[Peace-discuss] Letter to DI re cartoons

[David Green]

The DI no longer will publish my letters, but this was
sent anyway on Monday. They did publish a good one
today from Umair Irfan.

    The European cartoons defaming Muslims have
interest in the local context. It was barely over a
year ago that a DI cartoonist was grounded for
sarcastically referring to an anti-Semitic stereotype:
Jews as bankers with big noses. Hysterical local
Jewish leaders called in an official from Chicago, who
spoke to Chancellor Herman, who spoke against the
cartoonist, who was banished for a month. The response
was swift and self-righteous, and oblivious to issues
of expression, satire, and irony. Freedom of speech
succumbed to the double standard.

	In many countries in Europe, anti-Semitic speech is
outlawed, but not the kind that defames Muslim
Semites. Such speech is claimed to test Muslims’
willingness to adapt to secular society. But these
cartoons are no less a blatant provocation than the
worst Nazi stereotypes of Jews. If they are to be
supported as free expression, then a double standard
has been clearly established. But I would propose no
limits on any kind of speech, which would allow us to
call hate speech for what it is, and distinguish it
from civil discourse.

	That leaves us with the problem of contextualizing
hate speech while conducting civil discourse. In
Europe, not Jews but Muslims are oppressed and
dispossessed; verbal attacks on them reflect their
status as scapegoats—similar to Jews in an earlier
era. This hate has real consequences. In the Muslim
world, anti-Semitic speech is used as a form of
propaganda to distract the masses from their
powerlessness and their leaders’ failures. But such
hate speech also feeds off the very real nature of
American and Israeli power, including our affinity to
threaten, bomb, invade, and occupy. Instead of
denigrating alleged Muslim intolerance, we have the
constructive option of taking responsibility for the
root causes of both of these forms of hate speech.

David Green


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