https://thecritic.co.uk/the-passion-of-the-monkey-christ/
There is much talk in our age of ideological tumult about the Overton Window — that narrow range of ideas and policies that it’s socially acceptable to publicly discuss. It also applies to what we joke about, what we don’t. Two years before Cecilia Giménez became “a global laughing stock”, Kurt Westergaard wasn’t laughing. An axe-wielding Somali had broken into his house in Denmark screaming, “We will get our revenge!” The intruder had come to hack Mr Westergaard to death for the crime of drawing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad. Westergaard and his granddaughter survived by sheltering in a panic room built after another plot to kill the cartoonist was foiled in 2012. It is revealing that a set of blasphemous images could have generated such different reactions in 21st Century Europe, but revealing of what? The enlightened sophistication of the post-Christian Europe perhaps? It would be flattering to think so but, to any culture that values collective honour, secularist glee at Mrs Giménez’s unwitting creation only telegraphed the West’s self-destructive weakness.
Contemporary European Christianity may be supine but the mad zeal displayed by Westergaard’s enemies is inescapably part of our Abrahamic heritage: “God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Strength of a fanatical variety was displayed in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre. To writers, critics and comedians, the message was clear: Christianity is fair game but Islam is no laughing matter. The lesson was learned all too well by Europe’s terrified political class. Their solution to this culture clash is to try to silence it, with the creeping censorship that has darkened Europe’s once rich intellectual life and promises to extinguish it before long.
The joke was never on Cecilia Giménez. It was always on us.
There is much talk in our age of ideological tumult about the Overton Window — that narrow range of ideas and policies that it’s socially acceptable to publicly discuss. It also applies to what we joke about, what we don’t. Two years before Cecilia Giménez became “a global laughing stock”, Kurt Westergaard wasn’t laughing. An axe-wielding Somali had broken into his house in Denmark screaming, “We will get our revenge!” The intruder had come to hack Mr Westergaard to death for the crime of drawing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad. Westergaard and his granddaughter survived by sheltering in a panic room built after another plot to kill the cartoonist was foiled in 2012. It is revealing that a set of blasphemous images could have generated such different reactions in 21st Century Europe, but revealing of what? The enlightened sophistication of the post-Christian Europe perhaps? It would be flattering to think so but, to any culture that values collective honour, secularist glee at Mrs Giménez’s unwitting creation only telegraphed the West’s self-destructive weakness.
Contemporary European Christianity may be supine but the mad zeal displayed by Westergaard’s enemies is inescapably part of our Abrahamic heritage: “God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Strength of a fanatical variety was displayed in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre. To writers, critics and comedians, the message was clear: Christianity is fair game but Islam is no laughing matter. The lesson was learned all too well by Europe’s terrified political class. Their solution to this culture clash is to try to silence it, with the creeping censorship that has darkened Europe’s once rich intellectual life and promises to extinguish it before long.
The joke was never on Cecilia Giménez. It was always on us.