But Wh…Wh..What about….!?: Islam and Finding Something Else to Worry About

by Thomas Samm (March 2015)

All done.

For in the following few days, this incident convulsed the Guardian newspaper as if the Reichstag had been incinerated by Pegida. A slew of frantic articles engulfed its URL, as if automatically conjured by a daemon journobot algorhythmised to mash out prose reaction to any random act of Caucasian boorishness. The Guardian pasted a variety of interchangeable names and byline photos above each headline. Deborah Orr, in one of the world’s most confused articles ever written on the subject of race and crime, once related the following:

Ronay’s piece was appended by this:

Name*

Location*

Do you know any of the fans in this video?*

YesNo

Do you know the man pushed off the train?*

YesNo

Tell us what happened in as much detail as possible*

Can we use this for publication?*

Yes, entirelyYes, but contact me firstYes, but keep me anonymousNo, please keep this confidential

Email*

This will be kept confidential but will help us significantly

Phone

This will be kept confidential but will help us significantly

For the record, nothing else that day in this land of ever increasing sexual assault and domestic violence warranted the appending of an interactive procedural report form, not the “sickening mugging” of a 95 year old London man, and certainly not that which had happened a few days before in another European capital. For the low level bigotry behind a subterranean transport altercation was serving as the butwhatabout pretext for evasion of an incalculably more ominous crime.

Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein first shot and killed 55 year old film director Finn Nørgaard outside an event called, Art, Blasphemy, and Freedom of Expression. Later he shot and killed Dan Uzan, who was guarding The Great Synagogue on Krystalgade in central Copenhagen. Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, former street gang member and cage fighter of Palestinian extraction, and of late “radicalized” whilst in detention for the subway stabbing of a fellow passenger, died in a shootout with police later that night. Over 500 members of Copenhagen’s Muslim community attended his burial service, and not to express their sympathy for his victims. Where do you begin with what this might portend?

Brown is toeing an excruciating party line. If his colleague Hugh Muir was a caricature of the single issue race and culture obsessed columnist, he would write and sound just like himself. He simply calls for surrender.

Even after Paris, even after Denmark, we must guard against the understandable temptation to be provocative in the publication of these cartoons if the sole objective is to establish that we can do so.

So if men threaten you with guns for publishing a mere image, you must not publish in order to courageously defy their threats. You must not publish because you are being “provocative.” Had, say, a Latin American regime of the 1980s been offing independent journalists for portraying the leader of their junta in cartoon form, I doubt the Hugh Muir of the 1980s Guardian comment pages would have cautioned that “with rights to free speech come responsibilities.” Because, in that Latin American country, there would have been no free speech. And that is what is happening in Europe, incrementally, but with progressing sureness of outcome. The timorousness of a continent’s media in its refusal to print cartoons after the Paris massacre is being parlayed into a discourse-supported status quo.

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