The objects of satire are often - always? - respected authority figures or ideas within the culture of the satirist. WITHIN the culture, not OUTSIDE the culture. Even in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, the object of satire is not really the third world country to which Bill Boot has been booted by an editor who confused two Boots. It's the British press's hopeless, corrupt reporting from such countries. The satire was directed directly at institutions that were part and parcel of Waugh's upper class British Twitworld.
In contrast, as I see it, Islam is not part of mainstream Danish culture. Mohammed has no genuine cultural authority the way, say, the royal family might. To call the cartoons satire, therefore, seems to me inaccurate. It's simply ridicule, and ridicule of a figure from a culture that, from within Denmark - the satirizing culture - is Other. Danes are heeping scorn and humiliation on someone's religion, someone who is not Us. Someone who doesn't look like us, doesn't act like us, doesn't think like us, isn't as rich as us. And just can't be us.
...those who believe the cartoons really are satirical probably don't see it this way, I suspect. To them, it's pretty simple: Muslims should act like everyone else and take their knocks like everyone else. If anyone's excluding them, making them peculiar and Other, it is Muslims themselves, by acting like jerks and failing to understand the importance of free speech. No excuses: Muslims are just like everyone else and if they don't behave decently, we need to be teach them some lessons.
My objection to this argument starts with the firm belief that there is a utopian, mistakenly optimistic premise behind this kind of argument of equality. The playing field for Muslims is not equal in Denmark. Even if they behaved exactly the same way as their non-Muslim neighbors, they'd still be judged non-Danish. Right now, Denmark, like other Scandinavian countries, is grappling with the rapidly changing nature of Danish identity. The children of Muslim immigrants are far from being thought equally "Danish" as the children of those who can trace their ancestry back to some 12th century ancestor. Muslims in Denmark, and in the Western world in general, are not often in positions of authority, the religion is not dominant in the West, nor are Muslim citizens in many positions of power.
