Tolerance Toward Intolerance

Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 2:13 pm by cyclops

That’s the title of an op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post by Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, the Washington bureau chief of Die Zeit. Kleine-Brockhoff convincingly explains why his publication re-printed the Danish cartoons:

Last week the publication I work for, the German newsweekly Die Zeit, printed one of the controversial caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. It was the right thing to do.

When the cartoons were first published in Denmark in September, nobody in Germany took notice. Had our publication been offered the drawings at that point, in all likelihood we would have declined to print them. At least one of them seems to equate Islam with radical Islamism. That is exactly the direction nobody wants the debate about fundamentalism to take — even though the very nature of a political cartoon is overstatement. We would not have printed the caricature out of a sense of moderation and respect for the Muslim minority in our country. News people make judgments about taste all the time. We do not show sexually explicit pictures or body parts after a terrorist attack. We try to keep racism and anti-Semitism out of the paper. Freedom of the press comes with a responsibility.

But the criteria change when material that is seen as offensive becomes newsworthy. That’s why we saw bodies falling out of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. That’s why we saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib. On such issues we print what we usually wouldn’t. The very nature of the discourse is to find parameters of what is culturally acceptable. How many times have we seen Janet Jackson’s breast in the course of a discussion of the limits of family entertainment? How many times have we printed material that Jews might consider offensive in an attempt to define the extent of anti-Semitism? It seems odd that most U.S. papers patronize their readers by withholding cartoons that the whole world talks about. To publish does not mean to endorse. Context matters.

He also deservedly scolds the US press and our former President, the one and only Bill Clinton, for his remarks on the cartoon row:

Much of the U.S. reporting about the fracas made it appear as if Europeans just don’t get it — again. They struggle with immigration. They struggle with religion. They struggle with respect for minorities. And in the end they find their cities burning, as evidenced in Paris. Bill Clinton even detected an “anti-Islamic prejudice” and equated it with a previous “anti-Semitic prejudice.”

The former president has turned the argument upside down. In this jihad over humor, tolerance is disdained by people who demand it of others. The authoritarian governments that claim to speak on behalf of Europe’s supposedly oppressed Muslim minorities practice systematic repression against their own religious minorities. They have radicalized what was at first a difficult question. Now they are asking not for respect but for submission. They want non-Muslims in Europe to live by Muslim rules. Does Bill Clinton want to counsel tolerance toward intolerance?

In case you missed it, Slick Willy was in the state of Qatar last week fanning the flames of Muslim sensitivity, and I’m sure getting paid a huge amount of money to do it.

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