A cartoonist's view

We're off!

The Radio News Specialized Meeting is taking place in a rather formal, but comfortable conference room in the headquarters of Polish Radio. Our hosts have been very kind and have done a splendid job of organizing things.

The events of the next two days will be blogged here and by Kevin Anderson.

The opening debate is about the global furore triggered by the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad.

"Something's going on, but you don't know what it is, do you Mrs. Jones?" said Lisbeth Knudsen, the Editor-in-Chief of Danish Radio and TV, quoting a Bob Dylan song.

As a kid, I was more into Motown - sorry Lisbeth, but I never really liked Dylan - and the song that came to my mind was Aretha Franklin's "Respect". The song became a civil rights anthem in the US.

Lisbeth said that the affair known in Denmark as the "Muhammad crisis" had underlined not only the importance of free speech, but also that freedom had non-negotiable "ethical limits". But this did not mean that there was no room for constructive debate, she argued.

The insider's view came from the Head of the BBC's Arabic Service, Hosam El Sokkari. No, he was not speaking as the man, or editor, from the Arab street, but as someone who started his career as a cartoonist for a daily newspaper in Finland.

Hosam made the very important point that the Danish cartoons first appeared in an Egyptian magazine in October last year - months before the riots. Was he suggesting that religious leaders and Arab governments may have exploited the affair?

Cartoons deal in stereotypes, whether the Prophet with a bomb under his turban or Hosam's Finnish skinheads - the subject of his first published cartoon. But Hosam stressed there was a wide-ranging debate in the "Arab world" and that dishonest reporting in the West, rather than freedom of the Arab press, was the real issue.

Many Arabs accused Westerners of double standards - after all, they argued, cartoons denying the Holocaust were unacceptable in the West and would not be published by the MSM. Quite simply, it was a question of respect.

Staffan Sonning, editor-in-chief of Swedish Radio, made the case for press freedom. He said that accepting that Jyllandsposten had the right to publish the cartoons did not mean that you condoned them.

Fr. Koprowski of Vatican Radio said the outrage over the cartoons reflected what he described as a crisis within Islam, as Muslims struggled to reconcile the past with the modern world.

Hosam accused Fr. Koprowski of over simplifying and making generalisations: fundamentalists did not reflect the mainstream, he stressed. And he denied that democracy and technology were irreconcilable with Islam.

Arthur Landwehr of Germany's ARD highlighted the cultural differences between Moslems and Christians and suggested that Muslim immigrants were changing tradional Western liberal values.

Arthur cited a recent example, from Germany, of a satirical version of the Lord's prayer, which replaced the religious content with football terminology. He said that the public service broadcaster had eventually dropped the "prayer" following a number of complaints, but that the affair had never really roused passions in the Christian community.

I wanted to ask Arthur if he felt that was maybe because the satire was confined to one community. It is the same reason why Jews tell the best Jewish jokes - when somebody else tells them, they often come across as racist.