Cartoon politics by Toby Archer

The Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons controversy was not a natural disaster, neither did it arise from two incompatible and conflicting worldviews, neatly if very simplistically labelled Western and Islamic. It was the result of politics and political manoeuvring by various parties all around the world, all with their own agendas and all out to profit from the conflict. And to a great extent the controversy was fuelled and enabled by global media and the internet. The actual cartoons themselves very quickly became almost irrelevant to the following controversy. The fact that a number of them did not even depict the Prophet Mohammed himself, and most need a basic understanding of Danish politics to make any sense, mattered not one jot to the rampaging mobs in the Levant who burnt Danish embassies. Likewise many of the strident voices defending freedom of the press were being either deliberately dishonest or simply stupid in not recognising that even in the advanced democracies press freedom is very far from being unlimited. Limits might differ slightly from country to country, but libel and blasphemy laws, professional journalistic ethics, commercial pressures from advertisers on media owners, social mores and customs and current political pressures all limit what an editor puts on the front page. These issues were to a great extent ignored, and to a great extent the worlds media produced a simple story of the Danish cartoon controversy: a story of two incompatible systems that had collided. These two systems were stereotyped as Western liberalism that values free speech above religious observance and the Islamic tradition that the Prophet should never be depicted. This crassly simplified the whole situation but made for great newspaper headlines or 30 second TV news packages. So what really happened? The media did not fail completely. We know there is more to the story than the simple diametric opposition of liberalism and Islam because all the other facts have been reported. But these facts need to be viewed in various often complex contexts. They did not make front page splashes like burning down an embassy. Rather they came out in dribs and drabs

over the months during and after the events. Neither does a narrative of often conflicting and globally dispersed political agendas, all profiting from the conflict in some way, fit any ardently held ideological position. It is a story of normal, messy, complex run-of-the-mill politics and self interests, not nearly as interesting as a Clash of Civilisations. But nevertheless to make some sense of the crisis we need to reinject the politics, so the story goes something like this. In the summer of 2005 a Danish author of a number of books critical of Islam, and with a reputation for never missing an opportunity for publicity, told a journalist acquaintance that three illustrators had refused to illustrate his latest book on Mohammed for fear of offending Muslims in Denmark. These illustrators were never named, but nevertheless the journalists repeated the claim in an article for his news agency. Jyllands-Posten decided to test whether this was true and asked many Danish cartoonists to submit their depictions of Mohammed, and the famous 12 cartoons were the result. Danish Muslims made complaints to the various appropriate authorities in the country. Additionally the ambassadors to Denmark from 11 Muslim-majority countries wrote a letter of concern to the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, asking for a meeting. Danish Muslims had asked the ambassadors for support on this issue when they felt their concerns were not taken seriously by the authorities. But there was also unease amongst the diplomats over three other high-profile anti-Islamic statements made by Danish politicians and public figures that summer. Like elsewhere in Europe the perceived failure of integration of immigrants and of Muslims in particular has been a major issue in Denmark leading to much public debate, and concerns about terrorism after 9/11, Madrid and London was giving this debate a very harsh edge. The prime minister refused to meet the ambassadors, with many commentators seeing this action taken purely for domestic political reasons. Rasmussen wanted to be seen as strongly defending free-speech against Muslim sensibilities by his own centre-right electorate and by the rightwing supporters of his government in parliament. The government of Egypt became the next important player in the drama. First the Danish ambassador to Cairo was called in to hear Egypts displeasure at what they saw as a snub by Rasmussen and that Egypt believed that the issue could escalate if the Danish government did not take steps to counter this. At the same time the Egyptian government

began diplomatic action such as writing to the UN and other international organisations that did exactly that. Egypts activism in the autumn of 2005 on this otherwise trivial matter (indeed an Egyptian newspaper published the cartoons along side a critical article, but this publication caused no problems) has to be seen in the light of its domestic politics. At the time Egypt was preparing for elections where it was expected that candidates connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, the major Islamist group in the Islamic world, would do well. The Egyptian government which is basically a secular, authoritarian regime, saw standing up to the supposedly insulting Danes as a way of burnishing their own Islamic credentials before an electorate for whom Islam is becoming an increasingly important political consideration. Also in December, a party of Danish Muslims went to the Middle East to gain support for their protests against the cartoons. As well as the published cartoons themselves, they also took other far more offensive pictures that had been privately sent to Danish Muslims after the furore had broken out. They say that they never claimed these offensive pictures had been published in Denmark but various people they met with, including the Egyptian foreign minister, subsequently showed all of the pictures to others in the Muslim world. The Muslims who went on this tour did not represent a majority of Muslims in Denmark, and many have argued that the real aim of their trip was to raise their importance and status at home by gaining international support and recognition, rather than to really bring the cartoons to the attention of the Muslim world. Much bad will in Denmark resulted from a number of these personalities being caught telling two different stories, one to the Danish press and another to their audiences in the Middle East making claims about Denmark that were not true. At an OIC (Organization of the Islamic Conference) meeting in Mecca in December 2005 the cartoons became a prominent issue were and condemned in a joint statement. State media in many OIC countries started to highlight the events leading to a public outcry. This was particularly so in Iran and Syria both of whom were perhaps coincidentally, but probably not, under pressure from the United Nations Security Council at the time. Denmark happened to be at that time one of rotating Security Council members. Violence broke out at the end of January 2006 when gunmen stormed the EU offices in Gaza, but again there is a political context to this. The gunmen were from Fatah's armed wing; Fatah represent the secular side of Palestinian politics. Fatah had just lost the elections for control of the Palestinian Authority to Hamas, the Islamist party, and again

