http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/02/12/INGHIH5NF31.DTL
Europeans fighting the wrong fight Other immigrant issues dwarf cartoons Manfred Wolf Sunday, February 12, 2006 By widely reprinting the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, Europeans are finally taking a stand -- but for the wrong reason, on the wrong issue and probably at the wrong time. Why now? Divorce lawyers call it "the waffle-iron syndrome." The couple is divorcing; everything is being quietly and amicably divided: She gets the house, he gets the cash, the books are clearly hers, but the CD collection goes to him. It all proceeds this way until she says, "I'll take the waffle iron, OK?" He retorts, "You'll take what?" And they have the biggest fight ever. Even without a divorce, every couple has been there. Quiet and restraint and decorum prevail, grievances are ignored or swallowed, until somebody has a major tantrum -- usually about the wrong thing. For decades, Western European elites, governmental and otherwise, have been so quiet, so discreet, so politically correct, that until the upheavals of the last few years (the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands and the riots in France), no criticism of Muslim immigrants could be expressed in polite company. Those who did so were labeled racists or far-rightists, or even neo-Nazis. But then the dam burst, and now many polite Europeans are having a tantrum. Recent, cartoon-inspired violence may worsen it. It's hard to exaggerate the reproaches against politicians, journalists, educators, and other movers and shakers for having swept immigrant problems under the rug, for keeping silent in the face of problems with integration, or no integration at all. The scorn, ridicule and fury directed against those who should have spoken up but didn't, or hypocritically moved away from immigrant-heavy, crime-ridden city centers, or sent their kids to good schools, was not widely reported in the U.S. press. In Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden, the reproaches continue to this day. Now it's all out in the open. No more silence, no more political correctness. Suddenly, many Europeans find the complaints of Muslims about newspaper cartoons first published in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten last September (for instance, of the prophet as terrorist) unacceptable. The furious response by Muslims could harden those feelings. As if to make up for lost time, and not content to let Danes and their Muslim immigrants work things out, newspapers in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain and Italy reprinted the offending cartoons. You don't have to be a Muslim to see that as a clear case of provocation. And certainly the wrong battle about the wrong issue. People who passed over in silence the suggestion of some imams that homosexuals should be flung from the tops of tall buildings now take umbrage at Muslim rage about offensive cartoons. People who had allowed plays to be withdrawn because they offended Muslim sensibilities now decry Muslim inability to understand that freedom means freedom to insult. People who had said "immigrants just needed more time to adjust" now are beside themselves about Muslim fury at having their prophet caricatured. Yes, freedom of the press to be sure, but you can't exactly blame Muslims for being angry. And while Europe does not have precisely the same definition of hate speech as we do, it's not as if that concept is unknown there; after all, Holocaust denial is a crime in several European countries. Besides, ask yourself if anti-Jewish caricatures would have been widely reprinted in major European newspapers. Democracies, we should know, must treat their minorities with kid gloves. The dominant culture is by definition sturdier than any number of minority cultures. For reasons that should be obvious, an American university can have a black studies program but not a white studies program. That's not a double standard. The two sides, says the Dutch Moroccan scholar Youssef Azghari, "still don't know much about each other." The burning of the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus, and the riots and demonstrations elsewhere, make this harder -- but, still, now is the time to learn, and for Europeans to show the understanding that in their time of silence and quietude they seemed to demonstrate so excessively. No point going from one extreme to the other. Manfred Wolf teaches literature and the history of ideas at the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco. Page E - 5 -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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