Absurd Intellectual

As you may have heard in the news lately, South Park has received a lot of attention for an episode in which they portray Muhammad in a bear suit. The episode was subsequently censored by Comedy Central, after a threat made by a group of Muslim extremists based in New York.

From the Guardian article:

The censorship followed a warning from a New York-based group of extremist Muslim converts that could be construed as a death threat. The group, through its website Revolutionmuslim.com, had reacted to last week’s episode of South Park which first depicted Muhammad dressed as a bear by saying its originators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, “will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh”.

To underline the point, the website carried a picture of Van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker killed in 2004 after he made a documentary on the abuse of women in Muslim countries, with his throat cut and a knife in his chest. They also listed the New York headquarters of Comedy Central, the cable television channel that broadcasts the show, and South Park’s production company, adding: “You can pay them a visit at these addresses.”

In response to the controversy, cartoonist Molly Norris came up with a poster for a fictional “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.” Needless to say, it went absolutely viral, with someone even starting a facebook group. At first, Norris seemed like she was in support of it, but the more attention she and her cartoon received, the more she backed away from it.

Norris’s attitude, and that of Comedy Central, is one of fear. Fear of what a small, but very vocal group of people might do.

Not that one can blame them. As mentioned above in the quote, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered, and Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has received numerous death threats since a cartoon he made in 2005. Not to mention Salman Rushdie and the infamous death threat given to him after his novel The Satanic Verses came out. Really, with these cases alone, the fears of Norris and Comedy Central are justified.

But that is what I find so sad about this situation. Unfortunately, the fears are justified, people have been killed, and subsequently, artists and writers and the media in general are afraid to be critical — hell, even to joke — for fear of the retaliation by a minority of extremists.

With all these stories, I was reminded of a Christopher Hitchens article I read in Vanity Fair. It’s called “Assassins of the Mind” and it’s about this very thing: self-censorship out of fear. Hitchens brings up Rushdie and everything that happened after the Ayatollah issued his fatwa, which he says was “the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom.”

We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal.

So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table. He never speaks. He doesn’t have to. But he is very well understood. The late playwright Simon Gray was alluding to him when he said that Nicholas Hytner, the head of London’s National Theatre, might put on a play mocking Christianity but never one that questioned Islam. I brushed up against the unacknowledged censor myself when I went on CNN to defend the Danish cartoons and found that, though the network would show the relevant page of the newspaper, it had pixelated the cartoons themselves. And this in an age when the image is everything. The lady anchor did not blush to tell me that the network was obliterating its very stock-in-trade (newsworthy pictures) out of sheer fear.

Part of the problem I think (although I really have no evidence for this) is that, comparatively speaking, Islam is a newer religion, and it just hasn’t gone through the kind of reformation that Christianity went through. Sure, there are Christian extremists just as well as Muslim, but there is a more violent undertone with the Muslim extremists, and there seems to be more believers that think the Qur’ an is literally the written word of god. It also doesn’t help that we are living in an age where information is at your fingertips, and possible offenses to Islam can be found in an instant.

And unfortunately, because of the violent reactions of some, many are going to continue to censor themselves, until more and more people — within and outside the faith — stand up against extremism.