Would Americans be no less outraged at a mocking cartoon of Martin Luther King (say, in some stereotyped Watermelon-eating pose) or Jesus as many Muslims around the world are at the Danish cartoons?
I think it’s probably fair to say that any mainstream publication that published such a caricature of King would be swamped in a wave of social opprobrium, probably sufficient to lead to the firing of editors or others who were directly responsible for the decision to publish. With a mocking or satirical Jesus, I think the reaction would be not quite so dramatic. But I think the informal bars to something like that are great enough that they just stop it from happening.
(Again, I think it’s a given that one could probably find either in out of the way publications. But I’m talking about major newspapers, national magazines, etc.)
So does that make it the same? Is the level of offense equal?
I think we all have some sense of seeing some racist outfit publish a vile caricature of someone like King and then hiding behind ‘free speech’ orthodoxy when the you-know-what comes down on them. So if this were just the Muslims in Denmark equivalent, I wouldn’t be inclined to much sympathy.
To me, that’s part of the equation — the level of offense and the social/cultural context. But the real issue here is the resort to violence (at the extremes) and the calls for state intervention to prevent such publication from happening (on the ‘moderate’ end) that makes this different.
But let me know your thoughts.
