Editor,
Christian Beenfeldt's grandiose letter in the Daily Lobo the week before Spring Break claims the Danish cartoons denigrating the Muslim religion are an expression of free speech.
I claim the opposite - they have nothing to do with free speech. Moreover, there is no connection between the rights of slaves to be subversive or Spartacus, the slave's-rights leader, and these cartoons, as Beenfeldt claims. However, there is indeed a fundamental connection with the principles of democracy, but it's not the one Beenfeldt is drawing.
Democracy does not endorse a "right" to slander, to deny and to distort the truth of history, or to engage in character assassinations. In philosophy, logicians disqualify such conduct as a classical fallacy, the ad hominem argument against the person.
Nor does democracy entail the license to offend, to engage in secular and religious blasphemy by violating the integrity of a person or a whole culture. Hate-mongering incitement to violence has nothing to do with democracy. Democracy aims for truth by providing for the free flow of information. It is not the avenue of misinformation.
No random vilifying thought popping up in someone's dirty mind has the right to make the news. There is no right to deliberately misinform others. Ideas designed to do harm and not promote the common good of enlightenment may have their place in the gutter press.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
When spread by the mainstream press, however, we rightfully call such incidents what they are: propaganda and demagogy. Words are not only words, as the critic of pornography Catharine MacKinnon famously says. They can be designed to do harm and often do harm as they are spoken. This insight has led some European countries to institute laws aimed at preventing such harm - Holocaust deniers, for example, face trial and jail time.
Beenfeldt may not realize that the right-wing Danish publication Jyllands-Posten had rejected previous submissions of cartoons poking fun of Jesus Christ, deeming such depictions too offensive to the sensitivities of a Christian audience.
Hence, its application of the Danish version of the First Amendment is deliberately selective. It does not embrace the right to free speech, but exploits and violates it by invoking it selectively in order to justify and advocate a fundamental resentment against the Muslim world. Beenfeldt seems to share such sentiment.
After the first appearance of the cartoons last year, Muslim leaders had approached the editor of the newspaper to seek a resolution of the offensive publication in dialogue. The editor arrogantly rejected such attempts categorically. Nothing would enlighten his blind conception of the right to free speech.
The Danish cartoons are racist and fascist. They portray the founder of a peace-loving religion as a bomb-throwing terrorist, and by extension portray a religious community as comprised of violent, murderous fanatics prone to suicide-bombings. Such demonization has prompted a violent response, which thus gets immediately and conveniently justified.
This is not new. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, national newspapers published cartoons depicting the stereotypical Muslim man next to cockroaches and other vermin, a device used by the Nazis to influence public opinion of Jewish people, and some restaurants reportedly placed the image of the stereotypical Muslim man in urinals.
If you saw your face in a urinal, would you still think the act is free speech? And while public opinion is being manipulated, Muslims have become outlaws eligible for detention and deportation at will upon suspicion, and, as we now know, also for torture and murder in the United States and proxy gulags around the globe.
The hypocrisy of the double standard cannot be more apparent. While anti-Semitism directed against Muslims is sanctioned by the First Amendment, the public is ready to condemn it in unison when directed against Jews.
We should be consistent and reject it whenever and wherever it occurs.
Joachim Oberst
UNM staff
