Mohammed Cartoons: This Fire Needs More Fuel!!!

El Sol de Osa, in deep hibernation, has been stirred from its invigorating slumber by the global crisis over the Danish cartoons featuring the Muslim prophet Mohammed. Major news media outlets have been dancing all over the place on this one. Today's CNN disclaimer reads as follows:

CNN is not showing the negative caricatures of the likeness of Prophet Mohammed because the network believes its role is to cover the events surrounding the publication of the cartoons while not unnecessarily adding fuel to the controversy itself.

While I understand that CNN has commercial interests and market share to protect, this controversy appears to have little to do with respect for religion but seems to indeed embody the clash of ideologies and principles between Islam and the West that has given rise to illegal wars and suicide bombers in the first place. But in solid terms, this global cartoon crisis pits the principles of western-democracy style free speech against Islamic religious doctrine.

No doubt, it would surely be a grave sin for a practicing Muslim to draw an image representing his own prophet, since this might lead him onward to idolatry and since moreover such an action is proscribed by his religion and would therefore constitute an act of blasphemy at a minimum, apostasy under extenuating circumstances. For a non-Muslim satirist or cartoon editorialist, however, the prophet Mohammed would appear to be fair game, provided Christian and Jewish caricatures receive comparable air time. The prerogative of members of a free society to speak of the religions of other societies would be sacrosanct anytime, but is particularly so today when deep divides between societies have led to today's occupation/siege mentality of war without end. In today's age of the suicide bomber, the west is adapting to the improbable notion of an Islamic caliphate that would claim one fifth of the world's population and "assimilate" thirty or forty sovereign nations, a handful of them democracies in their own right. If a little humor is required to bend our minds around the aspirations of a few fanatics, then so be it. The West has the right to traffic in humor and must not be deterred from the exercise of our hard-won freedoms.

As recent elections in Palestine have clearly shown, democracy does not necessarily favor the interests of the United States and Western Europe (this being an unusual case in which their interests coincided) at least inasmuch as free elections there recently brought to power a political party that is on the American list of terrorist organizations. Win some, lose some. There were voices calling for a postponement of the election due to the recent popularity rise of Hamas. There were those that would defer the application of democratic principles abroad until they appeared to more closely serve a domestic agenda. But that's not what happened.

As anti-democratic and regressive as the American president and his neo-con cabal have shown themselves to be, they have nevertheless aggressively promulgated elections in tough venues, not only in Palestine but in Afghanistan and Iraq as well and multiple times despite troublesome poll results. Clearly, motives other than the love of democracy may be invoked to explain the full motives of the American presidency in getting out the vote, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the first steps in democratic principles have recently been tasted in societies in which elections were previously unknown, and for this the American administration deserves credit.

I consider this whole controversy to be a painful step along the way of a cultural reconciliation between the West and Islam that is the only thing that can ultimately end "the war on terror." Those of us that are fortunate enough to belong to a free society must not be intimidated by angry zealots favoring authoritarianism and religious dictatorship that threaten to kill us over the exercise of our painfully won freedoms, including society's most potent safeguard against repression and tyranny: free speech.

People have died as a result of this controversy. Three consular offices in the middle east have been torched. Editors have been fired and arrested. Ambassadors have been recalled. Trade boycotts have been applied. Death threats have become a dime a dozen. Nations have accused other nations of fanning religious fires for political ends. . .

A free society must never bow to religious pressure of any kind at the peril of suborning the very principles that allow it to exist and be free.

This is one of those unusual times when an otherwise innocuous issue must be neither placated nor swept under the rug, no matter what the consequence in damages and even human life. What is at stake in this argument is the very concept of personal liberty. Below, El Sol de Osa has reprinted a few of the cartoons at the root of this controversy.