[Mb-civic] The Ayatollah Joke Book - Michael Kinsley - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Ayatollah Joke Book

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, February 10, 2006; A19

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the noted wit, expert on freedom and unelected 
religious leader -- the leader who counts -- of Iran, observed the other 
day that in the West, "casting doubt or negating the genocide of the 
Jews is banned but insulting the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims is 
allowed." He apparently thought that this was a devastating point. 
Touche, Ayatollah Khamenei.

The worldwide fuss over 12 cartoon images of the prophet Muhammad (some 
mocking, some benign) that ran in a Danish newspaper has already killed 
a number of people. Many self-styled voices of Islam have made the 
bizarre comparison between showing pictures of Muhammad and expressing 
doubt about the Holocaust. A government-controlled Tehran newspaper 
announced a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust, asking "whether 
freedom of expression" applies to "the crimes committed by the United 
States and Israel." In a spirit of "see how you like it," a European 
Muslim group posted on the Web a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler.

Muslim complaints about a Western double standard would be more telling 
if the factual premise were accurate. But it is not. In fact, it is 
nearly the opposite of the truth. Nothing is easier and more common in 
the West, including the United States, than criticizing the United 
States -- except for criticizing Israel. A few Western countries have 
stupid laws, erratically enforced, against denying the Holocaust, but 
that hasn't stopped Holocaust denial from becoming a literary industry 
and cultural phenomenon. Nevertheless, there has been no rioting about 
the historical reality of the Holocaust. No one has died over it.

Meanwhile, whatever point these European Muslims were making with their 
cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by their very 
exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the cartoon on the Web. 
The notion that jokes about Frank are beyond the pale is provably false. 
There's a play running in New York right now called "25 Questions for a 
Jewish Mother." It's a monologue written and acted by stand-up comic 
Judy Gold, who says on stage every night that her mother used to read to 
her from a pop-up version of Anne Frank's diary, and would say, "Pull 
the tab, Judith. Alive. Pull it again. Dead." Maybe you had to be there. 
But the New York Times reviewer called the play "fiercely funny, honest 
and moving" and did not demand that the author be executed or even 
admonished.

By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost every 
major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing the 
controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center of a 
major news story that these papers cover at length every day. An 
editorial in the Times on Wednesday said that not publishing the 
cartoons was "a reasonable choice" because they would offend many people 
and "are so easy to describe in words." As I write I am looking at a 
front-page photo in today's Times of Mariah Carey singing into a 
microphone. Words do it justice, I think.

Of course it is not Western values that are trampling freedom of 
expression, it is the ayatollah's own values, combined with the threat 
of violence. The other problem with his little joke about double 
standards, and with the whole, supposedly mordant, comparison between 
denying the Holocaust and portraying the prophet is that the offended 
Muslims do not want a world where people are free to do both. They don't 
even want a world where people are not free to do either, which would at 
least be consistent. They want a world where you may not portray 
Muhammad (even flatteringly, slaying infidels or whatnot), but you may 
deny the Holocaust all day long.

The bewildered prime minister of Denmark, trying to calm the whirlwind 
that has descended on his innocent, unsuspecting country, gets it 
spectacularly wrong when he reassures disgruntled Muslims that Denmark 
supports "freedom of religion" and is "one of the world's most tolerant 
and open societies." Tolerance, openness and freedom of religion are not 
what they have in mind.

A lively debate is going on about whether Islam really does forbid any 
portrayal of the prophet, however benign, or whether that is a recent 
innovation of some subset of the faithful with possible ulterior 
motives. This debate misses the point. Some Christians believe they are 
required to wear particular sorts of clothing. Some Jews and Muslims 
don't eat pork. They don't claim that their religion requires other 
people to wear special clothing or avoid eating pork. Tolerance and 
ecumenism can do only so much. They have nothing to offer a Muslim in 
Afghanistan who is personally insulted and enraged about an image that 
appears in a newspaper in Denmark.

The shameful American position on all this is boilerplate endorsement of 
free expression combined with denunciation of the cartoons as an 
"unacceptable" insult. When three protesters died this week in a 
confrontation at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, an American 
spokesman there said that Afghans "should judge us on what we're doing 
here, not on what some cartoonist is doing somewhere else." But the 
limits of free expression cannot be set by the sensitivities of people 
who don't believe in it. How can President Bush continue to ask young 
Americans to sacrifice their lives for freedom in the Muslim world, if 
he won't even defend freedom verbally when forces from that world are 
suppressing it in our own?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020901432.html?nav=hcmodule
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