The Ayatollah Joke Book

The Ayatollah Joke Book

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, February 10, 2006; A19

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the noted wit, expert on freedom and unelected
religious leader -- the leader who counts -- of Iran, observed the
other day that in the West, "casting doubt or negating the genocide of
the Jews is banned but insulting the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims is
allowed." He apparently thought that this was a devastating point.
Touche, Ayatollah Khamenei.

The worldwide fuss over 12 cartoon images of the prophet Muhammad
(some mocking, some benign) that ran in a Danish newspaper has already
killed a number of people. Many self-styled voices of Islam have made
the bizarre comparison between showing pictures of Muhammad and
expressing doubt about the Holocaust. A government-controlled Tehran
newspaper announced a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust, asking
"whether freedom of expression" applies to "the crimes committed by
the United States and Israel." In a spirit of "see how you like it," a
European Muslim group posted on the Web a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed
with Hitler.

Muslim complaints about a Western double standard would be more
telling if the factual premise were accurate. But it is not. In fact,
it is nearly the opposite of the truth. Nothing is easier and more
common in the West, including the United States, than criticizing the
United States -- except for criticizing Israel. A few Western
countries have stupid laws, erratically enforced, against denying the
Holocaust, but that hasn't stopped Holocaust denial from becoming a
literary industry and cultural phenomenon. Nevertheless, there has
been no rioting about the historical reality of the Holocaust. No one
has died over it.

Meanwhile, whatever point these European Muslims were making with
their cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by
their very exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the
cartoon on the Web. The notion that jokes about Frank are beyond the
pale is provably false. There's a play running in New York right now
called "25 Questions for a Jewish Mother." It's a monologue written
and acted by stand-up comic Judy Gold, who says on stage every night
that her mother used to read to her from a pop-up version of Anne
Frank's diary, and would say, "Pull the tab, Judith. Alive. Pull it
again. Dead." Maybe you had to be there. But the New York Times
reviewer called the play "fiercely funny, honest and moving" and did
not demand that the author be executed or even admonished.

By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost
every major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing
the controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center
of a major news story that these papers cover at length every day. An
editorial in the Times on Wednesday said that not publishing the
cartoons was "a reasonable choice" because they would offend many
people and "are so easy to describe in words." As I write I am looking
at a front-page photo in today's Times of Mariah Carey singing into a
microphone. Words do it justice, I think.

Of course it is not Western values that are trampling freedom of
expression, it is the ayatollah's own values, combined with the threat
of violence. The other problem with his little joke about double
standards, and with the whole, supposedly mordant, comparison between
denying the Holocaust and portraying the prophet is that the offended
Muslims do not want a world where people are free to do both. They
don't even want a world where people are not free to do either, which
would at least be consistent. They want a world where you may not
portray Muhammad (even flatteringly, slaying infidels or whatnot), but
you may deny the Holocaust all day long.

The bewildered prime minister of Denmark, trying to calm the whirlwind
that has descended on his innocent, unsuspecting country, gets it
spectacularly wrong when he reassures disgruntled Muslims that Denmark
supports "freedom of religion" and is "one of the world's most
tolerant and open societies." Tolerance, openness and freedom of
religion are not what they have in mind.

A lively debate is going on about whether Islam really does forbid any
portrayal of the prophet, however benign, or whether that is a recent
innovation of some subset of the faithful with possible ulterior
motives. This debate misses the point. Some Christians believe they
are required to wear particular sorts of clothing. Some Jews and
Muslims don't eat pork. They don't claim that their religion requires
other people to wear special clothing or avoid eating pork. Tolerance
and ecumenism can do only so much. They have nothing to offer a Muslim
in Afghanistan who is personally insulted and enraged about an image
that appears in a newspaper in Denmark.

The shameful American position on all this is boilerplate endorsement
of free expression combined with denunciation of the cartoons as an
"unacceptable" insult. When three protesters died this week in a
confrontation at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, an American
spokesman there said that Afghans "should judge us on what we're doing
here, not on what some cartoonist is doing somewhere else." But the
limits of free expression cannot be set by the sensitivities of people
who don't believe in it. How can President Bush continue to ask young
Americans to sacrifice their lives for freedom in the Muslim world, if
he won't even defend freedom verbally when forces from that world are
suppressing it in our own?
© 2006 The Washington Post Company