Rational Grounds

The faculty panel on the "Cartoon Violence" question of April 6, 2006, featured Profs. Richard Bulliet, Brigitte Nacos, Katherine Ewing, David Johnston, and SIPA Dean Lisa Anderson with Prof. Neguin Yavari moderating. Yavari introduced each speaker with a short bio, and allowed them each eight minutes to make their points before a period of cross-talk and questions from the audience.

Prof. Bulliet kicked off the lineup with a bit of self deprecating humor. He claimed that this was "the second time he'd been dragged into doing these this semester" while he was technically on sabbatical, and he "really [did] regret it." He said he had watched a South Park episode last night that took on a similar topic, and "when you agree with Cartman, you really don't feel like you're doing the right thing."

Bulliet focused on two main points during his allotted time. His first was that this controversy was an artifact of the politics of polarization that so dominates many contemporary issues in the West and East today. He recounted a talk on the civil war in Bosnia by a Bosnian specialist from the region, and the specialist had said that during the leading up to the Bosnian crisis it was really hard to get the Christians and Muslims to hate each other because they had lived together, intermingled, for so long. But obviously, he noted, in the end it can be done.

Prof. Bulliet brought up two historical examples to flesh out this point a little. One was the War of Jenkins' Ear, when the British "reluctantly" went to war over the capture and mutilation of one Robert Jenkins by Spanish seafarers. The outcry over the incident which allegedly prompted the war began seven years after the attack occurred, when Jenkins showed up in Parliament brandishing his pickled ear in a jar. The divorce of the injury and the reaction paralleled the controversy in question to a certain extent. His second example was that of the Khomeini fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Similarly, this was somewhat after the fact – a full year after the book was originally published. Like the cartoon case, Bulliet said, the Khomeini fatwa against Rushdie was an example of people on all sides choosing to pick a particular "text" (cartoons, a book, etc.) as a focus of some sort of polarization. Neither side has to pick that particular "text" or do so at the particular time they do; Rushdie's book and the cartoons could easily have been ignored – unless you have a will not to.

Bulliet's second main point revolved around the legal sources for the protests in Islamic history. the precedent for this kind of protest goes back to the very early days of Islam, during the Prophet's life. When the Meccans were defeated and Mohammed gained control of the city, he granted blanket amnesty to those who had opposed him except to a couple poets who had written satirical attacks on him (poetry was the primary political arena of that time). This then became the case that later Islamic jurists would use to say that the Prophet's own example says that ridiculing the Prophet is a capital offense. However, Bulliet claimed, Mohammed simply achieved jurisdiction over individuals who had vilified him and punished them; that is interpretable as lese majesty, in the sense of committing a crime against a ruler, and its punishment was commonplace in history. Ergo, reasoned Bulliet, ridiculing an established Muslim government is likewise not okay. The choice to say that this was about the Prophet in particular was a later interpretation.

Prof. Bulliet finished by asking whether it was too late to rethink these interpretations. He predicted that this dispute would have "a lot of shelf-life. It's not a particularly profound conflict."

Katherine Ewing followed Prof. Bulliet, explicitly taking an anthropological viewpoint on the issue; trying to understand the perspectives of the various actors and analyze the forces that converged to bring about their actions.

She emphasized that, on the European government side, there has been an increasing concern over Muslim immigrants and Islamic terrorism. They worry about their economies and security, and see the Muslim communities as a threat to both. On the Muslim community side, there is a perception of being "ghettoized" and preyed upon in some of the same ways that the European Jews were before World War II. They draw parallels between the cartoons and the anti-Semitic cartoons that were common in newspapers of that era. For example, Prof. Ewing mentioned that about a year ago there was an honor killing in Berlin – a set of brothers murdered their sister – and all the talk was about how this was an opportunity to get rid of the gender relations taboos in Muslim culture. Muslims feel very put upon and see the cartoons as part and parcel of all that.

