This Marlette cartoon, published in 2002, depicts a jihadi driving a bomb-laden truck. By Doug Marlette, Tulsa World
I first got a whiff of the cosmic ramifications of this story last December when the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten contacted me for an interview about the threats I had received after drawing an Arab driving a Ryder Truck loaded with a nuke (this was in 2002, before Iran) under the caption "What Would Mohammed Drive?" Though this cartoon was more inflammatory than any of the ones that have caused riots around the world, I was merely denounced on the front page of the Saudi Arab News by the secretary general of the Muslim World League, and my newspaper, syndicate and home computer were flamed with tens of thousands of e-mails, viruses and death threats aimed at intimidating my publishers and shutting me up.
Still, this was a bit more excitement than I had in mind when I addressed the first East-West journalism conference, held in Prague, in July 1990, about the incendiary role of the cartoonist. I explained to the freshly minted free press there about how the American cartoon was born in revolution. (The very first, designed by Ben Franklin, showed a snake cut into eight segments, each representing one of the colonies. The legend above it read "Join or Die.") The best political cartoons, I told them, are always created in the spirit of the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution. They question authority, challenge the status quo and are inevitably accused of "Disturbing the Peace," borrowing the title of one of Václav Havel's books. If the editorial cartoons are doing their job, efforts will be made to suppress them.
So that week in Prague, hearing the easterners repeatedly admonished to be "responsible in their journalism," I took the opportunity to point out that the Japanese word for cartoon is "irresponsible drawings." Responsibility, of course, like beauty, lies always in the eye of the beholder. The reporting of some of the great journalists present there at that conference -- datelined Vietnam, for example -- was often labeled "irresponsible." Václav Havel's writings were called "irresponsible" by the Soviet thought controllers who not long before had convened in the hotel where we were staying. The list of "irresponsible" expression goes on: from the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate to the New York Times' revelations of warrantless wiretapping.
Having grown up in the Southern United States during the era of the civil rights movement, I remember how business, civic and religious leaders called Martin Luther King Jr. "irresponsible" as a way of disagreeing with his means without having to actually take a moral stand on his ends. Those cautioning "responsibility" in today's cartoon controversy -- in both the West and the Middle East -- have much in common with those "good people" of the segregated South, who preferred, as King wrote, "a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice." Their own decent, Christian values were embarrassed by terrorists who burned crosses and bombed churches in the name of Jesus, as Islam has been subverted by the hooded thugs of Muslim extremism. And like the politicians and oligarchs of the segregated South, the corrupt leadership of these Arab countries encourages the anti-cartoonists because their violent passions are a diversion from the government's own neglect and abuse of its people.
By Doug Marlette, Tulsa World
Why haven't the true Muslims, moderate religionists, men and women of good will, risen up to condemn those who so disgrace their faith? We constantly ask this question even though the answer is contained in the reluctance of our own civilization's instruments of free expression to confront the problem. "Fill the jails" was Gandhi's strategy of non-cooperation with a non-democratic system, for making society look at right and wrong in a fresh way, and it was one that Martin Luther King adopted in 1963 when he flooded the jails of Birmingham to defeat segregation. I submit that just as that nonviolent demonstration of solidarity and defiance exposed a corrosive political system and channeled the outrage of helplessness constructively, so would a form of cartoon direct action have advanced the true interests of Islam.
King wrote in his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," "Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with."
Here's what the American media might have done and could still do in response to the cartoon riots. In the spiritually expansive style of Gandhi and King, they could summon their aggregate moral authority and humbly dedicate a page of their newspaper or half a minute of their newscasts to showing the cartoons and explaining why they must, not as a taunt but as a restatement of democratic principle, as a prayer for coexistence. If everyone had stood up for Denmark's embattled cartoonists, then the taboo images might have lost their meaning, as going to jail lost its stigma when it was in the service of freedom. Collecting his Nobel Peace Prize on the heels of the Birmingham campaign, King noted that "every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities." Perhaps one day the Jyllands- Posten cartoonists will be recognized for their contributions to democratic health and a peace truer than the one they have disturbed.
About the writer
Doug Marlette is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist with the Tulsa World. His novel about the civil rights era, "Magic Time," will be published in the fall by Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar Straus & Giroux.
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