http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/arts/design/08imag.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1 By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Published: February 8, 2006 They're callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as a provocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting the general Muslim prohibition on images of the Prophet Muhammad to score cheap points about freedom of expression. But drawings are drawings, so a question arises. Have any modern works of art provoked as much chaos and violence as the Danish caricatures that first ran in September in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten? The story goes back a bit further, to a Danish children's author looking to write a book about the life of Muhammad, in the spirit of religious tolerance, and finding no illustrator because all the artists he approached said they were afraid. In response, the newspaper commissioned these cartoons, a dozen of them, by various satirists. And like all pictures calculated to be noticed by offending somebody, the caricaturist's stock in trade and the oldest trick in the book of modern art, they would have disappeared into deserved oblivion had not their targets risen to the bait. The newspaper was banking on the fact that unlike the West — where Max Ernst's painting of Mary spanking the infant Jesus didn't raise an eyebrow when recently shown at the Metropolitan Museum — the Muslim world has no tradition of, or tolerance for, religious irony in its art. But there are precedents going all the way back to the Bible for virulent reactions to proscribed and despised images. Beginning with the ancient Egyptians, who lopped off the noses of statues of dead pharaohs, through the toppling of statues of Lenin and Saddam Hussein, violence has often been directed against offending objects, though rarely against the artists who made them. Educated secular Westerners reared on modernism, with its inclination toward abstraction, its gamesmanship and its knee-jerk baiting of traditional authority, can miss the real force behind certain visual images, particularly religious ones. Trained to see pictures formally, as designs or concepts, we can often overlook the way images may not just symbolize but actually "partake of what they represent," as the art historian David Freedberg has put it. That's certainly how many aggrieved Muslims perceived the cartoons. Circulating the pictures, they prompted Arab governments like those of Saudi Arabia and Syria, not otherwise champions of religious freedom, to support boycotts of Danish goods and to withdraw their ambassadors from Copenhagen. That in turn led European papers to republish the cartoons in solidarity with Jyllands-Posten and in defense of free speech. Some of them have been reprinted in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary, New Zealand, Ukraine and Jordan. One appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer. They've spread worldwide via the Web, exacerbating Muslim outrage while leading many nonbelieving non-Muslims to scratch their heads over how such banal and idiotic pictures could ever be given a thought in the first place. Muhammad is lampooned with a turban in the shape of a ticking bomb; he's at the gates of heaven, arms raised, saying to men who look like suicide bombers, "Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins." Irate Muslim protesters set fire to the Danish and Norwegian missions in Damascus, where Syrian newspapers routinely print the most appalling, racist cartoons of big-nosed Jews. In Beirut, rioters burned the Danish mission and vandalized a Maronite Catholic church, beating a Dutch news photographer mistaken for a Dane. On Monday, Afghan security forces killed several protesters who tried to storm the American air base at Bagram. Yesterday the leading Iranian daily announced a contest for the best cartoon about the Holocaust, and 200 members of Iran's 290-member Parliament condemned the Danish cartoons: "Apparently, they have not learned their lesson from the miserable author of 'The Satanic Verses,' " the members said in a statement, referring to the fatwah against Salman Rushdie. From Gaza to Auckland, imams have demanded execution or amputations for the cartoonists and their publishers. Over art? These are made-up pictures. The photographs from Abu Ghraib were documents of real events, but they didn't provoke such widespread violence. What's going on? In part, the new Molotov cocktail of technology and incendiary art has hastened the speed with which otherwise forgettable pictures are now globally transmitted. Cellphones help protesters rally mobs swiftly against them. And there is also the deepening cynicism and political hypocrisy now endemic in the culture wars. Last week a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, simultaneously condemned the cartoons as "unacceptable" and spoke up for free speech, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff were firing off a letter to The Washington Post about a cartoon it ran in which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in the guise of a doctor, says to a heavily bandaged soldier who has lost his arms and legs, "I'm listing your condition as 'battle hardened.' " The letter called the cartoon, by Tom Toles, "reprehensible" and offensive to soldiers. The Post's editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, replied that the newspaper would not censor its cartoonists, inspiring John Aravosis, who runs Americablog (americablog.blogspot.com), the Web site where the letter was first reported, to tell Editor & Publisher magazine: "Now that the Joint Chiefs have addressed the insidious threat cartoons pose to our troops, perhaps they can move on to the less pressing issues like getting them their damn body armor." As is so often the case in the culture wars, choosing sides can be exasperating. Modern artists and their promoters forever pander to a like-minded audience by goading obvious targets, hoping to incite reactions that pass for political point-scoring. The twist in the Danish case is only that a conservative paper provoked Muslims. One may be excused for wondering whether the silence of the art world has something to do with the discomfort of staking a position where neither party offers the sanctuary of political correctness. An obvious precedent, now comically tame by comparison, is the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, a promotional bonanza for the British collector and wheeler-dealer Charles Saatchi, who owned the art in the show. The exhibition incited protests by the Catholic League. