Something major was missing from the 10th anniversary 9/11 ceremonies and media coverage. It was something that not only captures the meaning of the attacks themselves, but better defines our own response to them than any other single thing. It is the face of the age itself, and it is not Osama bin Laden’s. I refer to the most familiar of the 12 Danish Muhammad cartoons, the one by Kurt Westergaard. I always think of it as Bomb-head Muhammad for the lit bomb that serves as Muhammad’s turban in this world-famous drawing.
(This is no fantastical image, either, as we learned when Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai prevailed upon local imams last month to implore their flocks to stop putting bombs in their turbans after three separate assassinations via turban bombs took place.)
I say “world-famous drawing,” but have you ever actually seen this cartoon printed in a newspaper, or shown on a news broadcast? No. With exceptions to be counted on one hand, this ultra-potent image has never received mainstream media display despite its almost continual newsworthiness.
Yes, the media have covered the most violent eruptions of jihad that Muslims still wage against Denmark for having a free press with the temerity to function in dereliction of Islamic law.
These have ranged from Islamic rioting that killed more than 100 persons, to Islamic attacks on Danish interests, to Islamic boycotts of Danish products, to Islamic plots against Jyllands-Posten newspaper, to this week’s latest Islamic threat against Westergaard’s life that sent him home early from a trip to Norway.
But Western media have almost never dared flout Islamic law (Sharia) to show what “the fuss” was all about. They have almost never published the Westergaard Muhammad, which not only depicts Muhammad, Islam’s prophet — verboten — but also illustrates the violence of Islamic jihad — an implicit criticism of Islam, also verboten.
Instead, the free press of the West has accepted and enforced Islamic limits on expression by voluntarily censoring this skillfully executed, pointed political cartoon. It is this censorship, this bow to Sharia, that defines the post-9/11 age. It also makes the Westergaard Muhammad its poster child.
Osama bin Laden was a mass murderer, an external threat to ward off, hunt down and kill like an uncommon criminal. But the Westergaard Muhammad shows us something about ourselves.
It turned out be one Westerner’s mirror on the 9/11 attacks, and the wider West flinched at the reflection. From government to the academy, from media to the military, we couldn’t — and can’t — look at it in public.
To this day, we refuse to face the history of jihad to extend Islam’s law that the 9/11 attacks exemplify and that this cartoon so sharply symbolizes. Instead, we avert our eyes from the face of jihad and accept Islam’s law.
This tells us that 9/11 wasn’t a crisis about security. Rather, it was a crisis about our own insecurity — our inability to stand up and defend the liberties that made us who we are — or, rather, who we were, or at least tried to be.
Even worse, it exposed our inability as a society to emulate, let alone celebrate, those who would fight for those liberties with just their pens and brushes, their cameras and voices.
For the decade after 9/11, we chose the dhimmitude that the taboo on the Westergaard Muhammad symbolizes. It may seem like a lot to put on a quickly sketched newspaper drawing, but not until we assert our right to publish the Westergaard Muhammad will the West ever be free again.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
