I've pointed out on other blogs (particularly Steve Gilliard's) that, while there could be an objection to the Danish cartoons based on racial stereotypes, the overarching objection was depicting Mohammed at all, which really is antithetical to how we see freedom of speech in the US.
So it is with the objections raised by this cartoon.
More on the flip...
- Here is the reaction, as reported by the Beacon Journal.
- Here is a letter sent to the Beacon Journal by CAIR of Ohio.
- Chip Bok himself briefly blogged about the meeting that followed with CAIR in his own blog, describing some of the dialogue that he had.
To be complete, I noticed that one of the things I read mentioned two cartoons.
This is the other one. For my money, this one seems more offensive, if one believes that it's unfair to tar all Muslims with the same extremist brush. However, the Beacon article and Mr. Bok's description of the meeting lead me to believe that it was the pixelated depiction of Mohammed that caused the furor.
Say what you will about the motivations of the Danish newspaper that started this all, say what you will about the day to day indignities suffered by Muslims in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe, or even here in the US, the objections to Mr. Bok's cartoon must be politely and firmly rebuffed. Period.
Mr. Bok writes about the Muslims he met with, "They seemed genuinely hurt by the cartoon," and I believe the hurt is sincere, but, as he points out at the end of the Beacon article about the meeting, "My cartoon wasn't about them. To them it was; to me it wasn't."
This is the same kind of mistake the ADL made in decrying Senator Dick Durbin's comments about the toture going on at Gitmo and elsewhere, likening them to Soviet Gulags and Nazi prison camps. To complain about Senator Durbin's choice of comparisons when describing the torture being commited in our name is, to be overly polite, tragically myopic.
My feeling is that we will run into this dispute again and again, because our society (in the social contract sense of the word) has no absolute prohibition on depicting any particular image. Context matters in determining whether the image is designed to offend. If a group in our society doesn't understand that, whether it's CAIR or the ADL, that is their problem, not ours.