Pretty lame

Herein Danish publisher Flemming Rose tries to defend the indefensible: the deliberately provocative cartoons of Mohammed he published.

It won't work.

If attempts were being made to intimidate publishers into taking a more favorable view of Islam, and being less critical of it, and it was desired to defy the would- be intimidators, the logical thing would be to be more pointedly critical of Islam- in other words, to refuse to be intimidated. If Rose had chosen to engage in civil free speech, his actions might be defended on simple free speech grounds. In fact, he would have had an air-tight case.

But the moment he chose, instead, to do something outside the bounds of civil speech, two things happened.

First, the very point he was trying to make was obscured. His incivility, rather than Muslim intimidation, became the issue not only for Muslims, but also for any Westerners (and there are apparently all too few) not too blinded by legitimate revulsion at Islam's bullying, totalitarian aspects to be able to be objective about Rose's anti-pluralistic tactics, however sympathetic we may be to his objectives.

No Muslim, in any case, could see what Rose and his paper actually did as a refusal to be intimidated. No Muslim could help, on the other hand, seeing it as a deliberate, intentional and gratuitous provocation. If Rose truly intended to "challenge moderate Moslems to speak out" against the bullying tactics of the extremists, did it really make sense to do something which was as much an insult to those moderate Moslems as to the extremists?

Yes, I'm aware that not all of Islam shares the view that it is blasphemy to depict Mohammed. It's mainly a Sunni hangup (the Sunnis being the sect who represent the overwhelming majority of the world's Moslems), and not even all Sunnis necessarily buy into it. But Sunni and Shi'ite alike understand that Rose deliberately engaged in something he knew a large percentage of the world's Moslems would regard, not as a challenge to Islam's behavior or even a criticism of its nature, but as sacrilege- for the sole reason that he knew it would be so interpreted.

Sorry, but I fail to be moved by the touching story of the poor man who only wanted to do a children's book about Mohammed- which would just happen to be sacrilege in the eyes of a goodly proportion of the world's Moslems. If it was fear that made him unable to find an illustrator, that is to be regretted. In a normal, healthy state of affairs in a democracy, he would have had a difficult time finding an illustrator, too- but for different reasons: those of basic civility, courtesy and good taste.

It's fine to say that those cartoons treated Islam the same way Christianity and Judaism and other religions are treated in Danish society. But it's also beside the point. Islam isn't Christianity or Buddhism or Judaism. It's a separate religion, born in a separate culture, and with different sensibilities and strictures. One of them, for a goodly proportion of the Islamic world, is that one does not portray the prophet Mohammed. It is hardly to include Islam as an equal partner in the Danish community of religions to ignore its own sensibilities in addressing it.

That the newspaper in question also published at least one blasphemous cartoon of Jesus and a cartoon depicting a Star of David as a bomb may well safeguard it from the charge of engaging in a double standard, but it does nothing to enhance its credentials in the realm of civility.

The notion that one "should not be tolerant of the intolerant" is ironically encountered most frequently in the writings of those most in thrall to the intimidation and limitations on free speech represented by the movement known in the West as "political correctness." Here, as there, the adoption of that slogan is ironically the undoing of free speech and free expression. Who decides what is tolerant, or intolerant? But the real key to Rose's argument- and its utter undoing- is his statement that

I acknowledge that some people have been offended by the publication of the cartoons, and Jyllands-Posten has apologized for that. But we cannot apologize for our right to publish material, even offensive material. You cannot edit a newspaper if you are paralyzed by worries about every possible insult.

But nobody is asking that. All that is called for here is that one refrain from deliberately and purposely offending people for the sake of offending them, whether or not some greater purpose is ineffectually served thereby.

Again, Rose:

I am offended by things in the paper every day: transcripts of speeches by Osama bin Laden, photos from Abu Ghraib, people insisting that Israel should be erased from the face of the Earth, people saying the Holocaust never happened. But that does not mean that I would refrain from printing them as long as they fell within the limits of the law and of the newspaper's ethical code. That other editors would make different choices is the essence of pluralism.

No, Mr. Rose. Freedom of expression is indeed foundational for pluralism, but the essence of pluralism is that freedom be balanced precisely with respect precisely for those who differ from you and with whom you most profoundly disagree.

Without that, pluralism becomes impossible. Without that, society becomes impossible. Without that, we all turn into rampaging mobs of Islamic protesters, freely trashing the rights of those with whom we differ in the name of the unrestricted license of the self-righteous.

