The Spectator’s Notes | 11 February 2006

The best thing would have been for all the British papers to have published all the cartoons of Mohammed that appeared in Jyllands-Posten. As well as collectively asserting the right of freedom of speech, this action would have given readers the chance to see what is actually being discussed. The context, satirised in many of the cartoons themselves, is the very point over which all the rioting has taken place — the danger of provoking anger by drawing the Prophet. One of the pictures shows the cartoonist hunched over his drawing board, nervously shielding his picture from the eyes of menacing, bearded phantoms. Although the cartoons differ quite strongly from each other, there is a shared tone, one of student jokiness and of tail-tweaking. Even the picture of Mohammed with his turban turned into a bomb is done for comic, not threatening effect — a joke, one might guess, more at the expense of Islamist extremists who constantly invoke the Prophet in their desire to blow people up than an attack on the man himself. (Despite several reports to the contrary, none of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons was obscene or depicted the Prophet as a pig; these pictures were helpfully interpolated by angry Muslims in emails designed to make other Muslims angrier still.) Obviously those who abhor any depiction of the Prophet will abhor these, but from all the pompous denunciations by people like Jack Straw you might think that what appeared was vicious or hate-filled. It was not: if these drawings had been about any other subject whatever, including Jesus, they would have excited no remark in the West at all. So the question then becomes, ‘Must we apply completely different standards to what is said or drawn about Mohammed than to anything else?’ Surely it is important to answer, ‘No’.