"Stop Publishing The Cartoons" Middle East

I’ve participated in the “Buy Danish” campaign. And, I’ve stressed the connection between Internet freedom of speech and complicity in its repression in China and the Middle East by U.S. hi-tech companies undermining Western values, which makes easier anti-democratic states rousing their purposely ignorant “street” to attack the West.

Yet, I’ve agonized over whether to participate in the “Publish the Cartoons” campaign (led in the blogosphere by Judith Klinghoffer, Charles Johnson and Michelle Malkin, and most recently by Glenn Reynolds delectable taking CNN to the woodshed).

Being proudly Politically Correct, seeking to avoid offending any religious or ethnic sensitivity when another choice of words can do just as well, I tended initially to very uneasily side with most American newspapers’ choice to not show the relatively innocuous in themselves 12-cartoons. I’d rather stress positive Western values by “Buy Danish” solidarity with those attacked by street and state thugs.

That tendency is now certainly outweighed by the requirement that the American media allow its customers to fully know what the uproar in the Muslim world is about. It has been elevated to that import by the Muslim states-sponsored and incited riots and threats and violence against and in Western countries.

The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, is not to be singled out as particularly worse, but representing one of America’s leading newspapers her mental and journalistic confusion is an epitome. “Why not publish the cartoons?” she asks today. Lost in anecdotes of publishing this and not that, she sides with Post editorial judgment to not publish the cartoons as too insensitive. She glides past the Post’s news judgment that publishing some Abu Ghreib photos or of the burned bodies of American contractors, however, was justified by “high news value.” She has the unashamed effrontery to conclude that she is “a First Amendment freak”!!

The Sacramento Bee’s ombudsman, Armando Acuna, whose paper also chose not to publish any of the cartoons, at least has the First Amendment and journalistic integrity to say,

I just don’t agree with them. It seems to me that once the cartoons evolved from their origin as provocation and into an international news story, the paper had an obligation to show its readers what all the fuss was about….We do it because it’s news; that’s our business.”

As so often, my insight is heightened by my 5-year old son. As I drove him to Sunday school at our Temple, we listened to Kermit the Frog sing the “It’s Not Easy Being Green” song.

Instead of railing against those who discriminate against those green, Kermit affirms its positive aspects (“green’s the color of spring”) and concludes, “And I think it’s what I want to be.”

What does the West want to be? Do we in the West want to just rail against the worse injustices in the Muslim states, or do we want to stress affirming our values.

The West, governments and media, must unite in demanding that Muslim states cease publishing anti-Semitic cartoons. This is not trivial tit-for-tat. The state-sponsored twisting of youth’s and the otherwise immature minds of its citizens is a major impediment to any real hopefulness to create peace or tolerance in the Middle East. If the West is serious about that, and about its own values, this must be the unified Western position.

My thoughts travelled – as they have many times during the “cartoon intifada” – to the common refrain among Jews, “It’s not easy to be a Jew.” This usually refers to the many, many rules for the observant, the trying nuances of Talmudic interpretations of morality, and the persecutions and discriminations we’ve suffered and do suffer. Civilized Western thinkers, commonly, wrestle with delicate questions of morality and worthwhile actions to further it.

The American Jewish response to anti-Semitism has been to simultaneously expose its stupidity, including by re-publishing the virulent anti-Semitic cartoons prevalent throughout the Middle East, while successfully working energetically across religious and ethnic boundaries to build tolerance. (See the worthwhile Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties by Stuart Svonkin, Columbia University Press, 1997, for the post-World War II to 1960’s efforts of Jewish organizations.)

The response to anti-Semitism in Europe has differed in governments, particularly Germany, making publication of anti-Semitic tracts and cartoons illegal. Why the difference from America? Simple. When a state itself has actually been so corrupted by such hate, to the slaughter of 6-million and the deaths of tens of millions in a terrible world war, it is deemed necessary to stamp out such infections and wholesale re-educate one’s people. Germany, uniquely in the world, has largely succeeded in creating a new person, a new German. My German-born wife, converted to Judaism, and her decent German family are its product.

The Middle East’s virulence of hatred must be eradicated. Nothing less can any longer be winked at by the West.

Saudi Sheik Abdul Rahman al-Seedes, the iman of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, represents the one-sided Muslim point of view, in the AP story headlined, “U.S. must ‘pay’ over cartoons, Iran says”:

”Is there only freedom of expression when it involves insults to Muslims?”

Noted researcher of editorial cartoons Dan Pattir summed up the Muslim world’s gross hypocrisy in “Graphic Anti-Semitism”:

Indeed, reviewing many Arabic-language publications over the years, one cannot escape the conclusion that caricatures have always been perceived by Arab regimes - which own or control the media outlets of their countries - as a legitimate tool that need not and should not be restrained or refined in the no-holds-barred fight against Israel….

These cartoons are always rude and brutal, with a bloodthirsty punch. All of the cartoonists and their editors seem to treat the subject in the same way: through denial of the Holocaust; the Jew as a repulsive stereotype; Israel as a Nazi-like entity; and the Jews as a whole as the greatest existing threat to mankind. …

WHAT IS most amazing is the lack of any positive cartoons related to Israel - even at the height of peaceful negotiations (such as Camp David, Oslo agreements, the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty or Israel's disengagement from Gaza). None. Not even in the Gulf states that are regarded as having higher journalistic standards, being more open-minded politically and less antagonistic toward Israel.
There are no signs of restraint when it comes to anti-Semitic images…

This is a practice which can inflame dangerous passions in countries where many illiterate youth are fed distorted visual impressions of Jews and of Judaism.

The result of such unrelenting anti-Semitic onslaughts is that an entire generation of Egyptians, that has come of age since the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, is constituting a major setback in the normalization process with Israel. It also contradicts the peace treaties between Israel and its immediate neighbors, which call for "prevention of incitement and hostile propaganda as specified in the Interim Agreement" (the Hebron Protocol of 1997), and in the 1998 Wye River Memorandum stating that "the Palestinian side will issue a decree prohibiting all forms of incitement to violence or terror."

So far, not only have the above not been eradicated, but they are being perpetuated.