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani played the stern dad to a bunch of publicity-savvy artists whose work included a collage of the Virgin Mary with cutouts from pornographic magazines and shellacked clumps of elephant dung. Previously unmoved to action by Catholic League protests against a play at City Center involving a gay lead character fashioned after Jesus, the mayor, contemplating a Senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton, decided he was personally offended by the art, although he had never actually seen it, and threatened to cut off public financing for the museum. "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion," he said, foreshadowing a bit the Danish debacle about freedom of religious expression, notwithstanding that the artist of the Virgin Mary, Chris Ofili, happened to be Roman Catholic. The New York art world was shocked only because it had expected the show to pass without fuss, since the art was already old news to insiders. But then museums nationwide had to hold their collective nose to defend Brooklyn over the issue of free expression, and by the end the whole affair had turned into farce, obscuring even the quality of what were, in fact, a few not-so-bad works of art. No protester torched the museum or called for beheading anybody. Farce now becomes calamity over the cartoons, a different matter. The current bloodshed, fueled by political extremists and religious fanatics, turns the culture war once again into real war. People forget that Salman Rushdie's Japanese and Italian translators were stabbed (the Japanese fatally) and his Norwegian publisher shot. What may be overlooked this time is a deep, abiding fact about visual art, its totemic power: the power of representation. This power transcends logic or aesthetics. Like words, it can cause genuine pain. Ancient Greeks used to chain statues to prevent them from fleeing. Buddhists in Ceylon once believed that a painting could be brought to life once its eyes were painted. In the Netherlands in the 1560's, pictures were smashed in nearly every town and village simply for being graven images. And in the Philippines, enraged citizens destroyed billboards of Ferdinand Marcos. To many people, pictures will always, mysteriously, embody the things they depict. Among the issues to be hashed out in this affair, there's a lesson to be gleaned about art: Even a dumb cartoon may not be so dumb if it calls out to someone.
Feb. 8, 2006, 11:17AM Islamic groups call for end to violence Four more protesters shot to death in Afghanistan Associated Press KABUL, Afghanistan — Police shot four protesters to death today to stop hundreds from marching on a southern U.S. military base, and Islamic organizations called for an end to deadly rioting across the Muslim world over drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. "Islam says it's all right to demonstrate but not to resort to violence. This must stop," said senior cleric Mohammed Usman, a member of the Ulama Council — Afghanistan's top Islamic organization. "We condemn the cartoons but this does not justify violence. These rioters are defaming the name of Islam." Other members of the council went on radio and television today to appeal for calm. It followed a statement released Tuesday by the United Nations, European Union and the world's largest Islamic group urging an end to violence. "Aggression against life and property can only damage the image of a peaceful Islam," said the statement released by Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the EU chief Javier Solana. President Bush called upon governments today to stop the violence and protect the lives of diplomats overseas. "We reject violence as a way to express discontent with what may be printed in a free press," Bush said after meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan, who asked demonstrators to "express their views peacefully." In Baghdad, Iraq's top Shiite political leader criticized attacks on foreign embassies by Muslims. "We value and appreciate peaceful Islamic protests," said Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. "But we are against the idea of attacking embassies and other official sites." Meanwhile, a U.S. military spokesman said the United States and other countries were examining whether extremist groups may be inciting protesters to riot around the world over the cartoons that have been printed in numerous European papers. "The United States and other countries are providing assistance in any manner that they can ... to see if this is something larger than just a small demonstration," Col. James Yonts told reporters when asked whether al-Qaida and the Taliban may have been involved in the violent Afghan demonstrations. The Afghan protests have involved armed men and have been directed at foreign and Afghan government targets — fueling suspicions there is more behind the unrest than religious sensitivities. But Yonts stressed they had no evidence to support suggestions of al-Qaida or Taliban links. Hundreds rioted outside the U.S. military base in the southern city of Qalat on Wednesday, throwing rocks at Afghan police. Police tried to clear the crowd by firing into the air, then were forced to fire into the crowd, provincial police chief Ghulam Nabi Malakhail said. Four people were killed and at least 20 were wounded, he said. The protesters then set fire to three fuel tankers waiting to deliver gas to the base, Malakhail said. He said U.S. troops fired warning shots into