Double Standard: Mohammed Cartoons and “Piss Christ”

     One would hope and expect a liberal newspaper like the Times to have the meager virtue of consistency on matters of freedom of expression, particularly in defense of another newspaper. As the world now knows, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad last September, considered taboo (though not always recognized as such).

     But Times reporter Craig Smith found the cartoons more inflammatory than he did the actual fact of Muslims burning embassies in Syria and Lebanon in protest. Even the headline to his Sunday Week in Review story suggests that the Danish newspapers’ exercise of free speech was somehow irresponsible, likening it to pouring fuel on a flame: “Adding Newsprint to the Fire.”

     Smith irresponsibly compares the Danish cartoons to racist anti-black and anti-Semitic cartoons: “But this did not take place in a political vacuum. 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.’”

     Back in the 1990s, the Times took a far different tone regarding two excretory-based exhibits offensive to Christians -- though those controversies passed without the violent protests, death threats, or fire-bombings of embassies we are seeing today.

     Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” consisted of a crucifix submerged in a tank of Serrano’s urine. Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” showed the icon clotted with elephant dung and surrounded by pornographic cut-outs.

     Back in the previous millennium, the Times was intrigued by an art controversy at the Brooklyn Museum, showcasing what the September 24, 1999 editorial page called “a dung-stained, faux-naïve portrait of the Virgin Mary.” That would be Ofili’s artwork.

     On October 2, 1999, the editors dealt with Christian offense in one clause before calling for art that “challenge[d] the public”: “To be sure, many citizens of conscience find parts of the Brooklyn exhibition repugnant, and it is understandable that many Roman Catholics would find Chris Ofili's image of the Virgin Mary offensive. Others would agree with our colleague William Safire that while the Brooklyn Museum has a right to show what it likes, the administrators have been clumsy or needlessly provocative. Yet a Daily News poll shows that the majority of New Yorkers support the museum over Mayor Giuliani by a ratio of two to one. Those numbers show a broad-based support for New York's role as the nation's cultural capital. The people understand intuitively what Mr. Giuliani ignores for political gain. A museum is obliged to challenge the public as well as to placate it, or else the museum becomes a chamber of attractive ghosts, an institution completely disconnected from art in our time.”

     On October 9, 1999, Frank Rich, then columnist and now an Arts editor-columnist, compared Giuliani’s threatened denial of taxpayer funding (which was blocked) for the offensive art to the Nazi’s notorious 1937 condemnation of “degenerate art.”

     Most galling in retrospect was a May 3, 1998 review by contributing arts writer Amei Wallach, “Policing the Avant-Garde: Parallels Out of the Past,” on a show that compared those who protested tax funding of “Piss Christ” to Nazis.

      “Goebbels is long and thin; Hitler closely resembles a Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Dressed in clown ruffs, they nudge each other onto the stage in the Irondale Ensemble Project's musical theater-cabaret caper ‘Degenerate Art,’….the troupe is seeking to link 1990's debates about the N.E.A. with the 1937 ‘Entartete Kust’ (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition in Munich, which the Nazi Government organized to show the German people the kind of art they were meant to hate.”

     Wallach doesn't blink when an arts curator compares objections to tax-funding for "Piss Christ" to Goebbels and Hitler: “Such rhetoric sounded chillingly contemporary to Stephanie Barron, curator of 20th-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, when she was preparing ‘Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,’ the 1991 exhibition from which the Irondale Ensemble drew its inspiration. At the time when Ms. Barron was completing her reconstruction of the ‘Entartete Kunst’ show, some American senators and congressmen were using comparable language to denounce the works of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano in their opening salvos against the N.E.A. In her catalogue essay, Ms. Barron noted ‘an uncomfortable parallel between the enemies of artistic freedom today and those responsible for organizing the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition’ more than a half century before.”

     TimesWatch also sees an exceedingly “uncomfortable parallel” -- one between the paper’s sympathetic stance toward tax-funded art offensive to Christians, and its hypocritical failure to defend newspaper cartoons offensive to Muslims.

For more Smith on Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons, click here.

