February 8, 2006
Cartoon Publications, Free Elections, and Combat Operations
By
Austin
Bay
In 1989, Iran's Ayatollah
Khomeini didn't simply diss Salman Rushdie's provocative novel,
"The Satanic Verses." Khomeini issued a death threat,
and backed his fatwa with a multimillion-dollar reward for the
believer who killed the novelist.
Salman Rushdie is
still alive and kicking, though the reward remains in place, a
Damoclean sword made of money and an angry man's invocation of
God.
I read "Satanic
Verses" when it was published in 1988, but haven't looked
at it since. I found the book to be disorganized and rambling
-- bad James Joyce, I recall telling a friend -- though its explorations
of identity and change were occasionally compelling.
A sequence in the
novel featuring a Mohammed-like figure raised orthodox Muslim
ire. Disputed Koranic verses sparked the controversy. Rushdie
explored a doctrinal inconsistency in Islam -- imitating what
Enlightenment intellectuals did with Christianity.
The controversy made
Rushdie a literary cause celebre. Media oomph led to literary
prizes for a book that's an aesthetic snooze. The death threat,
however, gave Rushdie two less attractive identities. He became
a hunted man. He also became a symbolic political figure in what
he discovered wasn't an artistic contretemps, but a very long
war.
Rushdie benefited
from his media ploy -- he wanted readers to think, to explore,
but first he needed readers. A little sputtering reaction by the
rednecks or the clerical collars? Hey, it's good box office.
At least it is in
the Western world.
The media ploy's
much bigger brother is information warfare. Rushdie played the
ploy -- Khomeini fought a war. In the late 1980s, Tehran was in
tough straits economically, politically and militarily. Rushdie's
ploy gave a calculating strategist like Khomeini a perfect target:
a liberal Muslim intellectual who could be branded a heretic and
a Westernized sycophant. Call it a tyrant's "two-fer."
Attacking Rushdie deflected internal political dissent and promoted
Khomeini's claim to international leadership of "Islamic
revolution."
I support Rushdie's
right to free expression, fully and unequivocally. Rushdie, however,
failed to appreciate the power, goals and will of his opponents.
In fact, the word "opponent" is part of the problem,
for it implies a competition with rules -- rules like the First
Amendment or British common law, a philosophic debate that may
get a little heated and could end up in court. But it is the wrong
word for Khomeinis and -- in our time -- al-Qaidas and Saddams.
The appropriate word is "enemy" -- an armed, ruthless,
unappeasable and murderous enemy.
In May 2005,
Newsweek ran its phony Guantanamo prison "Koran
flushing" story -- a story designed to embarrass the Bush
administration as well as sell copies of Newsweek. A
good sales ploy? When riots began in Muslim countries, the world
got a lesson in information warfare. Indian military analyst Bahukutumbi
Raman claimed that in Afghanistan the riots were incited by "well-organized
agents of the Hizb ut-Tahrir terror gang."
The cartoons
published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten are
categorically different from Newsweek's indefensible
action. The cartoons, like Rushdie's novel, don't purport to convey
fact but are opinion, in their case mild satire. The Danish editor
argued many Muslim immigrants criticize Europeans but brook no
counter-critique.
Four months after
their publication, however, we witness waves of orchestrated,
coordinated violence -- war and information war directed at the
West but also designed to deflect domestic challenges to Middle
Eastern dictatorships. Vicious anti-Muslim cartoons -- not published
by the Danes -- now circulate with the originals (suggesting a
calculated act of propaganda designed to further inflame). Syria's
secular dictatorship made cynical use of the cartoons. Mobs burned
the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus. The attacks would
not be possible without the tacit permission or connivance of
the Syrian government. At the moment, Syria faces U.N. censure
for its role in the murder of Lebanon's Rafik Harari.
Turkish Muslims,
however, held peaceful protests. They opposed the cartoons, but
they are not enemies. Turkey is an emerging democracy.
I support the publication
of the original cartoons, but I also know the figurative war of
free expression in the West occurs in the midst of a real (non-figurative)
and active global war against terror and tyranny. That's why I
also support combat operations that lead to free elections and,
ultimately, liberation.
Copyright
2006 Creators Syndicate
