Buy Danish... in Korea

(If anyone has any ideas how those in Korea can support the Danes, feel free to leave a comment.)

I am not the first IKK blogger to talk about the ongoing 'Cartoon Intifada' (I believe that honor goes to the Big Hominid).  In fact, I'm probably jumping on this on the back end of the issue's shelf-live.  However, things have gotten to the point where I have decided to go off my normal beat and talk about it.

My view

Like many others have already said, I believe that the Danish paper in question and other media outlets have the right to publish those cartoons but that they should exercise that right while respecting the beliefs of others.  If I were the editor of the paper (which I am obviously not), I would not have run the cartoons.  Your right to draw cartoons does not give you the right to have someone publish them and editors should exercise prudence.

If Muslim groups would have called for a boycott of advertisers of the paper in a bid to force them to drop their ads, I would have seen no problem with that.  The paper chose to print those cartoons and can live with the (non-violent or state-coerced) consequences. I suspect that many 'culturally sensitive' Danes would have sided with them, making any boycott that much more effective.

But that is not what happened.  A local Danish Iman (Ahmed Abu Laban) decided to use the cartoons published in one non-government paper to paint the Danish people as anti-Muslim (cool video) on a trip to an Islamic conference in Egypt, although he later spoke out against the resulting violence he helped create.

Likewise, if the cartoons had been published with the financial support of the government, then foreign governments would have a legitimate beef with the Danish government.  But they were not so they don't.

In my view, this mess did not start out as a free speech issue, but it became one once some Muslim leaders and governments decided to pressure the Danish government into censoring their media.  So the current boycott of Danish goods by some Muslim countries and groups in order to force them to impose censorship on the press is a direct assault on our values.  Perhaps we are in a Guns of August situation but freedom of the press is not a point of compromise.

Buy Danish

While there is not a lot we can do about goons in the streets of Tehran or Damascus, we can do our little part to counteract the boycott of Danish goods.

For starters, check out this list of Danish products and see if there is anything you can buy at your local superstore.

If you are in Itaewon, you can order Carlsberg or Tuborg beer.  If you want some junk food, have a Steff hot dog (The garlic onion dog is pretty good.).

So far I have ordered one round of Carlsberg beer while celebrating the birth of my daughter and had one hot dog set at Steff that I otherwise would not have bought.  That is less than a drop in the bucket compared to the current anti-Danish boycott but it is a start.  I hope that other expats will take up the challenge to add their own drops to the bucket.

Final notes

Two final things that bug me about how the issue is being handled in the States and a few other places.  The first is the rather obvious double standard by media outlets like the New York Times on offending Muslim beliefs offending versus Christian ones (Remember Piss Christ?). 

The second is the somewhat related belief that printing the cartoons was like shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater.  First, it belittles Muslims by equating them to rabid Pavlovian dogs ready rip your leg off at the site of a cartoon.  It serves to remember, that even if a million Muslims went crazy over the cartoons, 1,299,000,000 Muslims did not go crazy.

Those two problems combine to effectively make a' rioters veto' in which those who resort to violence have the right to silence those they don't like:

"I think the press has an obligation not to gratuitously offend, but I also think that the press has the right and occasionally the obligation to blaspheme. These images aren't shown. We're extending the supposedly spontaneous -- but in fact politically organized and politically motivated -- rioters veto power over what runs in American newspapers. It's ridiculous and indefensible."

Since the L.A. Times (among others) has decided not to run the cartoons (and indirectly compared Muslims to road-raged psychos with guns when explaining why they will not), I fully expect them to show their new found religious sensitivity by refusing to run ads or reviews of The Da Vinci Code for its negative portrayal of the Catholic faith.

But I am not holding my breath.

Comments

[Thomas Jackson]

The comics mess is simply because Islam wants the West to submit to its values and mores.

(Yangban Edit:  Pejorative reference to Islam deleted.  Some stuff that might get printed in a Dannish newspaper does not make the grade here.  So says the editor of this blog.)

[Hojuin]

Andy said: "It serves to remember, that even if a million Muslims went crazy over the cartoons, 1,299,000,000 Muslims did not go crazy."

This is an interesting point, though it also serves to note the conspicuous and continuing silence of those 1,299,000,000 with regards to the madness of their cousins.

peace.