Pointless

I don’t normally write about political issues, but this whole cartoon business is becoming a horrible mess, and thanks to Roseg I just found this blog post by Burningbird that pretty much sums up what I think about the whole thing:

We seem to believe that any form of censorship is inevitably evil. Yet we censor our speech every day. I don’t tell the overweight woman in the checkout line that the twinkies she’s buying are harmful; I don’t get into a battle at work with the co-worker who wants to hang a cross in his or her cubicle, not because I don’t have beliefs of my own, but because I pick my battles and I make them work. I practice some self-control.

I just don’t see the point of the media republishing and republishing these cartoons. Is this all media freedom is about – publishing stupid, not-very-well-drawn work that we know is highly offensive to some members of our community? (I’d take real freedom of the press any day – the media not being tied to big business interests – but that’s a different story.) This seems to me to be the equivalent of primary school playground behaviour: “Nyah nyah you don’t like me to poke you so I will keep poking you, nyaaaaaaah nyah!”

What point are we trying to make by constantly inflaming the situation? Some people in Australia seem to take the warning by an Australian Muslim leader that the republication of these cartoons would cause anger among Muslims here, as a challenge and an affront to “our freedoms” – what about seeing it in terms of not wanting to cause hurt and offense to people in our community? (I keep saying our community, because we have a sizeable Muslim population in our country, and they are our neighbours, colleagues, friends, family.) We can’t just keep using the whole ‘freedom of speech’ argument to justify ourselves saying anything and everything we want to – with freedom comes responsibility, and with actions come consequences.

Mooiness has been following the developments, and makes some good points, and if you really have no idea how a Muslim might potentially feel when s/he sees such cartoons, Israd sums it up quite eloquently.

I’m under no illusions that we all agree with each other, but I like to think we can respect each others’ differences when talking about issues like this. And I will happily avoid saying things that I know are guaranteed to hurt or offend. This doesn’t mean I can’t say anything; if I say something unknowingly that offends someone then I will apologise. How can we live together if we can’t be polite and respect each other?

Update 8:45pm: This post, and this issue, has given M and me a topic for lively debate.

M commented (reposted here with his permission for easy reading):
I have little patience with religious fundamentalists. I understand the need for tolerance but that usually ends when the individuals I am asked to tolerate wont tolerate anyone or anything else.

“Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, commissioned twelve cartoonists to draw them and published the cartoons in response to the difficulty that Danish writer KÃ¥re Bluitgen had finding artists to illustrate his children’s book about Muhammad, because the artists feared violent attacks by extremist Muslims.” From Wikipedia.

So basically what’s happenned is that the Islamic extremism has got so bad in a *non-islamic country* that no-one, not even someone seeking to paint a fair story is willing to risk themselves to educate others.

The cartoons were aimed squarely at the extremists and I say good on em for publishing them.

This was conducted over email (it was a slow afternoon) and we continued discussing the issue some more when we got home from work. I accept M’s point that it’s important to stand up against extremism and fundamentalism, but I still don’t accept that it’s right to inflame an already bad situation, all in the name of press freedom. We can choose to use our freedoms in many ways.

Categories: incomprehensible, racism