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They Can't Bomb Us All
France Soir has become the first newspaper outside Denmark and Norway to show solidarity with Denmark's Jyylands-Posten by running the editorial cartoons judged by many Muslims to be blasphemous.
Updated. Click more to read on...
The newspaper - in financial trouble and with a circulation of 60,000 (low even by French standards), ran the drawings across two pages in its February 1 edition. It dedicated its front page to a new cartoon, depicting Mohammend on a cloud along with Buddha, a Jewish God and a Christian God. The Christian God tells him "Don't complain, we're all being caricatured here."
France Soir's editor Serge Faubert was in combative mood. Defending the decision to publish the cartoons, he thundered:
"There is nothing in these incriminated cartoons that intends to be racist or denigrate any community as such. Some are funny, others less so. That’s it. That is why we have decided to publish them... We will never apologise for being free to speak, to think and to believe."
"Enough lessons from these reactionary bigots!"
Stephen Pollard, writing in the Telegraph, makes explicit the link between Denmark's defence of its free press and the British government's attempt to pass the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill/ The Bill, defeated in the House of Commons yesterday, was conceived by Blair's team as a "sop" to reactionary Muslim opinion. Had it passed, it might have led to prison for cartoonists who attempted similar stunts in the UK. Although the government is adamant that the law would apply equally to those stirring hatred against any religion, it is difficult to imagine fundamentalist Christians succeeding in having satirists targeting their religion punished.
Indeed, just as it is difficult to imagine most of Europe's newspapers remaining silent while one of their number was threatened by a pack of violent Christians.
While much of Europe's media has reported and commented on the Danish cartoons, no other newspaper has been so forthright in its defence of the Jyllands-Posten. Perhaps it is expecting too much for other European and international newspapers to follow suit, in a show of solidarity for Europe's freedom of expression. After all, the fanatics can't bomb every newspaper, can they?
UPDATE German newspaper Die Welt has published one of the cartoons:
"Democracy is the institutionalized form of freedom of expression," it said in an editorial on its front page, "there is no right to protection from satire in the West; there is a right to blasphemy."
The Berliner Zeitung also published two cartoons, though opinion in Germany has not been wholly supportive of Denmark. Writing in Spiegel Online, Henryk M. Broder notes that the left-wing Die Tageszeitung criticised the Jyllands-Posten, describing it as "the mouthpiece of right-reactionaries in Denmark."
Tageszeitung claims the Danish paper "knew what it was getting into" by publishing the cartoons, and - bizarrely - compares the newspaper's editorial line with the "outspoken anti-Semitism in the 1930s... now it's the Muslim's turn."
Even more oddly, Die Tageszeitung was one of the few newspapers to side openly and fully with author Salman Rushdie when Iranian fanatics pronounced a fatwa on him following the publication of The Satanic Verses.
"How would Die Tageszeitung react were Christian fundamentalists to call for a boycott of England as a result of The Life of Brian?" asks Broder,
"Something has changed in the public awareness since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, since the numerous attacks since then from Ankara to Madrid, since the series of al-Jazeera images of beheaded hostages.
"'Punish one to educate 100,' Mao once said. Threaten one, intimidate 1 million would be today's version."
Update 2: They're all at it! Yahoo France reports Spain's national ABC and the Catalan daily El Periodico have carried the cartoons.
In Italy, La Stampa and Il Corriere della Sera have published some cartoons, La Stampa's reportedly "in a factual context" while discussing the scandal.
Switzerland's popular Blick has published two of the incriminating drawings, while La Tribune de Genève says it will publish them on Thursday.
Three Dutch newspapers have carried the illustrations, or have published a reproduction of the original Jyllands-Posten feature.
Prague's Dnes carried a small copy of the caricatures to illustrate an article on the subject.
As yet, no British newspaper has published the cartoons.
