Fahrenheit 32

Out of all the heat surrounding the cartoons controversy, some perspective from one of the Times' Paris correspondents.

Adding Newsprint to the Fire

Craig S. Smith: Europeans hoisted the banner of press freedom last week in response to Muslim anger over a dozen Danish cartoons, some of them mocking the Prophet Muhammad. But something deeper and more complex was also at work: The fracas grew out of, and then fed, a war of polemics between Europe's anti-immigrant nationalists and the fundamentalist Muslims among its immigrants.

"One extreme triggers the other," said Jonas Gahr Store, Norway's foreign minister, arguing that both sides want to polarize the debate at the expense of the moderate majority. "These issues are dangerous because they give the extremes fertile ground."

How did it begin? Oddly, with a decision by a Danish newspaper to commission, and then print, cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad in whatever light cartoonists chose to put him.

The newspaper's culture editor, Fleming Rose, says he intended simply to test cartoonists to see if they were self-censoring their work, out of fear of violence from Islamic radicals. ...

Hostile feelings have been growing between Denmark's immigrants and a government supported by the right-wing Danish People's Party, which has pushed anti-immigrant policies. And stereotyping in cartoons has a notorious history in Europe, where anti-Semitic caricatures fed the Holocaust, just as they feed anti-Israeli propaganda in the Middle East today.

In the current climate, some experts on mass communications suggest, the exercise was no more benign than commissioning caricatures of African-Americans would have been during the 1960's civil rights struggle. "You have to ask what was the intent of these cartoons, bearing in mind the recent history of tension in Denmark with the Muslim community," said David Welch, head of the Center for the Study of Propaganda and War at the University of Kent in Britain. Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, put it this way: "He knew what he was doing."

Photo of women burning an Israeli flag at a shrine in Qum, Iran by Lynsey Addario for the Times.