More cartoonery

The excerpt below is by the editor of Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, writing about "Why I Published Those Cartoons." I don't buy it. Censorship or self-censorship is part of human communication. We don't say some things as individuals to other individuals because we know we can cause them psychological or emotional harm, whether directly or indirectly. Sometimes we do say such things when we intend harm.

Jyllands-Postenis defending the cartoons once again on the basis of free speech. They're not terribly defensible in other terms; say, as providing crucial information or on aesthetic grounds. The cartoons were intended to provoke, as political cartoons often are.

But if there's a principle underpinning other liberal principles such as free speech, or perhaps a proviso that qualifies liberal freedoms, it's the principle of not causing harm by our actions. The cartoons, as intentionally provocative, cause harm. This weakens any claims for protecting freedom of speech against encroaching "self-censorship."

The idea wasn't to provoke gratuitously -- and we certainly didn't intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.

At the end of September, a Danish standup comedian said in an interview with Jyllands-Posten that he had no problem urinating on the Bible in front of a camera, but he dared not do the same thing with the Koran.

This was the culmination of a series of disturbing instances of self-censorship. Last September, a Danish children's writer had trouble finding an illustrator for a book about the life of Muhammad. Three people turned down the job for fear of consequences. The person who finally accepted insisted on anonymity, which in my book is a form of self-censorship. European translators of a critical book about Islam also did not want their names to appear on the book cover beside the name of the author, a Somalia-born Dutch politician who has herself been in hiding.

Around the same time, the Tate gallery in London withdrew an installation by the avant-garde artist John Latham depicting the Koran, Bible and Talmud torn to pieces. The museum explained that it did not want to stir things up after the London bombings. (A few months earlier, to avoid offending Muslims, a museum in Goteborg, Sweden, had removed a painting with a sexual motif and a quotation from the Koran.)

Finally, at the end of September, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen met with a group of imams, one of whom called on the prime minister to interfere with the press in order to get more positive coverage of Islam....

By the way, sound familiar?