Europe stands its ground.

last updated 8 January 2015

Mohammed Cartoons

We reprinted the Mohammed cartoons out of solidarity with our Danish colleagues, said Barcelona’s El Periódico de Catalunya in an editorial. The Danish paper Jyllands-Posten commissioned 12 caricatures of Islam’s founder specifically to make a point about free speech, after a Danish author complained that no artist would illustrate his children’s book about Mohammed. Islam does not allow representations of the Prophet, and cartoonists feared that imams would target them with the same kind of death fatwa that sent author Salman Rushdie into hiding during the 1990s. Turns out their fears were justified: After the newspaper ran the images, Muslims across the world hurled death threats and burned Danish embassies. Muslims have every right to be upset—some of the caricatures are offensive in that they equate Islam with terrorism. “But they’ve no right to try to suppress criticism abroad, or threaten those who have bad taste in satire.”

The protests themselves look like a satirical sendup of Arab outrage, said Milan Vodicka in Prague’s Mlada Fronta Dnes. Yemenis boycotting Legos? Armed Palestinians shouting, “Death to Danes”? The Muslims who claim that Islam has been mocked “are making a mockery of themselves.” Too bad it isn’t funny. The violent demonstrations across the Muslim world are yet another manifestation of spreading paranoia and self-pity. “Since the war in Iraq, the feeling that everything the West does is part of a big plan for weakening the Muslims has become stronger.” Arab governments are encouraging this sense of victimhood because they don’t want to seem less outraged than their Islamist oppositions. Many of the demonstrations, in fact, are obviously the “orchestrated” kind that we often see in unfree societies. The West needn’t be overly concerned. “Things will calm down.”

We might take these Muslim protests more seriously, said Roger Köppel in Hamburg’s Die Welt, “if they weren’t so hypocritical.” Arab newspapers routinely print cartoons of Jews—sometimes generic rabbis, sometimes recognizable politicians—as “ravenous cannibals” with the blood of Arab babies dripping from their fangs. Evidently perpetrating the old blood libel is all in good fun. How many imams raised even mild criticism when Arab television stations ran a series based on the anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”? Freedom of expression is “a core value of the West.” We will not allow Muslim mobs to dictate what European newspapers can and can’t print.