The Muhammad Cartoons Won’t Be Included in a Book About the Muhammad Cartoons

That is so ridiculous that it’s not even funny. I’d say find a better publisher, but that’s not exactly an easy thing to do…

I was actually planning to put one of those cartoons in our local atheist newsletter next month. Hope I don’t get killed!

Yeah, but that doesn’t matter. Taste isn’t something that we should feel intimidated by. There are thousands and thousands of books recently published that contain far worse racist diatribes than this stuff. It’s not particularly nice, no. But it should still be protected speech. Add in that they represented (through poorly drawn art) a legitimate viewpoint of many Europeans, whether or not it’s a pleasant one to consider, then regardless.

It doesn’t matter what these people say – it only matters that they can say it.

No, and I agree with you. Racism is bad. But we get our best responses when we challenge racism in a public forum, not when we repress racists and force them to keep their beliefs internalized, or in small groups. Even if you don’t change the mind of the racists, you put strong arguments – the facts – out into the open for those who’s opinions and minds have not yet been made up.

It’s the same thing we see with other forms of “isms”. Homophobia, of course, is the one our generation, well, my generation, seems to be struggling with. But just because people didn’t discuss their homophobia, for generations, doesn’t mean it’s gone away. And confronting homophobia in the public forum has led to slowly increasing approval ratings for the lgbt crowd.

The marketplace of ideas is full of good and bad; we need to use the marketplace to push the bad out. That’s why it’s important these people, racist as they may be, get to say what they want.

Does having the right to freedom of speech mean that we are automatically obligated to offend? It’s one thing to say that a publisher is refusing to publish certain material because they don’t have the balls to offend one demographic or another; That may be the case. But don’t they also have the right to decide for themselves what material they choose to have their company brand and image associated with?

Here’s a tangentially related story I came across today.

If you didn’t know who Vince Li was, you might not care. But knowing that he is the severely mentally disturbed man who decapitated and partly cannibalized someone on a bus, you might find a poster of him on public display offensive. Especially one referring to him as a “good person”.

The public complains, and the bar removes the poster, and assures everyone that they will find the advertiser who approved it. Did the advertiser have the right to distribute the ad? Absolutely. Should they have? Probably not, because it reflects on their brand, and that of their client.

So now that the ads are coming down, are we obligated to go out and obtain copies of them and post them on our blogs and forums too? Because Censorship! OMG! WTF!

Freedom of speech and expression protects us from legal ramifications of accidental incursions of good taste, and from general stupidity. But that’s pretty much where it ends. You can’t be taken to court for saying something stupid or in poor taste, unless it’s slander, liable, or threatening, copyright infringement, or something like that. In some jurisdictions, there may be infractions for inciting hatred or violence, you can’t say “Bomb” in an airport, or shout “fire” in a crowded theater; that sort of thing. But that’s pretty much it. You have the right to be a rude and inconsiderate bastard. You also have the right to not be a rude and inconsiderate bastard. But you don’t have the right to not be called a rude and inconsiderate bastard for saying something rude and inconsiderate. Freedom of speech doesn’t protect you from people being pissed off.

It’s been said that you don’t have the right to not be offended. But you do have the right to be offended, and to voice your objection to that offense. Granted, violence and destruction of property are outside the realm of acceptable discourse, but at some point that becomes more of a crowd control problem.

And you also have the right to not say something potentially inflammatory, if you feel that it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

So if the publisher refuses to publish the cartoons, I don’t really care. I might care if I happened to be the author, but I don’t imagine any of my work would have those particular cartoons in them. That’s their choice. The choice of the author, in that case, is either to buck up and accept it, or find another publisher.

@Peregrine

Of course, the publisher of this book is entitled to decline posting whatever he or she or they want, that’s part of capitalism. But there is a unique difference between what is posted at a bar and what is contained in a book – bars are identified as businesses where people go to have fun and relax, whereas publishers are part of one of the central tenements of our society. The idea that people can write books and distribute them to support a certain area of thought is core to our concept of freedom of speech. That is to say, there is a certain duty to the ideal that a publisher, or newspaper editor, or blog poster has that a bar advertiser does not. In the end, the owner of the bar is only interested in their profits, and a poor advertisement would reduce said profits. Publishers and editors and bloggers have a responsibility to the public that has been sadly forgotten by much of the current generation of journalists and bookmakers.

I like issues like these because it brings out the “murder is bad, but…” crowd, even among atheists, who I suspect come primarily from a liberal background.

Is it really too much to say: They had the right to publish the cartoons, and the response to them were absurd? Can’t we drop the blathering, “Yes, but…” that invariably follows?

