Mick Hartley

Clive Davis quotes Telegraph reporter David Rennie dismissing the significance of the Danish cartoons’ publication in an Egyptian newspaper:

The much-linked to Brussels Journal writes: “Guess what? Not a single Egyptian stormed the paper’s offices to burn it down, not a single Jihadist threatened to assassinate its journalists. And not a single Egyptian embassy was torched in neighbouring countries. French supermarket chain Carrefour did not boycott Egyptian products either. Apparently Muslim papers are allowed to do what Western papers are not: republish the Muhammad cartoons.”

Well, apparently it would seem they are, especially when that Muslim newspaper was publishing them to condemn them. To be flippant, I am allowed to mock my family, others are not. To be less flippant, human beings react to context.

Hmm. We were told that depiction of the prophet was absolutely forbidden in Islam: hence the outrage. Later we found out that this is not exactly the truth, and also that the cartoons had been published earlier in an Egyptian paper, with no outcry. If depiction of the prophet was such an issue, clearly the Egyptian journalists had flouted this proscription just as much as the Danes, even if their purpose was to criticise the cartoons.

So what’s the problem? Well, as Rennie writes, “I am allowed to mock my family, others are not.” Indeed. So the issue – as many of us suspected all along – is not about the flouting of an absolute taboo at all. It’s about the giving, and taking, of offence: a somewhat different matter. Whether the original publication of the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten was intended as a mockery of the prophet or not, clearly many Muslims took offence, but what I’ve so far failed to understand from the many commentators who’ve criticised the original decision to publish, and the later decision by a few European papers to show the cartoons as an act of solidarity, is, what’s so special about the Muslims? Why should they, alone of all groups, never be offended? Is there any other group which has this special never-to-be-offended status? Christians? Hindus? Scientologists? Jews? (ha!) Lesbians? Clowns? Bus Drivers? I can’t come up with any. All the rest of us in this imperfect world have to put up with all sorts of crap that offends us, and we put up with it in the knowledge that we can damn well offend people back. But not, apparently, Muslims – not when it comes to matters concerning their beliefs. And it’s become more and more apparent that there are a great many things about the West that offend them – indeed some, most notably their self-appointed spokesmen, are pretty much full-time professional offence-takers.

And the only reason I can think of why Muslims might be accorded this special status is that a portion of them will resort to threats and violence whenever they’re offended. Simple as that, really.