many believe that the actions of Fatah were as much about embarrassing Hamas and bolstering their own credentials as defenders of Islam, as it was about attacking Denmark. The next major act of violence was on 4 February in Damascus where the building housing the Danish Embassy (along with the Chilean and Swedish) was stormed and burnt. Mobs also attacked the Norwegian Embassy, again setting fire to it. The fact that this happened in Syria is notable. Syria is a police state where unapproved demonstrations are harshly repressed. If the Syrian government was not actually complicit in organizing the attacks, at the very least they did nothing to stop them taking place. The next day a protest in Beirut turned into a riot and again the Danish embassy was attacked and burnt. The Lebanese police noted that half of those they arrested in the rioting were also Syrian, which again leads to suspicions of Syrian government involvement. Democracy is limited or non-existent throughout the Middle East, and regimes in those countries, along with using force and coercion, have always looked for other ways of seeking legitimacy. Claiming to defend or propagate Islam has been one such method regularly used - for example the global growth of a more fundamentalist and personalised view of Islam, often called Salafism can be traced to great degree to the Saudi royal families massive financial support for the propagation of the Saudi version of Islam around the world. And it was therefore no surprise to see that the Saudi King was, in the words of one Arab commentator, hastening to compete with the Wahhabi Sheiks of Saudi Arabia on who could be more radically opposed to the Danish cartoons. The Islamists parties who have been in many cases savagely repressed by the governments of the Arab world also rushed to exploit the cartoons to gain more support at the expense of the governments. The prominent cleric Sheik al-Qaradhawi who is seen as the spiritual guide to the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest political Islamist organisation worldwide, and well known via his website and programme on al-Jazeera television, positioned himself as representing the Muslim world: for example negotiating with representatives from Norway and generally taking a hard-line in demanding an apology. Elsewhere around the world anti-cartoon protests had little to do with the cartoons themselves and more to do with local political concerns. In Pakistan crowds chanted death to America, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the US print and broadcast media had almost without exception, not shown the cartoons. Three protesters were killed in Qalat, Afghanistan, after police opened fire on a crowd but although they had gathered to protest against the cartoons, reporters there said the crowd was chanting against the hiring of

Pakistani to work on local reconstruction contracts. In Nigeria protests led to mob warfare between Christian and Muslims communities leading to dozens of deaths. In the past the Miss World Contests had served as a similar trigger for communal violence that has plagued the country for generations. The Iranian government called the cartoons a Zionist plot, and various supporters started to search rather desperately for Jewish connections. The Danish embassy in Tehran was also attacked, again raising questions over official connivance in a country where unapproved demonstrations are rare and often broken up with violence. An Iranian newspaper announced a competition for the best cartoons about the Holocaust. In Indonesia a radical Islamic group, that attacked Danish and US consulates in East Java, openly told reporters that the cartoons helped them gain support. Meanwhile in Europe defence of Jyllands-Posten came not only from supporters of unfettered free speech, but also from many right-wing organisations that are antiimmigration and distrustful of Muslims in particular. The influential anti-immigration and anti-Muslim blog The Brussels Journal was one of the first websites to republish the cartoons and was central to spreading the debate through the American blogosphere by reporting in English much of the story that had only been in Danish previously. In Britain the fascist National Front published the cartoons on their website. In Finland it was the minor far-right group Suomen Sisu that did the same. Of course there is a very valid discussion to be had on if there are limits to the freedom of speech, and many commentators in the media, along with bloggers and just private individuals discussing amongst themselves, engaged seriously on these issues as a result of the cartoon crisis, but it was also clear that in Europe there were those with an anti-immigrant agenda who exploited the controversy to hate-monger in exactly the same way as Islamist militants were doing around the world from the opposite extreme. The media as an actor The cartoon controversy thrust the role of the media into the limelight. Journalists were not simply reporting a story but were central to it as different newspapers and television stations had to make sometimes anguished decisions on whether to show the cartoons or not. A small number of journalists and editors in the Middle East were arrested and charged after publishing some of the cartoons next to stories critical of them. In the UK and Canada university authorities tried to recover and pulp all the copies of small university newspapers that decided to publish the cartoons, and media elsewhere followed minutely the case of a

