Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora

12. Drawing the Line: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Mohammed Cartoons Controversy as It Unfolded in Denmark and the United States

231 Twelve Drawing the Line A Rhetorical Analysis of the Mohammed Cartoons Controversy as It Unfolded in Denmark and the United States Helle Rytkønen Images of angry Muslims in Africa and the Middle East torching Scandinavian embassies, stomping on Danish flags, and chanting death threats against Danish cartoonists and politicians circulated the world in the first months of 2006. The immediate cause of the anger was twelve cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in Jyllandsposten, a major Danish newspaper. Any portrait of the Prophet is a violation of the Judeo-Muslim prohibition on depicting a holy figure; cartoons of Islam’s most sacred prophet as a terrorist infuriated many. An estimated hundred people died and eight hundred were injured in the demonstrations that followed. Muslim countries boycotted Danish products, and several Muslim ambassadors were withdrawn from Denmark. Denmark was, in the words of its prime minister, facing its worst foreign policy crisis since World War II.1 Amidst the turmoil, many European politicians called for “rational calmness ” from Muslim leaders and urged “the West” to stand united in what was very early on framed by the governing European2 discourse as a fight for Western values like freedom of speech against the threat of “a reactionary , Medieval Muslim culture.” The cartoons were soon reprinted in several European newspapers3 in support of the “Danish cause,” and “Buy Danish” campaigns popped up around the world. However, the U.S. reaction to the cartoons was starkly different. While the U.S. news media followed the controversy closely and circulated images of Muslims protesting violently in the Middle East, only a handful of papers reprinted the cartoons.4 And while the Danish government eagerly awaited U.S. support for its “cause,” American politicians were at best lukewarm in their responses. President George Bush 232 / between the middle east and the americas cautioned that “with freedom comes the responsibility to be thoughtful to others,”5 and former president Bill Clinton condemned the publication of the cartoons as “shameful.”6 This article tries to make sense of why the responses to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons were so different in the United States and Europe (with special focus on Denmark). The analysis is based on a discourse analysis of original documents (political statements, speeches, letters, the cartoons ) and dominant Danish and U.S. media representations of the case during and after the publication. I situate these representations in relation to ongoing political debates about Muslims in the West and pay particular attention to how Islam was mobilized and “packaged” in the imagining of Danish and U.S. identities.7 I argue that the cartoons and the Danish prime minister’s subsequent framing of the debate as an issue of freedom of speech under attack from Muslims are acts of “foreign-making,”8 and symptomatic of how Islam is continuously imagined as incompatible with “Western values” and Danish identity. Furthermore, despite a Danish rhetoric of inclusion and freedom of speech for all, the concerns of Danish Muslims who demonstrated peacefully against the publication of the cartoons were marginalized and silenced. The very different U.S. reaction to printing the cartoons, I argue, was not a given. While the Muslim population in the United States is better integrated than the Muslim population in most countries in Europe, and while America prides itself on being a multicultural society, the United States also has a history of employing Muslims’ (real or imagined) differences in the dominant narrative of its identity.9 After 9/11, these differences have often been framed in a security discourse or “securitized”10 and constructed as foreign to America and a “Western way of life.”11 However, more complex, nuanced, and favorable images of Muslims have also been part of the post 9/11 climate and, notably, the cartoon crisis came at a time when the Bush administration was desperate to win public support for its unpopular War on Terror. Emphasizing empathy for Muslim sentiments helped the government consolidate the idea of the United States as religiously tolerant despite leading wars in Muslim countries. The U.S. response therefore reflects the overlapping, competing, and conflicting representations of Muslims that continue to frame debates about American identity. An Invitation into a Culture of “Insult, Mockery and Ridicule” “We are in the midst of a ‘culture and value battle,’” argued Denmark’s Conservative minister of culture, Brian Mikkelsen, less than a week before the Drawing...