Nick Taranto's op-ed ("Defusing the Culture Bomb," Feb. 8) ends with an interesting comparison. He equates the publication of the 12 cartoons of Muhammad to "yelling 'Fire!'" This is a direct reference to one of the most famous lines in American free speech jurisprudence, penned by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes wrote, in Schenck v. U.S., that "even the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."
This ruling, however, was overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio; in America, speech is constitutionally protected if it is not "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action ... [or not] likely to incite or produce such action." Even yelling "fire" in a crowded theater would be protected speech if it was not intended to cause lawlessness, for example, if someone was describing the Homecoming Bonfire loudly to a friend across the hall.
In Brandenburg v. Ohio, a three-pronged test was articulated to determine what speech is protected: intent, imminence and likelihood. Clearly, the Danish cartoons were not "directed" to incite violence in the meaning of this court decision; they urged no breaking of the law. They did not imminently advocate violence. But were the cartoons likely to incite violence? Even if they were, they would be considered protected speech in America because they did not violate either of the two previous Brandenburg v. Ohio criteria.
This analysis, which shows that the cartoons are not really a free speech issue, brings me to the really interesting questions Taranto's analogy generates. If these cartoons were as dangerous and likely to incite violence as a yell of "Fire!" would be, why did it take until February, five months after publication, for anti-Danish firebombing to commence? Why did these attacks occur mainly in Beirut, Gaza and Damascus? Here's a hint: the Jyllands-Posten, the paper that first published the cartoons, does not have a large readership in any of these cities.
The answer to the question of timing is only partly due to the reprinting of the cartoons in major European papers -- we still have not seen French, German or Belgian embassies being firebombed. To answer the broader question of why the Danish are being targeted, we should turn to Imam Ahmad abu Ladan, the man most responsible for publicizing these cartoons in the Middle East. Abu Ladan, a Danish Muslim, embarked in December on a whirlwind tour of the Middle East. Abu Ladan showed the 12 cartoons to Muslim leaders across the region, along with three other faked images that were never published in any western media. Abu Ladan made no distinction between the three faked cartoons and those published as part of the series in Jyllands-Posten. These faked images were far more offensive, depicting Muhammad as a pig, as a pedophile, and showing a dog raping a praying Muslim. It is these phony cartoons, exhibited very recently to Muslim leaders, that provide a more proximate cause for the recent wave of protests.
So why are these protests occurring in Beirut, Gaza and Damascus? As many intelligent observers of the Middle East have pointed out, nothing happens in the police state of Syria without President Bashar al-Assad's full support. How convenient is it that in all three cities Danish flags were available in the hundreds to be burned? And that Syria, a country which has murdered thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members, is now suddenly lending its support to a decidedly religious cause? Clearly something is at work here besides spontaneous religious protest. My fellow Dartmouth students, that something is politics.
It is all too easy to jump on the bandwagon of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" and compare each controversial incident to yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. But before we start drawing battle lines around our holy books and boiling this latest controversy down to "the Muslim world" versus "American and 'Western' foreign policy", it behooves us all to do some critical thinking about why these particular events are unfolding around us in the manner that they are. Perhaps we can take a step back from this inevitable, horrible "clash" that Taranto fears by realizing that these "civilizations" are led by individuals with their own personal and political desires, not by ancient texts or principles.
