step back and look at "why this was so explosive an issue in the context not only of their religion but also in the politics that are happening in terms of geopolitics." And maybe ask why anyone would want to stand up in a very hot, crowded movie theater and yell,

"F...I....R....E!!!!!!!!!!" :nuke:

[omega minimo]

1. It's all about eyeballs and ratings "even on DU"

controversy sells, sex sells, ignorance sells, "who's a troll and who's getting wanked" sells.

:hi:


"The people long eagerly for two things, bread and circuses."

http://www.swans.com/library/art8/ga130.html

[Wordie]

2. Thanks for the additional background info on this sad issue, omega minimo.

Here's more from the article, for anyone interested. The article mentions how Rasmussen's government is highly anti-immigration, and has passed a number of strict anti-terrorism laws. The prime minister gets a lot of support from the highly anti-immigration Danish People's Party (which holds nearly 13 percent of Danish Parliament seats).:

This country of 5.4 million people, including about 200,000 Muslims, has long viewed itself as a haven for all views and faiths. But skyrocketing immigration in the 1990s spurred a backlash that culminated in the November 2001 election of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

...Morten Messerschmidt, a People's Party member of Parliament, said the clash between Muslims and ethnic Danes, who are largely Christian, was inevitable because the two cultures have vastly different traditions about issues such as free speech. He blamed Laban and other Muslim immigrant clerics for escalating the conflict and refusing to integrate and accept "freedoms that have created our highly developed societies in the West."

But there was good news in the article too:

But many Muslims in Denmark have disavowed the vehemence of the protests. "The majority of Muslims don't care about this," said Naser Khader, a Syrian-born member of Parliament. "This is an Islamist agenda," he said, using a word describing the philosophy of Islamic radicals. "We don't want those imams to talk for us."

A new association of "moderate Muslims" that he formed has attracted 500 members in recent days, he said: "All of us, across cultures and religions, have to say 'enough is enough' to the Islamists."

For anyone who is curious, as I was, the full name of the newspaper editor who set up the contest is Flemming Rose.

Recommended.

[omega minimo]

4. I believe it's pronounced "Flaming"

"For anyone who is curious, as I was, the full name of the newspaper editor who set up the contest is Flemming Rose."

:evilgrin:

What if some good came of this? A critical mass of people who recognize that there are no easy answers and no one is "right" here-- that it's time for all to step back, examine their own behavior, act in consistence with proclaimed beliefs-- i.e. "don't be a hypocrite" and quit going insane?

What if enough middle-of-the-road people are truly and permanently disgusted by the blatant racism and hypocrisy (and the violence IT perpetrates) of Limbot, Coulter, et al, that they start to detox from the Hate Wing?




Hey, we can DREAM. B-)


Meanwhile........... controversy sells.

[Wordie]

5. Now there's an irony!

And I would hope the same regarding the detox.

[omega minimo]

3. Link to San Francicsco Chronicle coverage (Mr. Rosenthal, Man. Ed.)

http://www.sfgate.com

then search or link to SF Chronicle

[Wordie]

6. Rosenthal made the right call: an ethical decision not to run the cartoon.

[omega minimo]

7. "Some line is always drawn" "Yes, absolutely --and every day"

GENEVA OVERHOLSER: I wonder if Jerry, however, would put into context here the question of how offensive these are. We regularly do withhold expletives that we know will offend our readers. If we wanted to tell the whole truth about a quote that someone used, we would need to use them but we regularly withhold them as a matter of taste, for example, or pictures that are simply too gory.

At some point this -- we take into consideration that in the context of the Islamic faith, these may be so offensive that they cross that same line that editors regularly cross every day.

JEFFREY BROWN: Some line is always drawn.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER: Yes, absolutely.

JEFFREY BROWN: There's a new -- you make a case for a new sort of cultural sensitivity, understanding where that line is.

GENEVA OVERHOLSER: And every day.

<>

JEFFREY BROWN: Mr. Rosenthal, I did want to ask you one thing because - I wanted to ask about the fear factor. Is that a factor at all in terms of making a decision to run them or not?

ROBERT ROSENTHAL: No. It wasn't at all -- any factor at all. I wanted one other thing, if we go back about a year ago, there was a report out of Guantanamo about a toilet being flushed in the Periscope Section of Newsweek. And that set off rioting that was almost equal to this and protests, and that was about words.

So it's not just simply the image here that set this off, it's the, you know, violation of a key, in this case, the prophet, the key prophet, and also in that case it was the Quran, an essential vehicle for Islam. So to me it was a lot more complicated, and I understand what Jerry is saying.

But I also think at the point where we all got into it, which was several days later, that at that point when everyone sort of knew what this was about, you know, that was also part of our decision. And, again, I agree with Geneva, we deal with every day in most newsrooms certain things we're going to do and not do, with the understanding that they will offend people. Abu Ghraib was an example, some papers in America didn't publish the pictures initially, some did on their front pages or elsewhere in the paper.

And everybody knew in the newsrooms what those photographs meant, not only in the Muslim world but also to us as Americans what we were doing. So it's a debate, and I think everybody's background influences the decision.

I think the fact that I was in the Middle East and understood this, and understood how the cultural divide I talked about, that was part of my decision making.

