Canada and Other Matters of Opinion by Rex Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

the deity is a definition of blasphemy.
    Portions of the West may have forgotten what blasphemy is. The entertainment industry, with reference to Christianity in particular, seems never to have either known or cared. A picture of Kanye West wearing a crown of thorns, on the cover of
Rolling Stone
, is a blasphemy. The infamously celebrated
Piss Christ
—a crucifix in a jar of urine—is blasphemous even to my lapsed sensibility. And, of course, there’s Madonna’s career.
    The Danish cartoons were published in September 2005 in Denmark, but the uproar over them—the simultaneous protests, riots and embassy-burnings they are said to have sparked—only reached a peak now, five months later. Most people reading the news may have wondered why there was such a gap between the publication and the outrage. And why, amid so many other quarrels between the West and the Muslim world, these twelve cartoons were capable of stirring such violent passions.
    Part of the answer, and it seems to me an important point to underscore, is that it is not just the original twelve cartoons, but at least three others—all more offensive thanany of the originals. One shows the Prophet with a pig’s snout, one features bestiality, another pedophilia.
    These three were included in a “dossier” compiled by an imam in Denmark who took a tour of Muslim countries, showing them to state and religious leaders. Since that tour, he has been interviewed on Danish television about the additions, and one of the more insulting images has been shown to have been doctored.
    We are not free to subtract this element from an account of the outrage. If there has been manipulation in the Muslim world of this story, and additionally, if more corrosive images have been deliberately added to the originals, corrosive images designed by their greater graphic and scatological detail to make outrage all but inescapable, then it is not just a story about twelve cartoons about Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper. It may be a bigger story about quite cynical and duplicitous manipulation, founded on a kernel of reality, then amplified with more explosive material and fed into the context of suspicion, friction and misunderstanding between the West and the Muslim world.
    If some Muslims are reacting to more than the pictures in a Danish newspaper, if they are reacting to strategically gathered, supplementary pictures of unqualified venom and uncompromising insult, placed before the Muslim world by the Danish imam, then the calls for apology from Western authorities are both premature and incomplete.
    A story that looked like a spontaneous combustion between Western free speech and Muslim religiosity maycontain more sly politics and subtle incitement than most headlines acknowledged. The Danish cartoonists may have supplied an occasion for much mischief, but the deeper mischief, it may turn out, was not their cartoons, but the supplemented dossier, the more gruesome and insulting representations associating their Prophet with truly unspeakable circumstances.
    There is very much to be said about the contest, or friction, between the foundational democratic principle of free speech and the absolutes of religious belief.
    I am far from convinced, however, that in this “cartoon debate” one faction has not attempted to rig the facts and—in part—achieve political goals under the cover of faith. If that is so, there’s a blasphemy all will agree on.
    In the multitude of articles and Internet postings about the cartoon crisis, from the moment riots ensued and some of the cartoonists found their lives in jeopardy, it remains very surprising that the point made above, of how the crisis was managed, and in particular of how the three additional more-scurrilous-by-far drawings were inserted into the original twelve, is so rarely mentioned.
    If there was genuine “rage” in what is too loosely called the Muslim world that rage was stimulated more by the fake inserts than