Columnist
Do American newspapers have the right to print cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist? Yes.
Should they exercise that right? Absolutely not.
Many editors suffer the notion that if a newspaper anywhere commits an act, no matter how egregious, the journal must be supported in the name of press freedom. In police precincts, this solidarity is called the blue wall.
With press freedom, the matter gets tricky, so let’s focus on the burning case in point. A newspaper in Denmark published a series of unflattering cartoons about the Islamic religion last September.
Editors reportedly had asked a dozen artists to render drawings of Muhammad after a frustrated book publisher said no artist dared illustrate his book about the prophet.
Months after the cartoons hit the stands, Muslim-organized street protests have flared against the overseas embassies of Denmark, New Zealand, France and other European countries where the offending images were published.
Several American papers have run the images in the pages as an expression of solidarity. Why?
Editors should no more be influenced by bad judgment of foreign colleagues than by threats from the mosque or fires in the street. If propriety renders it fundamentally wrong for an editor to publish the cartoons before the brouhaha riots, it remains bad judgment to publish them now.
Why?
The drawings, even for a cartoonist, who must traffic in such wares, are blatant stereotypes. If those who commit acts of terror happen to be Muslim – even if they commit such acts in the name of their religion – it does not follow that Muslims are terrorists. Most Muslims do not approve of the homicidal bombers, especially those bent on suicide.
The cartoonists proceed beyond slandering the 1 billion practitioners of the faith and bring forth their most revered holy man, rendering Prophet Muhammad as a turbaned killer on the prowl.
J.B. Stoner terrorized, lynched and dynamited Negroes and their churches as the Imperial Wizard of the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Were artists to follow this model, they would depict all Christians as Klansmen.
Imagine the bearded Son of God down from the cross armed with a shotgun. Such a rendering would not be published under the guise of free speech by any self-respecting newspaper in America.
“I’ve got the right to print my dissent from the doctrine, and I have exercised that right for many years,” H.L. Mencken wrote. “But I don’t have the right to go on the cathedral steps on Sunday morning, when the Catholics are coming out of High Mass, and make a speech denouncing them.”