Yet more on the cartoons, images of Mohammed, and the otherness of The Other

Gypsy Scholar has three great posts about the prohibition against the use of images of Mohammed. They can be found here, here, and here.

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom comments on the cartoon controversy:

But of course, freedom of speech—reduced (for purposes of this debate) to its core, animating mandate and protection—is PRECISELY the ability to look religion in its pious face and flip it the bird. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to criticize religion, just as freedom of religion is supposed to protect the rights of the religious not to have their religion established for them by a government—a counterbalancing right that is lacking in theocratic states and in religions where pluralism is denied legitimacy.

But this lack of balance between the freedoms—rather than being exploited by the west to make its case for free speech and its necessity as the guiding principle of liberalism—is instead being exploited by neophyte identity politicians in the Muslim world, who have learned to play the victim card so quickly that our own State Department has bought into their affected outrage at victimization and religious “intolerance."¹

Somehow, it seems to escape those raised on westernized Orientalism that by calling the intolerance of intolerance “intolerant,” they have reduced the concept of tolerance itself to a cruel semantic joke—the idea being that groups formed around cultural similarities, once they have honed their group message and excommunicated the dissenters—own the narrative. Outside criticism is therefore inauthentic—always tainted by the gaze of the Other, and so only to be considered secondarily (if at all) as a valid critique.

Eugene Volokh comments on the Boston Globe's apparent double standard here.

Altogether elsewhere, I returned home from a trip to Trader Joe's today with several big pieces of imported creamy Danish havarti cheese. I intend to erect a shrine to The Satanic Verses, set out my copy of the Qu'ran as a placemat, and eat the creamy Danish havarti with some fava beans and a nice chianti.