Enraged?

Reza Aslan writes in Slate that he’s “enraged” by the Danish cartoons. “No one doubts that the press should be free to satirize,” he says. (Actually, plenty of people seem to doubt it.) “But freedom of the press cannot excuse the promotion of noxious stereotypes,” he continues. That’s a fair point, but the printing of cartoons also cannot excuse thuggish threats from dictatorial governments half a world away. In yesterday’s NY Times Michael Kimmelman reported on a statement issued by 200 members of Iran’s 290-member parliament: “Apparently, they [Europeans] have not learned their lesson from the miserable author of ‘The Satanic Verses,’ ” the statement reads. The only “lesson” of the Rushdie affair is that we need to tell the Iranian mullahs where to stick their pronouncements.

Yesterday’s BBC also reported on elected officials in northern Nigeria burning the Danish flag. All of this gives the lie to Rami Khouri’s assertion, which I quoted yesterday, that violent cartoon protests are simply the equivalent of Europe’s “football hooliganism.” Khouri ignores the fact that the protests are being stoked by state actors.

Hassan M. Fattah lays this bare today in a NY Times report. At a December summit meeting in Mecca, ruling elites of the Muslim world began to fan the flames. Fattah reports:

After that meeting, anger at the Danish caricatures, especially at an official government level, became more public. In some countries, like Syria and Iran, that meant heavy press coverage in official news media and virtual government approval of demonstrations that ended with Danish embassies in flames.

So it’s hard to take seriously this editorial in the Arab News, out of Saudia Arabia, which asserts: “The editor of Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that started it all, has a lot on his conscience.” We could do with a lot more honesty about who “started it all.”

**Update: This piece in the Forward reveals what sort of cartoons the Arab News sees fit to print:

One cartoon that was published last March by the Arab News, an English-language newspaper sponsored by the Saudi government, depicted rats wearing Stars of David and skullcaps, scurrying through holes in the wall of a building called Palestine House. The imagery used is almost identical to a well-known scene from the 1934 Nazi film “Jude Süss” in which Jews are shown as vermin that must be eradicated.

Here it is (hat tip: David Bloom.)