But freedom of expression in the absence of the fundamental civility which makes not only pluralism but society itself possible isn't freedom at all. It's anarchy. It's the law of the jungle. It's the disregarding of all the basic assumptions about self-restraint and mutual respect which the very concept of democracy assumes.

That Rose just doesn't get it is revealed in his statement that

As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders. That is what happened to human rights activists and writers such as Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, Boris Pasternak. The regime accused them of anti-Soviet propaganda, just as some Muslims are labeling 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper anti-Islamic.

The lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow. The West prevailed in the Cold War because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease totalitarian tyrants.

But other than the Islamic yahoos who are rioting in the streets of Europe and the Middle East, nobody is calling for censorship on the grounds of insult. At least Rose's Western critics are not calling for censorship at all. Nobody (other than the rioters) is saying that somebody should have stopped Rose from publishing those cartoons. My point, rather, is that Rose should have had the common civility and common sense to have stopped himself, and to have substituted a means of rejection for the intimidation he felt which would not have involved him in violating the canons of pluralism just as much as the intimidators had- and, in the process, been more effective in making his point, rather than drawing attention away from it the way publishing those cartoons did.

The essence of the issue is revealed in Rose's disdain for the concept of what he calls self-censorship. Again, with the exception of the Islamic extremists themselves, nobody is suggesting that Rose did not have the political right to have published those cartoons. Nobody- again, with the exception of the extremists themselves- is suggesting that he should have been stopped. The issue is the fact that with freedom comes responsibility. To deliberately insult the religious beliefs of others certainly falls within the realm of free speech. But it is subversive of pluralism nonetheless. It is inherently disrespectful, and erodes the very lubricant- civility- which allows people who differ greatly to share a society.

The issue is that Rose used his freedom irresponsibly. Somewhat disingenuously, he says that

Did we achieve our purpose? Yes and no. Some of the spirited defenses of our freedom of expression have been inspiring. But tragic demonstrations throughout the Middle East and Asia were not what we anticipated, much less desired.

But anyone with as much sense as God gave a gnat should have anticipated precisely that response! It isn't simply that Jyllands-Posten failed to be a good citizen in a pluralistic society when it deliberately and intentionally insulted the religious beliefs of Muslims- or, for that matter, when it had earlier done precisely the same thing with Christians and Jews.

They were insulting murderous maniacs- maniacs who make no distinction between those who commit acts they find offensive and innocent people who happen to share their nationality or religion or other characteristics. They were not simply lighting a match while standing in a pool of gasoline. They were lighting that match while standing in a pool of gasoline which encompassed a goodly proportion of the world.

One may, under the canons of Western democracy, have the right to perform an action- but the moral duty to refrain. This is not a question of censorship, but of responsibility. The consequences of publishing those cartoons should have been apparent to Rose and the staff of Jyllands-Posten. They displayed not only a want of civility, but an appalling lack of judgment in publishing them anyway.

No, censorship is not the issue. The issue is that pluralism cannot function without civility- or in tandem with a refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of one's use of one's freedom. The issue is that Jyllands-Posten has a track record of crossing the line between being provocative and being insulting with regard to Christianity and Judaism as well as with Islam- and that, while it had every right to do so, doing so nevertheless is an act subversive of the very essence of pluralism, which is voluntary restraint and forbearance when dealing precisely with those with whom we disagree.

Jyllands-Posten failed to exercise that voluntary restraint and forbearance. It is not that anyone should have forced it to do so. It is that it- and Rose- should have known better, and bear the moral responsibility for that failure.

Is it not a matter of individual judgment where the line between being provocative and being offensive lies? Absolutely. And it is for that reason that Rose is right in saying that one cannot operate a newspaper while avoiding doing anything which might offend someone. But on the other hand, that is a different matter from intentionally crossing a line one acknowledges oneself- or wrecklessly endangering the lives and property of others in the name of one's own freedom to be deliberately uncivil.

No, far be it from me to remove an ounce of responsibility for the death and destruction from the Moslem mobs and the extremists who egged them on. And far be it from me to disagree with Rose (and with some who have commented on this blog) as to the necessity of opposing the aggressive totalitarianism of Islam.

But Rose, too, has blood on his hands. One cannot exercise one's legitimate freedoms without taking responsibility for the consequences- especially since the consequences could have been so easily foreseen.