The fact that PEOPLE WERE MURDERED in response to the cartoons more than justifies them as being thoughtful religious criticism.

The cartoons depict Mohammad as violent. Guess what — he was!

The cartoons depict Muslims as violent. Guess what — they can be!

Atheists will say that Catholics are child molesters and that Evangelicals are knuckle-dragging, women-hating ignoramuses, but apparently saying (not without justification, either!) that Muslims the world over have violent tendencies is too much for some.

“To not include images that are the very subject of the book is, as Reza Aslan says in the New York Times article, idiotic.”

This is the most pertinent point, to me. I think the publisher’s actions are idiotic.

I have seen books on history that include political cartoons, some of which are very offensive, racist, and occasionally pornographic. It’s part of the material. That’s the point of printing them.

I could see, maybe, choosing not to publish the cartoons if they were incidental, merely illustrations or unimportant examples. I cannot see excluding these high-profile examples of “cartoons that shook the world” from a book on that very subject, especially given that they are discussed in the book.

Nobody has the right to not be offended.

Thanks for running that, Hemant. I don’t think I had seen all of them. I forgot how witty some of them are.

I especially like the one that leaves it up to you to decide whether Muhammad has horns or a halo. That’s more a depiction of our modern culture’s conception of Muhammad than the prophet himself.

And the burka image is, IMO, both witty and pointed. It’s about the entire issue, wrapped up in one image: ‘who controls what we are allowed to see?’ Although I think in its depiction it perpetuates some truly ugly stereotypes.

I find the star and crescent one charming and whimsical. I like the desert one quite a bit, it feels beautiful and respectful. And I like the one where the cartoonist draws *himself* sweating and nervous over the assignment. That’s telling.

But yes, this book, a history of the whole affair written by a scholar in the field SHOULD have the cartoons. Doing it without them is like producing Hamlet without Hamlet.

The whole point of publishing those cartoons originally (in a right wing Danish newspaper) was to give a big “f%#! you!” to Muslims living in Denmark and Europe. It didn’t appear to me to be any sort of thoughtful critique of religion.

No, it was not. It was a talk both about free speech and how fundy muslims made other muslims look. If I remember correct, besides JyllandsPosten isn’t “right-winged”.

It is possible to hold the opinion that murder is definitely wrong and that the cartoons are somehow bad as well, but I think you have to be careful how you present such opinions because frankly, the cartoons are rather insignificant in comparison to the reaction to them. If it weren’t for the riots and murders, it would be a different story. People peacefully argue in the strongest of terms all the time. But when blood is spilled it changes the dynamic.

I guess it’s the same as when Christians respond to the murder of abortion providers. When George Tiller was murdered the reaction from some was largely about the evils of abortion and how Tiller was a bad person, with a begrudging “of course murder is wrong” thrown in. It made me seriously question people’s priorities if not their true motives.

I think they are cute, sorry, that’s my opinion and I’m stick’n to it!! !

I can’t read Danish, so something there may have escaped me, but I fail to see why so many people are using the knee-jerk term ‘racist’. Since when is Islam a race?

To paint this as anything other than a freedom-of-speech issue is a distraction. It doesn’t matter if it’s xenophobic, it doesn’t matter if it’s offensive, it doesn’t matter if the cartoons are good or bad or funny or mean.

What matters is that a group of people responded to political cartoons with violence, leaving over a hundred people dead, setting fire to buildings, and issuing death threats,all of which intimidated a university press to such an extent that they refused to publish the images in a book about the images.

I find both of those things truly offensive, and yet, somehow, I manage not to riot or make death threats…

Not including the cartoons in a book about the cartoons is ridiculous. And it is a crying shame that violence has intimidated the publisher into omitting the cartoons.

Now, a couple of the side issues in this thread:

“The fact that PEOPLE WERE MURDERED in response to the cartoons more than justifies them as being thoughtful religious criticism.”

Huh? That people had a bad reaction to something, makes that something automatically good? That makes no sense.

“Atheists will say that Catholics are child molesters and that Evangelicals are knuckle-dragging, women-hating ignoramuses, but apparently saying (not without justification, either!) that Muslims the world over have violent tendencies is too much for some.”

Well, I would say (as an atheist) that atheists shouldn’t be slinging around bigoted overgeneralizations about anyone. In the US, it bugs me more when Muslims are the targets than when, say, evangelical Protestants are, because it’s feeding a more pervasive societal stereotype, and because US Muslims don’t have the same level of power to defend themselves. But I would call out someone who started spouting anti-Christian bigotry.