Prof. David Johnston followed Prof. Ewing by stating that he felt "quite confident that he [was] the least knowledgeable about the core issue." That having been said, he further confessed that he taught the Koran as a "text," and in English translation. So, he claimed, his sins were many with reference to the topic at hand.

He couched his remarks in several small points that built into a historical narrative. First, he noted that Islam, Christianity and Judaism were all fairly similar and that the Koran in particular portrays a lot of continuity between them. He drew several parallels between Islam and Christianity; both universalistic, both evangelistic, and a good deal of intolerance to nonbelievers doctrinally. The rapprochement by Christianity to a regime of toleration – the way we mostly experience Christianity today – was a historical, gradual, and very painful process that ran against a lot of the grain in Christianity. It took centuries, really has only flowered in the past century, and it is still quite incomplete, according to Johnston.

Johnston noted that this all took place in the context of developing constitutionalism, the birth of the modern economic system with its ideas of long term economic growth, and the creation of democratic institutions, the key feature of which is that people are not denied a voice in their affairs. Fundamental to that framework is freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Having said that, Johnston noted that there were two fundamentally different approaches to those freedoms in liberal constitutional societies. The international/European framework has stiff legal penalties for "hate speech." In the US, however, there is near absolute protection for the content of speech, despite rules about and limits on the manner, place, and time of speech. He ended by emphasizing that "free speech is absolutely central to democratic processes," and combating oppression and that protection of speech is really only robust if it protects offensive speech as well.

Prof. Brigitte Nacos followed Prof. Johnston, and echoed a few of Prof. Ewing's points about the nature of the political situation between European governments and the Muslim immigrant populations. However she emphasized that there has been growing uneasiness in European societies over self-censorship in the media because of a fear of violent reprisal, as in the case of Theo Van Gogh.

Unfortunately, she said, there is not a real dialogue between the two sides in this debate. If there were there might be some very good progress on the question of what freedom of the press consists of.

She also pointed out that for the first couple months this was a local Danish problem, and that it only really became an international issue when other major publications republished the cartoons. She said she was surprised that no major papers in America republished the cartoons, and wondered if the media had taken their cue from Washington on this. The State Dept. had said it was unacceptable to show the images when the controversy when it first surfaced in Europe. Prof. Nacos also speculated as to whether this was in line with the media's performance during the lead up to the Iraq War.

Dean Anderson rounded out the speakers. She set out by reiterating a few of the main points that had been made before, saying it was quite clear that whatever the motive of the original publisher, very quickly on all sides there was an effort to use the issue in provocative ways and sustain the politics of polarization.

Anderson speculated that this was fostered and exacerbated by new technologies (such as the Internet) that allow for fast and widespread dissemination and subsequent organization. She said that these technologies lend themselves perhaps to deliberately derogatory and distorted coverage, and that that may be a piece of this picture.

She noted the points made on the differences in free speech philosophies between the US and Europe, and brought up the very interesting point that in the US and Europe today more hate speech is directed at Muslims than at any other community. One can say things about Muslims that one cannot possibly say about most others. This was eminently visible during the Dubai Ports controversy here in the States, and Muslims definitely see the cartoons as part of this pattern. In Europe the question is particularly pointed because of the limits on hate speech.

She admitted that even so Muslim reactions here were somewhat disingenuous. There is a lot of hate speech in the Muslim world – mostly directed at Jews and Israel – so there is something to be said for consistency.

Dean Anderson's finished by positing the question, "What role aught the government to have, here?" If the government is supposed to protect community standards, which is plausible, that sets different obligations than if the government is supposed to be indifferent to community standards. Is the government responsible to judge blasphemy or rule on, say, religious conversion? Ultimately, she said, there needs to be a Right to be Wrong. We have to be able to live in a community where members have the right to be "wrong" – the wrong political party, the wrong religion, etc. This underlies the notion of tolerance; you cannot have democracy where people impose on others what they think is right. This means you have to live with some loathsome (to you) behavior.

