Why did he sketch those cartoons?

Westergaard published his cartoon in 2005, as one of a set of 12, all by different artists. He produced a picture of Muhammad wearing a bomb in his turban. The bomb reads, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet” — which is the Muslim creed — and Muhammad himself has a slight scowl on his heavily bearded face.

Let me clear away two issues of debate that I think can be easily settled. First, it seems obvious to me that Westergaard had, and ought to have, the right to publish these cartoons. The real question is whether he — and his newspaper — should have exercised that right. The second red herring is the frequent reminder that in Islam, depictions of Muhammad — like depictions of all human beings — are forbidden as potentially idolatrous. But I don’t think the angry mobs in Nigeria would have been anywhere near so incensed if Westergaard had done a portrait of a quiet Muhammad dictating the Quran. The real issue was the particularly incendiary style of representation.

Westergaard himself said he wanted to show the world that Islam was a peaceful religion that had been hijacked by fanatics. I don’t buy that. The argument is too politically correct — it might have been ripped word-for-word from one of Bush’s speeches after Sept. 11 — and it requires a very strained reading of the cartoon. It seems to me that the cartoon was intended as an insult. The most obvious interpretation is “Muhammad was a villainous madman.”

In short, if Westergaard wanted to depict Islam as a peaceful religion cursed by a few rogue practitioners, he might have depicted Muhammad tied up in a cave in Afghanistan. He might have shown any of a hundred other images. What he seems to have wanted to say is “Violence is at the heart of Islam.”

Ought he to have said this? That’s a very different question from “Should he have been allowed to say this?” Of course, Westergaard must have the right to print a cartoon attacking Muhammad — or Jesus, or Moses. Americans are used to anti-Christian “artwork” — our own government has funded some of it. (Government funding is, in my opinion, going too far, but that’s another issue.) Westergaard put it best himself when he said, “You have the right to speak [but] there is one right you do not have, and that is the right not to be offended.” To which I say: Bravo.

Westergaard, however, critically weakened his own case when he claimed that he did not want to say what the cartoon clearly declares: that Islam is a violent religion. If he didn’t want to say this, then he was being recklessly stupid. Hedegaard further confused matters by making an oblique and unexplained reference to “other cartoons” that were also circulated in the wake of the controversy. These cartoons were falsely claimed by Danish imams as entries in the original set of 12 — they are of unknown provenance — but Hedegaard condemned them as “absolutely disgusting” and strongly implied that he would not want ever to see them published.

I must ask: If there are cartoons so “disgusting” that decent publishers should turn them down, why print Westergaard’s cartoon? It’s pretty insulting to Islam and Muslims generally. If Westergaard honestly thought that his society was in serious danger from Islam — as he implied in his op-ed piece in this paper, and which runs counter to his favored interpretation for the cartoon — then perhaps he had a serious responsibility to alert readers to this threat. But he claims that he didn’t want to say this at all. And though he has the right to be casually abrasive, he certainly ought not to do so.

On the other hand, it was terribly ironic — to say the least — that the reaction to these cartoons, from Nigeria through Malaysia, should have involved violence and death threats. And when the same reactions were provoked one year later by Pope Benedict’s infamous Regensburg Address, I noticed a distinct sense of fatigue on the part of Western opinion columnists. Rather than the exhortations that Westerners must “respect cultural sensibilities,” there was a general call for the violent people to “grow up.” So perhaps Westergaard had indeed paved the way for stronger freedom of expression in the West. But when considering his motives, and after hearing a thorough explanation from the author himself, I cannot say that he was right to do so.