On Offence: the politics of indignation by Richard King

Author:Richard King
Format: epub

Don’t Mention the War

If the policy of multiculturalism is partly responsible for the disengagement of immigrant communities, it is also partly responsible for the inability of politicians and others to deal effectively with violent outbreaks such as the Danish cartoons crisis. Again, the issue is not straightforward. Often, the reason publishers and others back down in the face of intimidation is that they are, to put it bluntly, scared. But concern for racial or religious sensibilities also has its part to play; and while the language of ‘offence’, ‘respect’, and ‘sensitivity’ can give an act of fearfulness the look of something more high-minded, it is also clear that those who employ it often do so with complete sincerity. For them, the argument that freedom of speech must include the freedom to offend fails to take account of the fact that often the person doing the offending is a lot more powerful than the person being offended.

In some ways, it’s a noble argument — or at least an argument that comes from a noble place. But it leads the advocate into immediate difficulties, including moral evasion in the face of intransigence. Time and again in the months after the cartoons crisis, commentators of a liberal persuasion sought to lay the blame for the chaos at the door of the newspaper that had published the cartoons, rather than with the protesters wreaking havoc or the politicians egging them on. They pointed out that Jyllands-Posten’s stunt was revealing of anti-Islamic sentiment not just among Denmark’s political class but also within the European community. All of which was well worth saying, as long as those saying it remained clear on the main point — namely, that having your feelings hurt doesn’t give you the right to riot or violate diplomatic immunity or attack Scandinavian nationals living in the Middle East. Too often, liberal sympathy for Muslims facing intolerance in Western societies shaded into exculpation of Muslim protesters everywhere. At the very least, there was a marked inability to understand precisely what was at stake. When, for example, a handful of European newspapers chose to reproduce the cartoons in solidarity with Jyllands-Posten, they were roundly criticised by politicians and commentators, including the British foreign minister Jack Straw, for their insensitivity and irresponsibility. How could these papers risk more death and destruction for the sake of a few mediocre cartoons — cartoons that were, in John Donatich’s words, ‘grotesque and insulting, gratuitously so’? But in reproducing the cartoons, these papers weren’t endorsing their content; rather, they were mounting guard over a principle. That so few media outlets followed suit was not only a scandal in itself; it also raised the possibility that any group with an axe to grind could intimidate the press in the future.

This anxiety found an official outlet in a report by the UN’s Commission on Human Rights, which was deeply critical of the Danish government’s handling of the cartoons crisis. ‘Politically and from the standpoint of the morality of international relations,’ it

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