EUROPE: ISLAMISTS THREATEN CULTURE

Leftists: Islamists threaten culture
Artists, others say fear leads to censorship
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Los Angeles Times


The newspapers are wrinkled as always, the conversations still veer toward the abstract, but the tempers are riled these days in Europe's cafes.

Artists and influential leftists are warning that the rise of radical Islam is threatening the hallowed tradition of European liberalism. Theater directors, cartoonists and writers say the continent is betraying its identity by practicing self-censorship aimed at appeasing a fundamentalist Islam they believe is determined to impose its will on free speech and provocative creativity.

The German Opera in Berlin recently canceled a Mozart production, fearing that a scene showing the severed head of the prophet Muhammad - along with that of Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea - would anger Islamists. In 2005, the London's Tate Gallery withdrew a sculpture titled "God is Great" because officials did not want to offend Muslims with embedded images of the Bible, Talmud and Quran.

The decisions are part of what liberals regard as an almost unconscious timidity that emerged after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the U.S. and intensified during this year's Muslim protests against a Danish newspaper's caricatures of Muhammad.

"It's a fear of brutality, and you submit to that brutality," said Henryk Broder, whose book, Hurray, We Capitulate, is a polemic on what he views as Europe's submission to Islamists. "It's surrender to an enemy you're deathly afraid of. . . . Europe is like a little dog on his back begging for mercy from a big dog. The driving factor is angst."

Even intellectuals who don't share Broder's acerbic tongue agree that Europe must not appear lax in defending its principles. This mood comes as Europeans of all political persuasions are growing less tolerant of Muslim immigrants and questioning whether Islam can coexist with Western ideals.

"We live in Europe, where democracy was based on criticizing religion," said Philippe Val, editor of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. "If we lose the right to criticize or attack religions in our free countries . . . we are doomed."

Leftists argue that Europe is placating radical elements at the expense of its culture.

When his sculpture was pulled from the Tate exhibit last year, John Lathan told the media, "Tate Britain have shown cowardice over this. . . . If they want to help the militants, this is the way to do it. It's not even a gesture as strong as censorship. It's just a loss of nerve."

"Europe has tacitly accepted that from now on, the freedom of satire is valid for everything but Islam," Angelo Panebianco wrote in an editorial in Italy's Corriere della Sera. "Now they (Islamists) are aiming for a more ambitious objective to strike at the religious heart of the West, forcing us to accept that not even the pope is free to reflect aloud on the specificity of Christianity or that which differs from Islam."

The animosities between Europe and Islamists grew more pronounced after the Sept. 11 attacks. In her 2002 book The Rage and the Pride, Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy's foremost journalists wrote of Islamists, "What logic is there in respecting those who do not respect us? What dignity is there in defending their culture or supposed culture when they show contempt for ours? I want to defend my culture, not theirs, and inform you that I like Dante Aligheri and Shakespeare and Goethe and Verlaine and Walt Whitman and Leopardi much more than Omar Khayyam."

Such outspokenness can have a price. A French philosophy professor, Robert Redeker, has gone into hiding after saying in an opinion piece for Le Figaro that "Jesus is a master of love; Muhammad is a master of hatred. . . . Islam is a religion that in its very sacred text as much as in some of its everyday rights, exalts violence and hatred."

Shortly after the article appeared, the French Intelligence Services informed Redeker that radical Islamic websites had published pictures of him, his phone number and a map to his house. Redeker said one threat stated, "This pig should have his head cut off."

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