French editor sacked by his newspaper's owner who for publishing the offending cartoon, where to the excitement of many on the right the owner was revealed to be of Egyptianorigin despite his French nationality, but then to their later chagrin turned out to be a Catholic rather than a Muslim. Journalists and editors were not just under pressure to weigh claims of freedom of speech against security concerns over possible retributive attacks from Muslim fanatics, but also from more normal domestic pressures. Some in the Finnish media were critical of the Finnish prime minister's willingness to apologies for what they saw and non-existing offence to Muslims whilst others were willing to follow the government's lead. Old local feuds came back to the surface in many places - for example the much of the right-of-centre press in the U.S. was highly critical of former President Clinton who spoke strongly against publishing the cartoons, whilst in Denmark the left-of-centre press was critical of their prime minister's perceived intransigence and how this had stoked the flames of the conflict. It is also hard to ever be sure of what is a principled position as opposed to what is blatant self interest masquerading as principled position. For example in the past massive media organisations like Rupert Murdoch's News International have shown themselves to be unwilling to upset the Chinese government if that might limit their access to the huge Chinese market - so we have no way of knowing whether the normally outspoken Murdochowned tabloid press in the UK and US did not publish the Danish cartoons out of a genuine wish not to offend Muslim readers or whether the reason was a fear of an economic boycott like Danish firms faced, or a fear of angering the British and American governments that at a time where both were trying to improve their relations with the Muslim world after the damage done by the Iraq war. A special note should also be made of the role of the "new media" of blogs and other web based press. There is a lot of self-congratulation on all sides of the blogosphere: that bloggers are somehow completely separate to the dreaded "MSM" (mainstream media) and serve to check its fictions and biases. This is a fiction itself and, particularly as the line between reporting and comment becomes increasingly blurred, journalists in what New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has called "the legacy media" openly discuss relying on blogs for information and analysis as well as many of them who also blog directly themselves. The cartoon crisis was one of the first example of where it was clear to see blogs driving aspects of a global news story (although they had already played an important role in 2004 U.S. Presidential elections). The Brussels Journal has already been noted

above for helping the story spread through the US right-wing media (new and old) where much of the narrative shaping was done that in particular saw peaceful protests by European Muslims as part of a "global jihad", not as evidence of positive political and civil engagement in their home countries. In this narrative protest by Muslims are seen as terrorism not integration. The focus was once again placed on the extremist carrying their "behead the infidels" poster rather than thousand marching asking for respect. Bloggers were also central to pointing out some of the hypocrisy of the Middle Eastern governments it was an Egyptian blogger who noted that the cartoons had been published in an Egyptian newspaper in the autumn without causing even a fuss, let alone violence. And a blogger in Damascus gave eyewitness accounts of what appeared to be plain clothes security officers marshaling the protests that led to the burning of the embassies. The narrative that poses Islam as a whole as threat that has been prevalent on predominantly but by no means solely the right of the blogosphere has spread in reach, partly as a response to the cartoon crisis. Concepts that pre-9/11 were virtually unheard of, and even three or so years ago were mainly to be found only on the fringes of the internet, have begun to creep into mainstream consciousness. The term "Eurabia" that infers that European political elites have sold out to the Islamist powers of the Arab world and that Europe is steadily becoming an Islamic continent, was considered a conspiracy theory of alien abduction-type by most previously. But the word (albeit with a dismissive article following) made it onto the front page headline of the Economist in June of 2006. The concept of "dhimmi" - people of the other monotheistic religions living us free men but under certain restrictions in Muslim states - was not well known five years ago outside of university Islamic history departments and amongst a few dedicated anti-Islamist (and indeed anti-Muslim) activists who used the term disparagingly to refer to non-Muslims who they believe have caved in to pressure from Muslims. Google now records over 1.6 million uses of the term on the internet and most use it in the latter sense. Many blog and internet users who had not heard the term before the cartoon crisis had done so afterwards. Conclusion Vast amount of airtime, newsprint and bandwidth were expended reporting and commentating on the Danish cartoon crisis. The media did tend to cover all aspects of the story, but much of the nuance got lost as the most powerful narrative - that of a clash of civilizations - began to order the chaos. This turned the conflict into a grand confrontation

of differing world views. This narrative suggested a model of Europe: a post-enlightenment, post-religious world where liberal values protecting the individuals' right to say what they wish were preeminent. This was put against a model of the Islamic world where religion and respect for those sacred beliefs always comes first. This narrative sucked the politics out of the situation. When civilizations are clashing who needs to worry about the Danish Imam trying to work out how to increase his mosque's budget and pinch worshipers from his rival clerics? Or the Middle Eastern foreign minister doing his bit to try and increase his government's popularity before upcoming local elections? Or the creative European neo-fascist who sees a chance to reposition himself away from being a nasty bigot to being a defender of European cultural values? Add in governments worried about losing diplomatic support from their overseas allies for their pet projects; companies worried about losing sales in growing markets; and cynical newspapers editors spotting a way to increase flagging sales and quickly you no longer have a neat story of a clash of civilizations. Rather you have the messy, tawdry, often dull and always complicated reality of international social life. And who has time to read that story on the bus to work?