Discussion! When Dean Anderson finished, Prof. Yavari opened the discussion to whole group for some cross-talk and debate. Prof. Bulliet jumped right in by calling "baloney" the concerns about media self-censorship. "Media self-censor on hundreds of issues," he said, and recounted his own personal involvement as a CBS censor many years ago. "Not a single moment is not pre-censored," he claimed, though he admitted there was a "firewall" between that and the news division, which was left alone. Instead, he went on, the internet is our true bastion of free speech, and possibly the greatest development in world history of the last 500 years.

He said that the publishing of the cartoons was not so much a matter of free speech but an act of media irresponsibility. You do not, he finished, have free speech in every venue.

Prof. Ewing popped in next to make the point that the term "free speech" had been greatly stereotyped. There are many places we don't have "perfect" free speech – copyright rules, for example.

She went on to say that community standards are the basis of the responsibility at issue here. She said that the German who doesn't see the parallels with pre-World War II anti-Semitic cartoons is very divorced from his Muslim community contemporaries who are talking about this. This issue has been evaluated in terms of criteria for free speech law in Europe and by those terms the decision has been that this is not "defamation of character" or blasphemy. The mainstream here is making judgments for the minority community about what they should be upset about.

Prof. Johnston disagreed with Prof. Bulliet, saying that these cartoons were free speech. He agreed that it was irresponsible for newspapers to print them, but said that there should not be legal repercussions for this. He provided a caveat to Dean Anderson's assertion that Muslims were subject to more hate speech than others, saying that it is still possible to find anti-Semitic statements all too readily. His final "substantial point," was that while hate speech was primarily in service of dehumanizing the "inscrutable Other," it was also accepting this worldview to a certain extent to turn around and give certain groups wide berths on cultural issues; to abrogate the responsibility to come to an understanding and deal with them instead.

Prof. Nacos responded to Prof. Bulliet's assertion about self-censorship by emphasizing that this particular context was one of threatened violence. While self-censorship was always a factor, it should not happen from fear of violent reprisals, she said.

Questions! At this point Prof. Yavari finally opened the floor to questions from the audience. I actually got to ask the first question, and tried to direct the discussion to both the strange lead time the cartoons had on the worldwide protests and the nature and pattern of those protests. Prof. Bulliet responded that the protests really migrated out when Muslim leaders took the cartoons along on the Hajj after they failed to generate "sufficient" protest in Denmark.

Another audience member asked how we reconcile these freedoms impinging upon each other, but Prof. Johnston disagreed with the premise, saying that this was not a case of that. Rather, the cartoons offend but they do not prohibit the practice of any religion. He felt that the solution to problematical speech is more speech.

An audience member in the back asked how we might be able to bridge the culture gap that has been created, especially after 9/11, and Prof. Yavari pounced on that. She pronounced that detail was very important here, that rights to this or that is a very general and ideological discussion. She recounted that the original publisher wrote an essay about why he first published the cartoons. He said he was concerned self-censorship and protecting the Danish culture, country and economy from Muslim immigrants. Raising the dialogue has a lot to do with knowing what exactly we're saying. "Muslim" today is used very much like an ethnicity, and there are heavy stereotypes of what a "real" Muslim is. Katherine Ewing noted that there were plenty of examples of violent Christians as well, and that the perceived gaps were not that great. Prof. Bulliet remarked that the politics of polarization helped keep us from entertaining the middle ground. An atmosphere of war has been created, and "In wartime you don't have tea with the enemy."

Prof. Morrison, attending as a spectator, noted that the grand Mufti of Egypt tackled the issue of images of the Prophet in the early 19th century. He found that in the early years of Islam this was problematic because it was a temptation towards polytheism, but that it was no longer a danger – it was a historical problem. But, said Morrison, this is not really a legal issue but a political one. The issue is about dignity and the perceived slight on behalf of Muslims worldwide.

Naturally, in a mere two hours with so many voices we didn't reach a huge amount of conclusion on the topic, Towards the end a questioner pressed Dean Anderson on her balancing of the rights regime and "community standards." Anderson replied that it was an "internal inconsistency that I have yet to resolve, and when I do I'll let you all know."