WASHINGTON: While Undersec-retary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes who is on her second tour of the Middle East these days, must feel at least some relief that Europe — rather than the United States — has been the main target of the two-week outpouring of anger in the Muslim world that has come to be called the “cartoon crisis”.

Hughes, a long-time friend and adviser to President George W. Bush, has played a leading role in shaping the US response to the crisis, which has sparked large protests, including some violence, particularly in the Middle East.

She will no doubt be called on to clarify US views at the third annual US-Islamic World Forum in Qatar, as well as in scheduled meetings with non-governmental groups and students there and in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Under her guidance, the administration has tried to walk a fine line between showing sympathy for Muslims offended by the blasphemous Danish caricatures of the holy prophet and their re-publication by major newspapers elsewhere in Europe and upholding “free speech” principles.

“Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief,” declared State Department spokesman Scott McCormick at the outset of the crisis. “While we share the offence that Muslims have taken at these images,” he added, “we at the same time vigorously defend the “right of individuals to express points of view.”” Such a carefully balanced statement, however, outraged some of the administration’s strongest supporters, particularly neo-conservatives and other hawks who charged that it smacked of “appeasement” to “Islamist radicals” and constituted an abandonment of western ideals of freedom in defence of which Bush had purportedly launched his “war on terror”.

As a result, subsequent administration statements focused more on criticising the violence, particularly after attacks on Danish embassies in Damascus and Beirut, than on the offensive nature of the cartoons.

“We reject violence as a way to express discontent over what is printed in the ‘free press’,” declared Bush.

While the US administration’s greater focus on assailing the violence and the alleged responsibility for it of Washington’s two remaining Middle East foes and radical Islamists appears to have pacified its hawkish supporters, the crisis has also given rise to a new public discussion reminiscent of the “Why Do They Hate Us” and “Clash of Civilisations” debates that followed the Sept 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks on US landmarks. As in those debates, one side argues that “radical Islam,” if not Islam itself, represents an existential “threat” to western ideals — in this case, “freedom of speech and the press” — and that any suggestion that European newspaper publishers should show greater sensitivity to Muslim sentiments constitutes “weakness” and signals the decline of western civilisation.

“Like the appeasement of the 1930s,” wrote Victor Davis Hanson, a favourite columnist of Vice President Dick Cheney, this week, “we are in the great age now of ethical retrenchment... If we give in to these 8th-century clerics, shortly we will be living in an 8th century ourselves, where we may say, hear, and do nothing that might offend a fundamentalist Muslim.”

“This is a moment of truth in the in the global struggle against Islamic extremism,” wrote William Kristol, editor of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, one of the handful of US publications to reprint the cartoons. He asserted that the anti-Danish demonstrations showed that “those who are threatened by our effort to help ‘liberalise and civilise’ the Middle East are fighting back with whatever weapons are at hands”

On the other side of the debate — and one heard more loudly than in 2001, perhaps because Europe, rather than US, has been the main target — are commentators who insist that the outrage voiced by Muslims in the crisis is based on real grievances that the West should understand and address.

“What we are witnessing today has little to do with Western democratic values and everything to do with a European media that reflects and plays to an increasingly xenophobic and Islamophobic society,” wrote John Esposito, who teaches Middle East studies at Georgetown University.

Citing a recent Gallup World Poll of opinions in predominantly Islamic countries, he noted that, when asked to describe what the West could do to improve relations with the Arab-Muslim world, “by far the most frequent reply was that they should demonstrate more understanding and respect for Islam, show less prejudice, and not denigrate what Islam stands for. At the same time, overwhelming majorities said they favoured freedom of speech in their own countries.

In Esposito’s view, depicting the crisis as a defence of ‘free speech’ principles — if not of western civilisation — was precisely the wrong tack to take.

“Cartoons defaming the prophet and Islam reinforce Muslim grievances, humiliation, social marginalisation and drive a wedge between the West and moderate Muslims, unwittingly playing directly into the hands of extremists,” he warned.

In a New York Times column on Friday, New America Foundation senior fellow Robert Wright also mocked the hawks’ depiction of the crisis as a replay of the 1930s, noting that self-censorship by the media, particularly regarding minorities, is “an American tradition that has helped make America one of the most harmonious multiethnic and multi-religious societies in the history of the world.”

Recalling changes made in the media’s treatment, as well as in anti-discrimination laws, of US blacks after the urban riots of the mid-1960s, Wright also noted that “appeasement” in that case neither spawned more violence nor “weakened Western values”.

Behind the cartoon crisis, he went on, “so many of the grievances coalesce in a sense that Muslims aren’t respected by the affluent, powerful West (just as rioting American blacks felt they weren’t respected by affluent, powerful whites).”—Dawn/IPS News Service