What can we say with confidence about the riots following (long after) the publication, in Denmark, of the now infamous cartoons (read: caricatures)? Certainly, most compassionate, thinking people would agree that the riots were both reprehensible and indefensible.
The indefensibility of the violent reaction, however, should not render that reaction incomprehensible to us. Nor should this one particular rejoinder, a shrewdly manipulated riposte to a deliberate offense, be taken as either representative or revelatory, with regard to the general response and widespread sentiment of hundreds of millions of ordinary Muslims across the world.
In attempting to understand, but not excuse, the violence of the riots, an effort must be made to empathize with the offended, even while condemning the offensiveness of the rioters’ actions. The effort to empathize should be marked by an honest effort to develop and demonstrate some sensitivity to others’ sensibilities, a prerequisite to any genuine dialogue – and, indeed, to any productive speech that leaves open the possibility of a truly participatory conversation.
“People in a free society have the right to choose who they wish to offend,” Mr. Elberg (Wespeak, 4/11/06) rightly observes, but he fails to consider the consequences and implications of pursuing such a philosophy in our heterogeneous and interdependent global village. With the right of speech, whatever its form or manner, comes social responsibilities and moral obligations.
The question here is not a “free speech” question, for there is no real question that, of course, Jyllens-Posten should have been allowed to publish their inane cartoons. Rather, the question is whether Jyllens-Posten should have chosen to print those cartoons or not – and why? One who demands the right to speak must possess, too, the humility and willingness to listen – and the humility and willingness to listen, first of all, to how one’s own speech is heard by others.
Mr. Elberg argues, in consecutive sentences, that free speech is both “a prerequisite for participating in Western political discourse” and “the price of admission to the global conversation.” It should be obvious, though, that Western political discourse does not, in and of itself, constitute a global conversation at all.
Is it not yet time, if ours is truly a postcolonial world, to finally consider the radical notion that the dictates of Western political discourse alone should not shape the contours of a global conversation?
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