You know, there's a way of looking at this whole drawing a cartoon of Mohammad thing that people should consider, which doesn't have anything to do with religious tolerance or free speech issues or even the obvious and absurd irony that these cartoons incite violence while attempting to criticize the culture of violence that does, in fact, exists. One of the things that we aught to at least consider, is that ethnic Muslim groups are a heavily ghettoized minority in much of the western world. While these cartoons are a perfectly valid way of criticizing violence in a particular culture, a culture that is dominant in other parts of the world, they’re also a somewhat shitty thing to do to a largely poor ethnic minority.

Lets for a moment remove the somewhat questionable rationale that drawing Mohammad is offensive to Muslims. Who knows how much Muslims actually care about the physical act of drawing him. Let’s simply take it that the establishment understands it to be offensive to a large, generally poor ethnic minority and that this poor ethnic minority understands that the establishment knows this. To a poor ethnic minority, the establishment is just kind of being a dick for no good reason. The establishment could lambast and criticize the more odious parts of religious extremism without being a dick about it, but instead they choose to tack a shitty little cartoon onto the end of that criticism. Because, you know, “you guys suck.”

Let’s say that people in America were broadly critical of the urban violence and rioting that occurred in African-American cities in the US, and they decided to take it out by making caricatures of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X dancing in a minstrel show. Let’s also say that this was done to solicit the obvious ironic reaction that such a provocation would incite more violence (supposedly in violation of King’s approach to non-violence) and more looting of African American owned businesses (supposedly in violation of Malcolm X’s African American solidarity). This is being done as a point of free speech, but it’s also being done for the obvious irony it creates. “Look at how dumb these people are. They don’t even get how ironic they’re being.”

Of course, this statement would be true, but it wouldn’t make the act any less of a shitty thing to do to a poor, disadvantaged minority who aren’t exactly going to be empowered by this sort of irony. Moreover, while I’m being high handed by using Martin Luther King as an example, that’s not necessary to make the point. Let’s say you hate Islam and think Mohammad was largely an advocate of violence, OK fine. Instead, in my example, H. Rap Brown and Mumia Abu-Jamal are in the minstrel show cartoon. Still seems pretty shitty. Not because Brown and Abu-Jamal are somehow great guys, or because a racist cartoon is even really that bad, but because the targets are still poor minorities.

The more noble rationale of this whole draw Mohammad thing is trying to encourage a broad, backward swath of the world to be more iconoclastic. This is a good thing. There is a great deal of backwardness and oppression going on all over the Muslim world that is facilitated by fanatic deference to authority and an utter lack of self-awareness. It’s a real problem, and right thinking people in the west are right to try and change it. I think the original Danish Mohammad cartoons were a valid attempt to serve that iconoclastic purpose. In some ways, the global response to the violence it incited (the republishing, the South Park episode, etc.) was also a necessary as a means of reaffirming the supreme importance of free speech.

If the primary target of these responses had been Ali Khamenei or Abdullah Saud or the Emir of Dubai, people with actual power, it would have seemed to me an important road to continue on. But they aren't. They’re primarily directed at people in a poor ghettoized minority. People for whom “hilarious” exploitative irony isn’t really all that useful in changing their social structure. At this point, continuing down this particular road just seems kind of mean. Not sacrilegious or culturally insensitive or profane, just mean.