Sadanand Dhume is a scholar with the Asia Society and the author of a forthcoming book on the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia. Earlier this month he contributed a smart commentary to the Wall Street Journal about the tense situation in Jakarta, where authorities prosecuted Playboy Indonesia editor Erwin Arnada for indecency. Although the newly launched edition contains no nudity (in fact, it shows less skin than other publications available at newsstands), a small group of radical Islamists greeted the inaugural issue by stoning Playboy's offices. As the prosecutor read the charges against Arnada for the judge, the fundamentalists packing the courtroom chanted, "Hang him! Hang him!" According to Reuters, prosecutor Resni Muchtar told the court: “Photos, drawings and articles in Playboy Indonesia magazine were results of the defendant’s selection. They were unsuitable for civility and could arouse lust among readers so they violated feelings of decency.”
In his commentary, Dhume wrote, "The Playboy affair captures the world's most populous Muslim country's steady slide toward intolerance.... But the silence with which it has been greeted in the U.S.—no press releases from the Committee to Protect Journalists clog my inbox—also underscores the cringe of bien pensant America toward the export of popular culture, especially to Muslim lands... The problem is not Playboy's predilection for the scantily clad, but Islamists' tendency to fly into a rage over a flash of thigh or a bare midriff."
He continued, "The idea of a woman dressing or undressing as she pleases, or that you may personally disapprove of the Playboy bunny but respect your neighbor's right to fantasize about her, undermines the very core of Islamist totalitarianism. On a more flippant note, persuading young men to blow themselves up in order to claim 72 dark-eyed virgins in paradise is that much harder when the dark-eyed virgin next door can be found spread across a Centerfold...."
After reading Duhme's commentary, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Simon, could not contain himself. He felt the committee had been slighted and shot off a response to the Journal to correct the record. As longtime supporters of CPJ, it's hard to express the disappointment we felt after reading his letter, which the Journal published a few days later.
"I am pleased that Sadanand Dhume regularly receives our email alerts," Simon wrote. "There's a reason he never got one about the legal harassment and intimidation of Playboy Indonesia. In this instance, Islamist groups have harassed editors, intimidated models and filed criminal complaints that helped fuel the ongoing prosecution for indecency. But the Islamists, as far as we can determine, did not take action in response to any journalistic content. They appear to be angry about the publication of photos of scantily clad women in the magazine, which they see as a symbol of the decadent West.
"Since Mr. Dhume regularly receives our correspondence, he must know we are not shy about denouncing the use of blasphemy or indecency laws to suppress journalistic speech. For example, we denounced the Egyptian government's jailing of blogger Abdel Karim Suleiman who was sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing Islam (not to mention President Hosni Mubarak). We have also denounced the Liberian government for shutting down the The Independent newspaper after it published a front-page photo of ex-Presidential Affairs Minister Willis Knuckles in flagrante delicto with two women."
CPJ's work is laudatory and important. But when we checked its mission statement, nowhere does the committee offer a definition of journalist that would exclude Erwin Arnada or the other courageous editors, designers and photographers at our Indonesian edition. We have to wonder if CPJ has ever before publicly disavowed an editor who has been accused of thought crimes and threatened with imprisonment or death. Given the continuing tensions in Indonesia, perhaps it would be better if the committee continued its silence. Our editorial director, Christopher Napolitano, has asked as much in a letter to Simon that we would describe as curt.
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Comments on this entry:
I'm actually scared to comment as you never know who'd be offended if I left a longer post ...
I wish all of you luck and peace in this.