BBC: "Nordic uproar at Syrian protests"

Think about the title of the article as you read this:

Denmark and Norway have condemned Syria for failing to stop attacks on their embassies in a row over the publication of contentious cartoons.

Syrians set fire to the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Damascus in protest at the publication of newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

The two Nordic countries said it was unacceptable that Syrian authorities had allowed protests to take place.

The two countries have called for their citizens to leave Syria.

That is the part of the article that deals with the Norwegian and Danish reaction to the embassy burnings. The reader would be justified at this point in remarking "what uproar"? Making statements condemning the burning of one's embassies is an "uproar" (and the burnings themselves are "protests")? There is a lot to comment on in this BBC story. According to one sentence one of the cartoons "depicts Muhammad as a terrorist." It has been widely interpreted that way, but this isn't quite true--and many people who are now aware of this story have not seen the cartoons. One cartoon, to be more exact, shows Mohammed wearing a turban that contains a bomb with a burning fuse. That obviously associates terrorism with Mohammed in some way, but it is somewhat ambiguous: it takes two things that Muslims are sensitive about and links them without being clear about the precise nature of the linkage. I used to see it as merely pushing Muslim buttons. Now that two embassies have been torched, I interpret this cartoon as offering prescient self-commentary: as if to say "this cartoon is a bomb."

Hugh Hewitt asks some interesting questions about the cartoons:

So, did the cartoons and their aftermath make it easier or more diffcult for Musharraf of Pakistan to continue to guide his country away from the lure of the jihadists? Easier or more difficult for Turkey to remain a friend of the West's? Easier or more difficult for the pro-Western people of Iran to summon the courage to change their government? Easier or more difficult for Jordan's King Abdullah to continue his course, which has included support for the reconstruction of Iraq even in the face of Zarqawi's murderers?

Those are rhetorical questions and the answer to all of them is "no." The real question would be was it worth it? What did the cartoons accomplish at the expense of the sorts of things listed by Hewitt? The cartoons did test the waters, and they did discover that free speech is in danger. Two editors of the Jordanian paper that published some of the cartoons are now under arrest. A European editor lost his job. As far as I know, no print edition of any major American paper had the courage to emulate the Jordanian paper.

The cartoons also accomplished the illustration of something that the political Right, at any rate, has known for some time: Large segments of the Muslim world are dysfunctional at the moment--their populations are the pawns of demagogues, ready to be transformed into seething lynch-mobs at a moment's notice. This dysfunction is being exported to some parts of Europe, and this dysfunction demands submission from the West. From the European end, this whole affair with the cartoons has been an experiment in withholding that submission. And the final outcome is still unknown.

Update: Other worthwhile items on the cartoons here, here, and here.

Tags: cartoons, Prophet-cartoons, Denmark, Europe, Islam