Yes, they're offensive, but the degree of passion and rage in response to the offence in most folks is going to depend on ... [drum roll] context.
Is it just possible (humour me for a minute here with a thought experiment) that "the French" (ah, these national pesudo-persons) have thicker skins than "all these people" because they have been for many years a colonising rather than a colonised population -- that while Americans or Germans may be thumbing noses or making puerile Francophobe jokes, the borders are safe and no bombs are falling, that we (calm and rational) people can look up at a plane crossing the sky without cringeing and running for cover, that all of our friends and relations die in car crashes or of natural causes, not as "collateral damage"...? That Frenchmen and women abroad are not being arrested and detained purely on the basis of their last names or accents, or spirited off to undisclosed locations to be tortured? That despite occasional snook-cocking, the Theys who insult or mock the Us are not actually ready, willing and able to invade us with the intent of real personal harm any day now, and that at this point it is Our grandfathers that Their grandfathers may have shot or bombed or held prisoner, not our brothers or sisters or (even worse) our children?
If similar mocking cartoons were published by the Boche during the occupation of France, can we really say that "thick skinned" and rational frenchmen and women would not have stepped up their Maquis activity locally, in furious response to the salt in the wound? (To the occupying Germans, the Maquis were of course "terrorists"). Historians recall the abuse, the public humiliations, the shaving of heads of women who slept with German soldiers [and how much real choice did those women have? who was in a position to protect them?]... was that a tolerant, rational, thick-skinned reaction? no, instead an ugly expression of outraged pride, nationalist rage, the personal need to get revenge, to take it out on perceived "collaborators" regardless of the calculus of power... whatever. not rational, not admirable, not proportionate, not just, but regrettably all too human.
In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. -- Walt Whitman
What I'm saying (have been for some time and at far too great length) is that it's easy to be calm and proportionate and rational when we're -- on the whole -- winning and fairly comfortable. I would not expect a temperate response to a jibe or jab from a person whose sore toe I'm standing on... or even one whose sore toe someone else is standing on... get off the toe first, is my philosophy, before I start upbraiding them for their inadequate sense of humour :-) The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
I suspect the same happened in the US in 2003. It's just nice once in a while to have a go at hate speech with a target that doesn't really mind. Because it is pretty violent and nasty (if sometimes funny), and even when you're used to it (the level of French bashing in the UK press always leaves me bemused), it can be painful to hear. I do suspect that the current bit of self-flagellation is to some extent inspired by the permanent bashing of the French and the French model in the English language.
But in the end, it tells more about the basher (who feels threatened, scared, unsecure) than the bashee. The Danish cartoons show their latent fear of brown foreigners; the Muslim (over)reactions shows their terror at the insidious liberal ways of the West.
How do you fight fear and build trust? Be responsible. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
as long as the "insidious liberal ways" of the west involve controlling Muslim countries directly or indirectly, bombing Muslims, ignoring the plight of Palestine, etc., the Islamists' fear has somewhat deeper roots in reality than the Danes' (no matter how overheated and bizarre the ensuing rhetoric may become -- the greater the fear, the more bizarre the rhetoric will get). that said, I must also admit that with economic hard times a lurking possibility and social safety nets being vandalised wherever we turn, the fear of proletarians that immigrants will cheapen labour and drive down living conditions is also rooted in present realities. (divide et impera -- we plebes are least dangerous to our masters when we are at each other's throats.)
oh dear, everybody needs a Time Out, says the long-dormant day-care worker in me :-) [a job I did for a while as a teen]
another reflective riff: I think many of us fear -- deeply, in our bones and gut -- the slow or fast death of the Enlightenment, the recrudescence of zealotry and factionalism and fundamentalism, the stifling of science, a degradation in the quality of arts and letters, the decline of literacy, the failure of democracy, the coarsening of public discourse into jingo and brawling. we look around and fear a dying of the light -- at home, not just abroad.
and that fear I think informs our distate for and terror of the clerical authoritarianism and repressive ambitions of fundie Islam. but the imminent threat to my own personal freedoms comes from my own Western world, from the "security state" apparatus, the unravelling of the Constitution and the separation of powers, the disregard for posse comitatus and habeas corpus, the rise of evangelical rightist xtianity and its strong presence in the professional military... it is these forces that are starting to revoke my rights and restore feudalism in my time. it is easier to fear and revile repression and obscurantism with a foreign (and dusky) face, an alien power which I can "keep at bay," than to come to grips with what may be growing under the bed in my own house...
... a man was appointed by BushCo to one of the highest medical administrative posts in the land, who believes that most gynaecological troubles can be cured by prayer. imho we are reasonable to be afraid... but is our anger and defiance focussed where it needs to be? The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
