Offend One, Offend All
The Guardian talks some creeping sneaking nonsense.
It is now exactly a year since a Danish newspaper published a series of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which Muslims found so insulting that 140 people died in the ensuing violence.
No. That’s wrong, and it’s a misleading way of putting it. Some Muslims found the cartoons ‘so insulting’, and a much much smaller number found them ‘so insulting that 140 people died in the ensuing violence’ – that is, to interpret that foolishly meaningless phrase, either found them so insulting that they caused lethal violence or found them so insulting that they thought the deaths of 140 people made an appropriate response. Not all Muslims found the cartoons insulting at all; not all Muslims who did find them insulting found them also worthy of protest or criticism of the act of publication; not all Muslims who found them worthy of protest also found them deserving of outright censorship or government action; and so on. Why do so many people – especially, of all things, well-meaning liberal people who (clearly) see themselves as being kind to and trying to help ‘Muslims’ – equate some Muslims with all Muslims that way? Why do they chronically and repeatedly assume that if some Muslims feel insulted or offended then all do? Why do they not pause to remember that as a matter of fact there are some Muslims who are insulted or offended not by cartoons or papal speeches or operas but by their insultable co-religionists and by liberal columnists who assume that all Muslims are offended by what some Muslims are offended by? Why do they not also pause to remember that there is, in fact, something quite searchingly insulting about assuming that all people in a particular group think exactly the same thing, particularly on a controversial and contested issue? Why are they so fokking patronizing? And why are they so fokking patronizing while thinking they are being kind and empathetic and helpful? Why don’t they think a little harder and look a little farther?
These incidents all hurt Muslim sensibilities – and generated agonised debate about freedom of expression and its limits.
Same again. No they didn’t – not all ‘Muslim sensibilities’. Some Muslims are actually grown-up enough and rational enough not to let their sensibilities be hurt by every pimple on the media horizon merely because some people stage shouting fests about them. I’m guessing that quite a few Muslims are that grown-up and rational, actually.
Salman Rushdie won sympathy on the basis of that classic Enlightenment stance in 1989 when his Satanic Verses generated an Iranian “fatwa” – the first incident of its kind in our globalised world.
Note the shift of agency. It was Rushdie’s novel that generated the fatwa, not the ayatollah. Thus, if anyone writes or draws or sings or stages anything that someone elects to find insulting or offensive or blasphemous or just not quite the thing, if you know what I mean, and sets about getting the writer or drawer killed, it is the fault of the writer or drawer for perpetrating this Object of Insultingness. So therefore – all things are to be considered presumptively guilty, because if anyone decides to find one guilty, then it becomes guilty. So this post right here is guilty, all the books in this room are guilty, all the paintings in all the museums are guilty, all plays, all songs, all everything – they’re all, all guilty, because they can’t know in advance that there is no possibility that no one on the planet will be insulted by them. That’s an interesting way of thinking about the subject. If the Guardian buys that it really ought to shut down right now, for safety reasons.
Behzti, a controversial play set in a temple, was axed after it offended Sikhs.
There we have both stupidities in one short sentence. ‘Behzti’ didn’t offend ‘Sikhs’, just as Brick Lane didn’t offend ‘the Brick Lane community’ – both offended a few men in each group, and in any case saying ‘”Behzti” offended Sikhs’ again makes it sound as if ‘Behzti’ is guilty as charged and to blame for its own axing.
…where the west needs to recognise its responsibilities, stop employing double standards, refrain from equating Islam and terrorism, and thus help isolate the fanatics who give ordinary Muslims a bad name.
You’ve just done a pretty good job of giving ‘ordinary’ Muslims a bad name yourself, Graun – not to mention giving your newspaper a bad name.
Do you notice how sneaky they are with the “its limits” in the phrase “freedom of expression and its limits”. As if it’s a point of consensus that obviously the limits are there and we have to just make sure they are set in such a fashion as to upset no-one. Bah.
Yuk! I felt almost physically sick when I read that piece of spineless blather in the Guardian. My respect for that once fine newspaper is rapidly declining. With the honourable exception of Polly Toynbee (who still says sensible things about religion), The Grauniad is increasingly home to the gooey-brained platitudes of the likes of Madeline Bunting and Karen Armstrong.
“This newspaper believes in that freedom. We invoked it in February when we had to decide whether to publish the cartoons. We believe now as then that it was our right to do so – but not our duty to cause gratuitous offence”.
Oh come on! They just didn’t want their windows smashed (or worse). They should have the decency to be honest rather that spew all that high-minded crap.
Here at B and W, we are all familiar with the excellent Jesus and Mo cartoons. Their sharp, satirical digs at the absurdities of religion are exactly the sort of thing a liberal progressive newspaper like the Guardian should be keen to promote (and Jesus and Mo is also a damn sight funnier than anything Steve Bell has produced in a long time). So in the unlikely event that any Guardian editor is reading this, I’d be genuinely interested to know if you would be prepared to run J and M in your newspaper? If not, why not?
Crudely drawn and only rarely funny? (I am not a Graun editor).
More “Jesus-and-Mo”, PLEASE!
How does one get them – I’ve never been able to get any but the “current” version, without back numbers.
And give them LOTS more publicity – the sooner the muslim loonies find out, the better.
Re. the Grauniad – hopeless, spineless, and witless.
I’ve posted to their comments on this one….