Times Lauds Betty Friedan’s “Mesmerizing” Feminist Work

     Margalit Fox’s obituary for feminist Betty Friedan celebrates her without explaining her communist beliefs.

     “Betty Friedan, the feminist crusader and author whose searing first book, ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ ignited the contemporary women's movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world, died Saturday, her 85th birthday, at her home in Washington.”

     John Miller at National Review Online points to a column by David Horowitz unmasking Friedan’s communist sympathies.

     Horowitz writes: “She was hardly a suburban housewife when she wrote those words, but a twenty-five year veteran of professional journalism in the Communist Left, where she had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the politics of ‘the woman question’ and specifically the idea that women were ‘oppressed.’ As [Daniel] Horowitz's biography makes clear, Friedan, from her college days and until her mid-thirties, was a Stalinist marxist (or a camp follower thereof), the political intimate of leaders of America's Cold War fifth column, and for a time even the lover of a young communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

     None of that made it into the Times. Instead there’s this:

     “With its impassioned yet clear-eyed analysis of the issues that affected women's lives in the decades after World War II -- including enforced domesticity, limited career prospects and, as chronicled in later editions, the campaign for legalized abortion -- ‘The Feminine Mystique’ is widely regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, the book had sold more than three million copies by the year 2000 and has been translated into many languages.

     The Times even runs a long excerpt from “The Feminine Mystique,” which Fox calls “as mesmerizing as it was more than four decades ago.”

     Fox claims: “The words have the hypnotic pull of a fairy tale, and for the next 400 pages, Ms. Friedan identifies, dissects and damningly indicts one of the most pervasive folk beliefs of postwar American life: the myth of suburban women's domestic fulfillment she came to call the feminine mystique.”

     Sounding like an old-school feminist, Fox signs on to Friedan’s worldview of women imprisoned by domesticity: “The portrait she painted was chilling. For a typical woman of the 1950's, even a college-educated one, life centered almost exclusively on chores and children. She cooked and baked and bandaged and chauffeured and laundered and sewed. She did the mopping and the marketing and took her husband's gray flannel suit to the cleaners. She was happy to keep his dinner warm till he came wearily home from downtown.”

     Near the end, there’s finally room for personal and political criticism -- though the political criticism consists of Freidan accused of not being radical enough: “Though widely respected as a modern-day heroine, Ms. Friedan was by no means universally beloved, even -- or perhaps especially -- by members of the women's movement. She was famously abrasive. She could be thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament. In the 1970's and afterward, some feminists criticized Ms. Friedan for focusing almost exclusively on the concerns of middle-class married white women and ignoring those of minorities, lesbians and the poor. Some called her retrograde for insisting that women could, and should, live in collaborative partnership with men.”

For more of Fox’s obituary of Betty Friedan, click here.

Nagourney Wrings His Hands Over GOP "Attacks" on Hillary

     Chief political reporter Adam Nagourney is in full hand-wringing mode in Monday’s “Calling Senator Clinton ‘Angry,’ G.O.P. Chairman Attacks,” his startled reaction to comments made by GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman yesterday on ABC’s “This Week.”

     “Referring to Mrs. Clinton's assertion that Republicans were running Congress like a plantation, [Mehlman] said, ‘Whether it's the comments about the plantation or the worst administration in history, Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger.’

     “‘There's a lot of talk about a new Hillary Clinton, but if you look at the record, it's a very left-wing record,’ Mr. Mehlman said, adding that her record did not reflect the values of most Americans.”

     Nagourney, preternaturally sensitive to “harsh” Republican rhetoric, today combines that sensitivity with another one of his favorite themes, that of desperate Republicans.

     “Mr. Mehlman's remarks were some of the strongest statements he has made about Mrs. Clinton, and they reflect an effort by Republicans to tarnish her credentials when she is thought to be preparing for the 2008 presidential race. To some extent, Mr. Mehlman was filling a void created by the failure of the Republican Party, so far, to find a strong candidate to run against Mrs. Clinton as she seeks re-election to the Senate this year. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Howard Wolfson, dismissed the attacks.”

For more Nagourney on Republican “attacks” on Hillary, click here.