the air. A U.S. military spokesman, Lt. Mike Cody, said he had no details on the incident. Eleven people have been killed in the past week as thousands have protested in a dozen Afghan cities and towns to march against the cartoons, which have been reprinted in various European media after first appearing in a Danish newspaper in September. The drawings — including one depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb — have touched a raw nerve among Muslims. Islam is interpreted to forbid any illustrations of Muhammad for fear they could lead to idolatry. The caricatures were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Culture editor Flemming Rose told CNN today he came up with the idea after several local cases of self-censorship involving people fearing reprisals from Muslims. "There was a story out there and we had to cover it," Rose said. "We just chose to cover it in a different way, according to the principle: Don't tell it, show it." Rose also said his paper was trying to contact a prominent Iranian newspaper that said it would hold a competition for cartoons on the Holocaust to test whether the West extends the principle of freedom of expression to the Nazi genocide as it did to the Muhammad caricatures. Rose said Jyllands-Posten wants to publish those cartoons on the same day the Iranian paper Hamshahri does. The editor of the paper said he had no plans to resign over the drawings after former Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen said that "when an editor-in-chief admits he made an erroneous judgment ... he should quit." Elsewhere, about 300 Palestinians attacked an international observer mission in the West Bank city of Hebron and tried to burn one building. Sixty members of the mission were inside, said Gunhild Forselv, spokeswoman for the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, or TIPH, which serves as a buffer between Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the volatile city. The protesters chased away outnumbered Palestinian police stationed outside the mission, Forselv said. Reinforcements were called in to quell the disturbance. In France, President Jacques Chirac asked media to avoid offending religious beliefs as another French newspaper reprinted the caricatures. Chirac said during a Cabinet meeting that he condemned "all obvious provocations likely to dangerously kindle passions." Besides reprinting the drawings, the satirical French weekly Charlie-Hebdo also printed new caricatures of its own, including one under the headline "Muhammad Overwhelmed by the Fundamentalists" that showed the prophet with his head in his hands, remarking, "It's hard to be loved by idiots." Two newspapers and two television stations in New Zealand that carried the prophet drawings apologized for causing offense during a meeting with a national Islamic federation. There were several other small protests across Afghanistan today, including one in Kabul. Hundreds of university students, including women, marched peacefully through the capital, chanting "Death to the Danish! Death to Americans!" More than 1,000 people also rallied today in Muslim-majority Bangladesh's capital, burning Danish and Italian flags. There were no immediate reports of violence. Muslims also demonstrated for the third straight day in Indian-controlled Kashmir. In Turkey, police using armored vehicles blocked some 500 ultranationalist Turks from reaching the Danish Embassy and the demonstrators dispersed peacefully.
The refusal to print anti-Christian cartoons isn't a double standard. What do editorial cartoons do? They editorialize about current events and this is as current as they get. And would you guys please stop implying that these guys were TRYING to insult Islam by doing this. The cartoons are offensive to muslims but that's not their aim. If it were, there are many more offensive things they could have done.
Also, hasn't it been shown that some of the cartoons that Imams are using to incite the violence were created by radicals to incite just this type of behavior? I find that pretty ironic from a group so radical (I'm not talking about all muslims just the radical ones) that believe the Holocaust never happened and that 9/11 was perpetrated by the Jews.
I think thegary's article pointed that out well. It's a good point, and only makes the uproar more hypocritical and ignorant.
Glad to see the OIC itself interject in this and denounce the violence...I am starting to get the impression however (based on articles I've read) that these continued riots are not spontaneous or random in nature, but rather well-organized by extremist groups that have apparently planned them all along. Watching Arab TV, there has been numerous politicians and religious leaders condemning the violence, hope it works.
Many Tibetans would disagree with that. I don't any Uighars but I do know some Tibetans and their customs were anything but respected during the Cultural Revolution. From what I've heard about the Uighars they're not treated much better.
I would say someone whose vast vast majority of threads and posts critical of Islam, even on some obscure events, would qualify as an obsession.
Did anything make sense during those 10-12 years? One of the most stupidest dumbest time period in China's history.
I think the various cultures should be respected, but the Islam world have gone way over board on this issue(thanks to some governments).
Systematic destruction of what? There are "Affirmative Action" policies specifically created for ethnic Chinese minorities in PRC for their advancement in k-12 to higher education, career development, not to mention plethora of special financial incentives. There were 5 autonomous regions back then some 40 years ago for Chinese minorities. There are 5 of them today. Do you see any autonomous state for Native Americans in US? Has there ever been one?
Wnes and Pirc; I don't want to derail this thread by making this a discussion about Tibet but will be happy to debate it in another thread. I should've remembered this would be a hot button issue before bringing it up.