Jesus & Mo
Click the back-arrow above the strip
http://www.atheistresource.co.uk/humour.html
http://www.lulu.com/content/288394
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Your frustration is so evident in that post, OB. I tend to put that sort of crap down to lazy subeditors who wouldn’t know how to unpick the phrase the way you’ve just done. The story should have been flung back at the writer with an order to make it unambiguous. When they’re not changing meaning (potentially) by using shit grammar, they’re obfuscating by using imprecise English.
For what it’s worth, I’ve stuck my four penn’orth in at ‘Comment is Free’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1884424,00.html) under the name AArmitage. I’ve linked to this, in hopes of getting it some more readers.
Your point would be made if indeed this article had used ‘all Muslims’, but it is only you using the ‘all’. I would have thought it fairly obvious that it was Muslims who were objecting, not necessarily all, but Muslims as opposed to other groups. ‘Catholics in Belfast’ likewise doesn’t have to mean ‘all’ Catholics. I think your nit picking here.
“I tend to put that sort of crap down to lazy subeditors who wouldn’t know how to unpick the phrase the way you’ve just done. The story should have been flung back at the writer with an order to make it unambiguous.”
Well speaking as a subeditor myself, that’s certainly what I would have done, and have done. I’m not sure that’s what it was though – I’m not sure it’s not policy to say things like that. Why do I think that? I guess because it keeps recurring. I think there is a line of thought that it is somehow “progressive” or multiculti or kind – that it is the correct, left thing to do, to imply whenever possible that all Muslims speak with one voice and that that one voice is the voice that is most offended and insulted by whatever the latest blip is. Why do I think that? Because it keeps recurring.
Good comment at CiF! And thanks for the plug.
“I think your nit picking here.”
Well, editors are like that – good ones, anyway. But that’s for a reason. Good editors don’t want readers to have to figure out – however ‘fairly obvious’ it may be – what is meant, they want it to be unambiguous. That’s why I get rid of dangling participles: they’re confusing, and create pointless extra work for the readers; that’s also why I get rid of overgeneralizations such as ‘which Muslims found so insulting’.
In any case I think you’re wrong: I think the much more obvious meaning is that all Muslims were offended, and I think the vast majority of readers won’t take the time to notice that in fact it can’t mean that since that’s not true. That’s how sloppy or sly overgeneralization works; that’s why it’s so insidious.
Charlie, I explained that: it’s not that I think readers have no sense, it’s that I think they shouldn’t have to figure out the meaning of an ambiguous phrase. It’s also that newspapers are, not surprisingly, generally read quickly; most of us most of the time don’t notice possible alternative meanings. I flatly disagree with you: I think the phrase “which Muslims found so insulting that 140 people died in the ensuing violence” decidedly conveys the impression that Muslims in general found the cartoons insulting. An opinion that is a sample should be clearly labeled as such.
It’s a pretty simple point, I think. If one says women do this, men do that, Germans do this, Italians do that – the chances are very very good that one is making a sweeping generalization; that if one does it in an assigned paper for a class, one will find a marginal query; that if one does it in a live discussion, one’s interlocutors will ask how one knows. (Some UK intellectuals do it about Americans, I’ve noticed. Americans are sentimental, Americans are thick, Americans are religious zealots. Not all of us, I always murmur gently.)
No, as far as I know this is not part of a ‘wider smear’. Thank you for the courteous suggestion though.
I apologise -no discourteousy intended. Perhaps smear wasn’t what I meant; I merely noted the the enthusiasm with which your criticism was echoed above, which must be part of some wider quibble of which this seems a rather poor example in that this newspaper did not actually on this occasion commit this particular sin. I take your point about generalisations; which is also my point in that whether we are talking about Americans or Muslims, the same qualification applies. That those offended were Muslim does not imply all Muslims were offended.
That’s okay. I getcha: you meant not smear but something like a wider or on-going criticism, and you’re right about that. I have criticized the Guardian before, for similar reasons.
“in that this newspaper did not actually on this occasion commit this particular sin”
Well, you think it didn’t, but I think it did, and as an editor, I would definitely re-word that passage. Actually no, I take that back, I wouldn’t; I would return it to the author for a re-write – or I might reject the whole piece. If the problem were only “which Muslims found insulting” I could easily change it to “which many Muslims found insulting”. But there is more to it than that, there are at least three problems with that one sentence. There is the “which Muslims found so insulting” and there is the “which Muslims found so insulting that 140 people died in the ensuing violence” – which is a very peculiar, evasive, responsibility-shifting way of saying what it says.
So if I were editing that piece for B&W I would reject it; if I were subediting it for another publication I would want extensive re-writing and would consult the editor and the writer.
Making an argument that (say) the violence caused by protests over the cartoons is the fault of the cartoonists or of Denmark is one thing, but insinuating it via tricky wording is another. I’ll put up a stiff fight against the second, and when I’m the editor I’ll just plain say no.
See, your view seems to be that all this is quibbling and nitpicking, but mine is that it’s very important: this kind of thing is how a lot of dirty work of hidden persuasion gets done. That’s why I do things like writing cod dictionaries. I think words and syntax matter.
Thanks. Yes I agree, words, syntax and cod dictionaries matter to me too, although, perhaps to make the point, you imply they might not do so quite enough, but then I should be the one giving you any benefit of the doubt as to what you might have meant!
“Responsibility-shifting” is only one way of hearing what you are saying it says. Perhaps prisms don’t always make good hearing aids.
Of course the guardian was being ambiguous,cowardly and shifting responsibility,well done for nailing them O.B.