While the outpouring of responses to Evan Carp’s February 24 Wespeak is unsurprising, the uniformity of the responses is. I thought opposing bigotry was a core Wesleyan value? Maybe not anymore.
Let us recap and get a few things straight: Last September, a Danish newspaper published a set of political cartoons on the subject of Islam and the West, to illustrate an editorial arguing that some Danish Muslims were unwilling to adapt to a secular society. Several of the cartoons depicted Muhammed, in the humorous style of political cartoons familiar to readers of Western newspapers, saying such things as, “Stop, stop, we’re running out of virgins.” One depicted a bearded figure wearing a bomb as a turban. Most depicted individual Muslims complaining about the newspaper. The central image depicted a police line-up containing Mohammed along with Jesus, Buddha, a right-wing Danish politician, and others, with a witness stating he “can’t hardly recognize him.”
In December, a group of Danish Muslim religious leaders began touring the Middle East showing the twelve cartoons. They added three images of their own which they falsely attributed to the Danish newspaper. One, a photograph of a man wearing a pig’s snout, was described as a depiction of Mohammed. Another depicted Mohammed as a child-molester (a reference to his marriage to Aisha when she was fourteen years old), and the third showed a Muslim being sodomized by a dog.
The peaceful complaints and protests by Danish Muslims that immediately following publication of the twelve cartoons were eclipsed by the violent protests we see today after the tour began in December and all fifteen cartoons were reprinted by Islamic newspapers in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere. The protests are targeted at Westerners in general.
Today, those few European newspapers that reprinted the cartoons are under criminal investigation for “offensive speech.” The editorial board of one American student newspaper was removed after reprinting them, and most American papers have refrained, purportedly because depicting Mohammed offends Muslims as a sin.
Into this fray steps, at Wesleyan, (as at other universities) a campus Muslim group to politely explain the “historical context” and “roots” of the “Muslim anger” behind the riots. (Hint: Maybe it had something to do with the Muslim leaders that added the three falsely attributed cartoons and the Muslim governments that promoted the issue. Just a guess…
Since when are the victims of bigotry expected to sympathize to the bigot’s point of view? Why should anyone in the West care in the slightest about offending violent anti-speech rioters? They shouldn’t, especially when Muslim communities are making no attempt to understand the roots or historical context of Western distrust, or modifying their behavior to solicit a different Western response.
Believing that there is some connection between Islam and mass violence directed against innocent and defenseless civilians, or that many Muslims are unwilling to accept secular states, is not prejudice. It is a rational response (even if wrong) to the actions and words of Muslims who purport to act in the name of Islam and to the resounding silence of other Muslims. While many cultures have engaged in depravity, when we look out at the horrors of the world of today—hate riots directed at entire continents and ethnic groups; torture; beheading; “honor” killing; hostage taking; gang rape used as criminal punishment; suicide bombing; mass violence directed against women, children, and the elderly; poison gas attacks; slavery; genocide—we see a Muslim with a weapon far too often.
As Western-Muslim contact increases in our globalized world, one of these cultures is going to have to adapt. I think that responsibility should be on the violent anti-speech religious bigot rioters, not on Western newspapers, the secular democratic governments of peaceful and tolerant states, or liberal arts students. Not rioting would be a good start. If the Wesleyan Muslim Students Association would like to conduct further teach-ins, I suggest they would do more good by touring the Middle-East explaining why free speech is good, violent anti-speech hate riots are bad, and what Muslims can do to improve their image in the eyes of the West.
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