In very bad company

Editorial

The Danish cartoons that launched worldwide pro-tests in 2005 are causing an uproar again. Last week, Danish police arrested three men suspected of planning to kill cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose work depicted the prophet Muhammad with a bomb for a turban.

In the process of reporting this news, many Danish newspapers reprinted Westergaard's cartoon. In Islam, depiction of the prophet is forbidden, even in a positive or neutral sense. The cartoon was perceived as blasphemous and, while the cartoon was offensive – as were the others like it that ran at the same time – it was not nearly as offensive as the violence and outrage that greeted it. In 2005, riots led to an estimated 100 deaths and the sacking of Danish and other European-identified institutions across the Muslim world.

Last weekend, chanting mobs in Europe were demanding that such blasphemous acts cease, shouting "God is great" and "Free speech is a plague."

The greatest danger posed by these incidents is not the violence and incitement that they have evoked, though this violence and fanaticism is not nothing. The gravest danger comes from those who fail to see the other blasphemy taking place.

The demand that such cartoons be banned from publication is itself a blasphemy against something sacred in our society: free expression. A core value like free expression may seem trivial when the issue is a cartoon. If 100 people die because a newspaper runs a cartoon, some contend, the newspaper should not run the cartoon. But the problem is not the cartoon; it is the excessive reaction. The right of a newspaper to publish a cartoon may not seem the ideal case from which to launch a heartfelt defence of liberty, but it is precisely the perceived insignificance of the offending medium that makes this situation so deceptively dangerous.

Asking a newspaper not to print a cartoon seems a small compromise, but if newspapers, or anyone else, begin self-censoring because violent extremists threaten retaliation, we draw near a very slippery slope. Depictions of the prophet are considered an affront to Muslims, but so are a million other small things we do and take for granted every day: a cocktail before dinner, exposure of a woman's legs or a sideways glance at someone not our spouse. It is also, notably, considered blasphemous to claim that Jesus is the son of God. If non-Muslims go out of their way to avoid anything that offends Muslims out of fear of violence, it will be a matter of time before most human rights are voluntarily surrendered – freedom of speech, religion, thought and so forth.

It is, of course, disturbing when anger leads to violence, but this should not be surprising. Violence is a conventional way of dealing with issues whenever and wherever pluralism is not respected – and across the Muslim world, few examples exist of healthy, pluralist socieities. Pluralism is an acknowledgement of diversity. Pluralism does not require us to celebrate the ideas or actions of others; it merely asks us to live and let live those with whom we may not agree. Pluralism is almost always found in democracies or, maybe it is more accurate to say, democracy is almost always founded on pluralism.

While pluralists are correctly defending the right of newspapers to print cartoons – even highly offensive ones – there is another offensive issue far closer to home.

On Feb. 25, the Vancouver Public Library will be the venue for a scheduled reading by Greg Felton, author of The Host and the Parasite: How Israel's Fifth Column Consumed America. Felton is a notorious purveyor of hysterical and offensive commentary, whose fixation on Israel long ago surpassed rational discourse. His ideology is a pastiche of rambling conspiracy theories, most of which lead directly back to the dark, manipulative doings of you-know-who.

There is concern in the Jewish community, and among others who care about such things, that Felton has been given a legitimacy and a venue he does not deserve. Certainly, anyone with an open mind attending Felton's performance Monday will doubtless have it filled with nonsense, not all of it harmless or humorous. But libraries, of all places, should be open to all ideas, even very bad ones.

We expect there will be law enforcement officials on hand Monday to determine if Canadian hate crime or other laws are broken. Like all countries, Canada has laws limiting the parameters of expression and, while we can argue over where that line should be drawn, Canadian legislatures and courts have identified current limits. Beyond this, however grotesque the message or however odious the messenger, it is in the greater interest of a free society to permit the expression of loathsome ideas. To do otherwise not only undermines our claims to pluralism and places on us the intolerable and endless burden of identifying acceptable and unacceptable discourse – it also puts us in some very bad company, indeed.

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