Bridget Purcell: Once again, the Muslims are raining on everyone’s parade. Yesterday’s New York Times reported that a German theater cancelled a production of “Idomeneo” after receiving an anonymous threat from an incensed Muslim. The theater judged the play, which features the severed heads of several religious leaders including Muhammad, a threat to its security. The article quotes a number of German officials criticizing the theater for “falling on its knees before the terrorists” and pandering to a hyper-sensitive Muslim community. All of them cited last year’s cartoon crisis and the Pope’s recent apologies to Muslims as evidence of Islam’s increasing encroachment on freedom of speech.

There is a common and messy logic in place here—one which places each of these distinct events under the rubric of “freedom of expression” and then labels any objection as an attack on Western Values. How much does this play—which depicts the disembodied heads of several religious leaders and is, we can argue, at least ecumenical in its offensiveness—have to do with last year’s cartoons, which were frankly racist and deliberately inflammatory? Or with the public characterization of Islam as “evil and inhumane” by the world’s most recognizable religious leader?

Further, why should this one incident be taken as evidence of Muslim hypersensitivity and hatred of free speech? Surely there is a difference between waves of popular opposition from Muslims (as in the cartoon crisis) and some anonymous threat to an opera house in Germany. Thus far all of the outrage and uproar is coming not from Muslim communities, but rather from non-Muslim Germans.

What we see here is the decontextualization and conflation of distinct events in service of some silly line about a “clash” between Islam and free speech. In fact, the perceived conflict between “expressive freedom” and the Muslim world is one which is reconstituted again and again through the media. (How, after all, did a few local cartoons become a worldwide phenomenon capable of sparking massive protests?) Without the “cartoon crisis” or the Pope’s remarks we may have never had an “Idomeneo ordeal”—and we certainly wouldn’t have it on the front page of the Times.