THE CARICATURE OF FREE SPEECH: The Cartoon Riots

CAROL CHEHADE

The concept of free speech was recently challenged when a Danish newspaper, The Jyllands-Posten, caricatured the Prophet Mohammed in various ways, one of which depicting him wearing a headdress fashioned like a bomb. Expectedly, the image has provoked many Muslims to participate in what we know as the Cartoon Riots.

It seems like there are more grave issues we should be rioting over, like, for instance, the murderous plague of AIDS in Africa. In comparison, the Cartoon Riots seem like a joke we would watch in an actual cartoon. It is ridiculous to think that masses of people across nations are rioting over drawings. Yet, let’s take the cartoon caricature out of its non-Western cultural context for a moment and move it into the American context. Imagine if caricatures of you were promoted in various mediums of the media? Obviously we do not have to think too deeply to understand that many African Americans have been painted with the brutal strokes of ministrelization. In the past, films like, Birth of a Nation, acted as virtual marketing tool that increased the reasons to lynch African Americans. Today, African Americans are still criminalized as pimps or drug dealers. As the population diversified, so to do the media’s covert modes of their minstrel tactics. Featured on the list are images of Arab Americans as terrorists, women sexualized as hoes or shaped into one-dimensional housewives, Hispanics as the hot to trot “mamis” and “papis” as well as the “Maids of Manhattan”, Asian women as subservient love interests or crazy versions of dragon ladies, while Asian men only are seen through the clichéd Bruce Lee martial arts films, completely de-sexualized as opposed to the over-sexualized images of other men of color. Indeed, cartoon caricatures have a long history of sanctioning the humiliation of another race, culture, sex and religion.

Images are so powerful that even the Prophet Mohammed saw their danger when he forbade images of himself to be depicted because he rejected the idea that the Prophet should be owned by those who look like him, or worse yet, bought out by those who manipulated his image to look like them. This happened when we see an image of Jesus who looks more like a white rock star versus what he actually looked like. Manipulation of imagery has caused a lot of havoc in the world. The deification or demonization of images has created racist notions of beauty, privilege and power.

Caricatures of the powerful have been done, but they have rarely been powerful enough to threaten their livelihood and survival. The less powerful groups always suffer long term effects of even a simple stereotype because the powerful can back up bigoted beliefs with oppressive actions. When it comes to equal coverage of multi-faced sides in an issue, there is a double standard in every country. Yet, the power of that double standard is dangerous when perpetuated from a superpower that has more military might than the whole world combined.

Manipulating images in humiliating ways is often defended under the name of freedom. Thus far, looking for freedom by mocking others seems like one of the worst forms of bondage. How is freedom defined when there is nobody else to humiliate?

In times of war, slights and insults are compounded. The caricature comes at a time when the theater of war is increasing its admission price with the flowing blood of a dying audience. All sides have contributed to this deadly outburst. Cartooning this tragedy shows the arrogance of the West and the reactionism of the East.

The rioters reacted not only to the caricature, but to the plethora of slights against Islam that preceded the cartoon. This seemingly harmless caricature is perhaps the last straw that many Muslims felt broke the camels’ back. With wars, internal divisions and utter political chaos created by both foreign and native governments, many Muslims feel like they have been insulted by many in the world community. The caricature of the Prophet was a final blow that pushed many Muslims over the edge. Having little power to define and promote one’s identity is frustrating enough, but having an outsider mis-define you and exploit those definitions of you is the very thing that creates riots. The more we alienate a group of people, the angrier they become and the angrier they become the more vulnerable they are to fulfill the stereotypes set up for them to fall into. Similar to the riots in the U.S., the Cartoon Riots have been a result of the calculating instigation of the superiority complex of the few.

The cartoon riots accentuated the enormous cultural gap between the Western concept of freedom of speech and the Islamic concept of spiritual sacredness. We certainly do not want to sacrifice one ideal for the other. Freedom of speech must exist as much as respect for religious differences must exist. Both these schools are thought are marks of advanced civilizations, yet our overall slow move toward evolution has not figured out how the two schools can be assimilated together in order to reach a common truth. In a sad way, this inability to allow the two to co-exist is part of a larger war we are fighting.

Freedom of speech, particularly in the press, is at question here. It would be easy to invoke freedom of the speech if there really was such a thing. As it stands, freedom of speech has never been free for the majority of people. If the Muslims are censoring a free press, then the censorship has been reciprocal because the so-called free press in the Unites States rarely reports the real reasons on why we have spent billions of dollars on a war that has neither found weapons of mass destruction or Osama Bin Laden. Therefore, whether or not the cartoons constitute freedom of speech is less prevalent because most things that get into the press are untrue and controlled by those who determine what we should know.

The West’s self-righteousness must be checked as much as the East’s. Fanaticism runs on both sides of these issues. We have enough coverage telling us of the Islamic fanaticism and we have little coverage of the brand of ideological fanaticism the U.S. forces onto countries that do not subscribe with zeal to the western brand of democracy.

One thing that the freedom of speech and the basis of Islam both have in common is the search for truth. The press does have the right to print whatever it wants as long as it is prepared to deal with reactions. Proponents are entitled to those reactions. Essentially, both the press and the rioters have failed miserably because the press became enslaved to defining freedom of themselves through exploiting the images of the other, while the rioters enslaved themselves into the very caricatures by which they were offended.

The definition of freedom of speech is not defined by listening to and implementing the input of all nations. Every form of freedom is segregated right now. We have misunderstanding because we are working off of fragmented information which by its very nature segregates us from assimilating world inclusive views of freedom of speech. Free speech in the world context has to be applied uniformly and defined collectively.

Let us not be emotionally swayed to either side so that we can really discover the meaning of freedom in contrast to those who have the power to grant it to us. While we are so concerned in making non-Westerners accept our passionate philosophies of freedom of speech, we arrogantly forget that we are a country that is tightly wrapped up in the blanket of the Patriot Act. Freedom of speech has never existed. In fact real freedom has never existed.