SAN DIEGO -- Thanks
to the controversy over the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad,
people the world over find themselves in a familiar but uncomfortable
spot: One group is offended by something and another can't wait
to inform them they should cool off and that they have no right
to take offense.
This is what the
controversy is really about. It's not how outraged Muslims reacted
or what their reaction says about them. Nor is it about which
American newspapers and networks have opted to show the cartoons
and which haven't.
The newspapers
that have run the images include The Philadelphia Inquirer,
whose offices where recently picketed by about 200 demonstrators
protesting that it was in bad taste for the paper to publish the
drawing of the prophet with a bomb for a turban.
What this is really
about is respecting someone else's prerogative to take offense
to something that may not offend you. That's not always easy to
do.
A few months ago,
I suggested that we all sign a pact in which we'd humbly acknowledge
that we're in no position to judge whether something is offensive
unless the offense is aimed directly at us. I got the idea when
radio talk-show host Bill Bennett made his tone-deaf remarks about
reducing crime by aborting black babies. As I recall, most whites
weren't as troubled by the remarks as were most blacks.
Now here we go again.
A Danish newspaper serves up deliberately provocative cartoons
maligning an entire religion and Muslims react with outrage and
violence. Meanwhile, in Europe and the United States, commentators
are so eager to condemn the reaction that they can't bring themselves
to condemn the newspaper that commissioned the cartoons or even
acknowledge that Muslims have the right to be offended. They can't
get past the rioting, the destruction of property and the fact
that European Muslims seemed to have stoked these fires by disseminating
the cartoons to a Muslim audience mostly in the Middle East. They've
convinced themselves that to even acknowledge the slight would
be to somehow condone the violence and give into pressure from
extremists.
In this line of work,
I've been known to offend quite frequently. And at times, I've
taken offense at something that someone else has said or done.
And when that happens,
people tell me to get over it. They usually make it sound almost
high-minded, as if only the thin-skinned, the overly sensitive
and the politically correct let such things bother them.
But what bothers
me is when I see a member of the ``get-over-it'' chorus do an
about-face and make hay out of something that offends him. That
happened recently when I took exception to the fact that Chief
Justice John Roberts -- while he was a young government lawyer
-- penned a tasteless memo where he took the liberty of referring
to Mexican immigrants as ``amigos.'' One person who wasn't troubled
by the Roberts memo was talk-show host Michael Medved, who invited
me onto his radio show to defend my position -- and to tell me,
in so many words to, well, get over it.
Of course,
Medved is also a film critic. And a few months after our chat,
he penned an op-ed article for USA Today in which he
took offense to Steven Spielberg's "Munich." The way
Medved sees it, the Oscar-nominated film -- in fictionalizing
Israel's response to the murder of 11 members of its Olympic team
in 1972 -- ``deliberately blurs distinctions between those who
commit terrorism and those who combat it.'' Medved said Spielberg
and screenwriter Tony Kushner ``traffic in the hoariest anti-Semitic
stereotypes, showing the coldly calculating Jews computing the
cost of their operation in dollars ... to balance the crimes of
Munich.''
As I was reading
Medved's article, it hit me once again: This is one interesting
world in which we live.
It's the same feeling
I had some years ago when I was living in Cambridge, Mass., and
a rumor began that the Boston Housing Authority had declared the
shamrock a hate symbol, akin to the swastika, and prohibited residents
in public housing from displaying it. A lot of Irish-Americans
saw red, firing off angry letters to local newspapers and calling
into radio talk shows.
In the end, officials
with the housing authority insisted it was all a big misunderstanding
and that there had been no formal declaration.
At the time, I couldn't
make sense of the ruckus. But then, of course, I'm not Irish.
Now is that so hard
to understand?
©
2006, The San Diego Union-Tribune
