Berlin: Intellectuals` support to Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard is much less than that to Salman Rushdie though both are accused of hurting the feelings of Muslims, according to a leading German magazine.
"The attack on Westergaard wasn`t the first attempt to carry out a deadly fatwa. When Muslims tried to murder Rushdie 20 years ago, the protests among intellectuals were loud. Today, though, Western writers and thinkers would rather take cover than defend basic rights," writes Henryk M Broder in an editorial in Der Spiegel.
Last week, a Somali allegedly tried to murder Westergaard with an axe and a knife.
According to Broder, when Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie after his "The Satanic Verses" was published in 1988, no German publisher had the courage to publish the book.
Seventeen years later, after Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published a dozen cartoons of Prophet Muhammad on a single page, there were similar reactions in the Islamic world to those that had followed the publication of "The Satanic Verses".
Al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden even went so far as to demand the extradition of cartoonist Westergaard and the daily`s staff so that they could be condemned by an Islamic court.
"This time, however, in contrast to the Rushdie case, hardly anyone has showed any solidarity with the threatened Danish cartoonists - to the contrary," Border wrote.
"I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong," then British Home Secretary Jack Straw had commented, referring to the decision by several European media organisations to republish them.
According to Broder, had the Muhammad cartoons been reprinted by the whole German press, then newspaper readers could have seen for themselves how excessively harmless the 12 cartoons were and how bizarre and pointless the whole debate had become.
Instead, the assessment was left to experts who had in the past defended every criticism of the pope and the Church as well as every blasphemous piece of art in the name of freedom of opinion, but who, in the case of the Muhammad cartoons, suddenly held the view that one must take other people`s religious feelings into consideration.
"But that argument was clearly just an excuse, a way of excusing the fact they had been silenced by fear.
"....after all, a few things had happened in the time between the Rushdie affair and the caricatures debacle: 9/11, the London bombings, Madrid, Bali, Jakarta, - events which some commentators have also interpreted as a reaction by the Islamic world to its degradation and humiliation by the West.
"Against this threat, it seemed more reasonable and, above all, safer, to show respect to religious feelings rather than insist on the right to freedom of expression," Broder wrote.
PTI
First Published: Sunday, January 10, 2010, 19:55