[Wordie]

10. Many of the "free speech" advocates would never use the "N" word...

to refer to a black person. There are many self-restrictive sorts of reins on free speech that are a part of our own culture. Yet perhaps because they are so deeply ingrained now, especially for those of us who are progressives, that we perhaps aren't really even aware of our own exercise of them.

I've made this point before, but I don't seem to be getting much of anywhere with it. :(

But here's a thread with some good news, from London:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2101502

It's about a peaceful protest against the cartoons, held just this morning. :)

[omega minimo]

13. This brought out folks who think "free speech" is freedom to be a jerk

The subtleties of this issue are probably unknown to many Americans-- the prohibition on images of a holy figure, or how some cultures view their holy books LITERALLY as "alive." That Danish editor intentionally set off a firestorm.

Today's SF Chron headline is "What's Behind Muslim Cartoon Outrage."

Good news about peaceful protests. :bounce:

[Wordie]

14. Yeah, but I think there are also a certain number of folks who

have heard the stuff about limitations on free speech, and since they value free speech, and haven't been presented with all the info that reveals this to be a far more complicated issue, they just go with that.

That's why I think your posts have been very valuable, omega minimo. They present a good explanation of why the cartoons were so offensive to Muslims. Most in the US just don't know a lot about the religion, besides what they've heard about the extreme stuff.

[bloom]

8. There was a thread

on DU yesterday (maybe it's still going) where someone was arguing that the Muslims should stop the violence (and while it's been Muslims killed by police by police/security in the protests - I don't think their concern was for Muslims). And then someone ( a newbie - it was deleted) posted that the US should be killing Muslims (as if our military is not already) - so you see the flames spreading.

Another thread linked to a cartoon from a site with links to many anti-Muslim hate-sites.

:(

[omega minimo]

9. A new peace movement would challenge all the violence in the name of god

RIP Martin and Coretta

[Douglas Carpenter]

11. maybe it's just me....but it seems that there has been a number of

anti-Arab and anti-Muslim comments lately. This kind of hate speech would not be tolerated against many other groups. It is disgusting that it can even be found on a progressive forum.

[omega minimo]

12. Yes, that's short-sighted to say the least

The non-violence advocates are fighting back ;) against ignorance.

In the big picture too, I'm hoping that could be a possible outcome of this mess.

[Wordie]

15. Kick for Sunday morning crowd...

[omega minimo]

16. Wonder if major peace movement could generate from this insanity?

:toast: thanks Wordie :yourock:

[Wordie]

17. It appears that moderate Muslims are speaking out, and that's a good thing

another poster gave me this link, which is appropriate for posting in this thread also:

http://www.mpacuk.org/content/view/4/1351/103

MPACUK is the Muslim Public Affairs Committee of the UK, which has soundly condemned those who have reacted violently. The comments section under the article is worth reading too, although quite long.

Here's part of what MPACUK said:

...It seemed the group served one function alone, that of "rent-a-bogeyman" to prove Muslims were "unreasonable fanatics". Just one example of how desperate they were to get onto the Media to promote their hate and demonise Muslim's further, was highlighted by the fact that when the story broke they even camped outside the BBC – tell us that isn't a deliberate ploy to get attention.

It was disgusting to see these Muslims spouting their evil, helping the cartoonists who demonised the Prophet PBUH by making non Muslims think we are all some crazed fanatics who want to “kill the infidel” and harm more people with another bombing in London. The group number no more then 50 people. But they harm two million with their Media stunts to get on the TV.

It was wrong that the Media did not make it clear that they were nothing but a racist, evil, fringe of thugs less representative than the BNP, and it's wrong that we Muslims have not dealt with them once and for all.

We must unite, be far more organised and finally tell Britain that these people are nothing to do with us. They are a bunch of hate filled bigots that we do not want representing us in times of crisis, just like the BNP do not represent the average decent Briton.

No more hijacking of our causes, no more allowing the fringe element to dictate what non-Muslims perceive us as. Fair is fair, we must be seen as being honest and just. When anyone demonises or insults what we hold dear, we react, then surely we should also react when we hurt or harm others.

We cannot allow extremists to split Britain and the world into camps of hatred, whether non Muslim (as the editors of the cartoons and the BNP were trying to do) or fanatical bigoted Muslims themselves.

They will die without the oxygen of publicity. They know it that’s why they pull these stunts. They must not be allowed to harm us all. The British Media must be very careful to explain how small this group is and how shunned they are within the Muslim community themselves.

Remember that we cannot complain about non Muslims attacking us and be silent when groups like this attack them and we remain silent! Do justice, do not let evil go unchallenged just because the perpertrators look like us.

MPACUK condemn's the message that was given on the march on Friday by ex members of al-Mahajaroun and demand the Media do not give more airtime to these fringe fanatics, than to mainstream views or at least tell the public how unrepresentative this group is! We also urge the Mosque leaders to have elections open to all Britain’s Muslims so that we ourselves can choose the leaders we want, and our youth can be employed to further the high ideals of Islam and mankind rather than be waylaid by anger and frustration that some groups prey on.

[omega minimo]

18. A call for ALL faithful and non-hypocrites to stand up

:grouphug: