Harry Siegel is a bona fide left-winger, and this column is from the New York Daily News, one of the most liberal papers in the country. I placed one passage in bold. It highlights the conundrum for liberals (here and everywhere) who feel the need to defend Islam. Because if you say cartoons shouldn’t be drawn for fear of incitement, you’re saying an awful lot about Muslims...but can’t admit it. Helluva Catch-22.
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"Fear is part of it.”
That’s how the Boston Phoenix explained its decision, back in 2006, not to run the Muhammad cartoons that had appeared the previous year in the Dutch newspaper Jyllands-Posten, only to spark riots months later — cartoonists in hiding with bounties on their heads, mercenaries throwing grenades at Dutch embassies and 200 deaths.
That violence came months after the cartoons had run, to little notice. Danish clerics then went to Gulf States with far more offensive counterfeit cartoons (for instance, of a dog mounting the prophet) to raise funds to foment “spontaneous” violent protests.
I was editor of the alt-weekly New York Press then, and we’d assembled a package with new reporting about that fundraising tour and several of the cartoons. As a weekly, we figured every other paper in America would have run the images by the time we went to print. After all, how could you report on worldwide violence inspired by drawings without showing those drawings?
But it turned out the Phoenix wasn’t alone in its fear . Almost no American outlets printed the fairly banal images, easily found online. Nothing at all happened to the handful of places that did print them, but the fear was contagious.
Violence worked, self-censorship held and, insult to injury, almost every outlet hemmed and hawed about sensitivity and such, rather than admit their fear.
At literally the eleventh hour, New York Press’ owner ordered us to pull the images, and news networks — which had booked me and my colleagues Tim Marchman, Jonathan Leaf and Azi Paybarah to explain why we were running the cartoons — had us on instead to explain why we’d all quit in response. Not one of those programs showed the images they had us on to discuss.
We wrote then: “As intended, a gullible Western press again portrayed Muslims as mindless savages to be feared and placated.”
Here we are again.
This time, the cartoons are more amateurish, and in line with that portrayal of Islam. The provocateur isn’t a journalist, but semi-pro Islamophobe Pamela Geller, who hosted a “draw Muhammad” event Monday in Texas, where she, cartoonists and other attendees were met by two surprise guests, in body armor and with automatic weapons. Thankfully, the pair was cut down by one of the many security guards the venue required Geller to provide.
Now ISIS, which claimed credit for that botched attack, has apparently put a bounty on Geller, and anyone willing to be near her.
She is an obsessed and all-but-willing martyr, caught up in the same hallucination of some apocalyptic war between Islam and the West as her would-be murderers.
But the assassin’s veto, as historian Timothy Garton Ash termed “the use of violence to impose your taboos,” is pointed at her neck. The nastiness of her words, about "the savages” trying to impose Sharia law here, is no longer the issue.
The threat to Geller’s life for speaking is.
Yet many among the literati, who typically fancy themselves truth tellers and idol smashers, spent the last week competing to disdain the obvious and explain why the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists weren’t worthy recipients of an award from a group dedicated to “defend(ing) writers endangered because of their work.”
One such useful idiot — who admits he’s never even read Hebdo — wrote “it seemed to me that ‘Je suis Charlie’ was a way for (Americans) to re-pledge their commitment to the War on Terror.”
That slogan, of course, was a Rorschach test, and the writer found in it justification for the position he’d already taken — one that’s a given at many of the right cocktail parties, and a lot easier than admitting fear.
I suspect the Hebdo gang would’ve found a laugh in a black-tie affair with the lit world’s name brands (minus those who skipped the dinner in protest) fundraising off of martyred cartoonists who’d eked out livings taking the piss out of the powerful and the sacred.
“We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends,” said Hebdo cartoonist Bernard "Willem" Holtrop, after millions rallied in solidarity after the attack he survived only because he hated meetings. “A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn’t know what it was. Now it’s the opposite.”
Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the 2006 Danish cartoons with little idea what he was getting into, and who a decade later still needs an armed guard (he and three colleagues are on an Al Qaeda-published hit list that also included Hebdo staffers), having survived several attempts on his life, explained why his paper didn’t run the French cartoons after those cartoonists were slaughtered: “Violence works. And sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen.”
He elaborated: “We caved in to intimidation. And I don’t think that we will get less intimidation because of that. Because we are telling the extremists that it works.”
Someone is always threatening someone else. Eventually, we all die. The question is what — other than fear — guides us until then.
hsiegel@nydailynews.com
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"Fear is part of it.”
That’s how the Boston Phoenix explained its decision, back in 2006, not to run the Muhammad cartoons that had appeared the previous year in the Dutch newspaper Jyllands-Posten, only to spark riots months later — cartoonists in hiding with bounties on their heads, mercenaries throwing grenades at Dutch embassies and 200 deaths.
That violence came months after the cartoons had run, to little notice. Danish clerics then went to Gulf States with far more offensive counterfeit cartoons (for instance, of a dog mounting the prophet) to raise funds to foment “spontaneous” violent protests.
I was editor of the alt-weekly New York Press then, and we’d assembled a package with new reporting about that fundraising tour and several of the cartoons. As a weekly, we figured every other paper in America would have run the images by the time we went to print. After all, how could you report on worldwide violence inspired by drawings without showing those drawings?
But it turned out the Phoenix wasn’t alone in its fear . Almost no American outlets printed the fairly banal images, easily found online. Nothing at all happened to the handful of places that did print them, but the fear was contagious.
Violence worked, self-censorship held and, insult to injury, almost every outlet hemmed and hawed about sensitivity and such, rather than admit their fear.
At literally the eleventh hour, New York Press’ owner ordered us to pull the images, and news networks — which had booked me and my colleagues Tim Marchman, Jonathan Leaf and Azi Paybarah to explain why we were running the cartoons — had us on instead to explain why we’d all quit in response. Not one of those programs showed the images they had us on to discuss.
We wrote then: “As intended, a gullible Western press again portrayed Muslims as mindless savages to be feared and placated.”
Here we are again.
This time, the cartoons are more amateurish, and in line with that portrayal of Islam. The provocateur isn’t a journalist, but semi-pro Islamophobe Pamela Geller, who hosted a “draw Muhammad” event Monday in Texas, where she, cartoonists and other attendees were met by two surprise guests, in body armor and with automatic weapons. Thankfully, the pair was cut down by one of the many security guards the venue required Geller to provide.
Now ISIS, which claimed credit for that botched attack, has apparently put a bounty on Geller, and anyone willing to be near her.
She is an obsessed and all-but-willing martyr, caught up in the same hallucination of some apocalyptic war between Islam and the West as her would-be murderers.
But the assassin’s veto, as historian Timothy Garton Ash termed “the use of violence to impose your taboos,” is pointed at her neck. The nastiness of her words, about "the savages” trying to impose Sharia law here, is no longer the issue.
The threat to Geller’s life for speaking is.
Yet many among the literati, who typically fancy themselves truth tellers and idol smashers, spent the last week competing to disdain the obvious and explain why the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists weren’t worthy recipients of an award from a group dedicated to “defend(ing) writers endangered because of their work.”
One such useful idiot — who admits he’s never even read Hebdo — wrote “it seemed to me that ‘Je suis Charlie’ was a way for (Americans) to re-pledge their commitment to the War on Terror.”
That slogan, of course, was a Rorschach test, and the writer found in it justification for the position he’d already taken — one that’s a given at many of the right cocktail parties, and a lot easier than admitting fear.
I suspect the Hebdo gang would’ve found a laugh in a black-tie affair with the lit world’s name brands (minus those who skipped the dinner in protest) fundraising off of martyred cartoonists who’d eked out livings taking the piss out of the powerful and the sacred.
“We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends,” said Hebdo cartoonist Bernard "Willem" Holtrop, after millions rallied in solidarity after the attack he survived only because he hated meetings. “A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn’t know what it was. Now it’s the opposite.”
Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the 2006 Danish cartoons with little idea what he was getting into, and who a decade later still needs an armed guard (he and three colleagues are on an Al Qaeda-published hit list that also included Hebdo staffers), having survived several attempts on his life, explained why his paper didn’t run the French cartoons after those cartoonists were slaughtered: “Violence works. And sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen.”
He elaborated: “We caved in to intimidation. And I don’t think that we will get less intimidation because of that. Because we are telling the extremists that it works.”
Someone is always threatening someone else. Eventually, we all die. The question is what — other than fear — guides us until then.
hsiegel@nydailynews.com
