The West has been in denial about censorship for far too long

On February 14, US Vice President JD Vance caused a stir at the Munich Security Conference when he decided to accuse America’s European allies of practising censorship. Outraged Europeans hit back, pointing at the track record of Vance’s boss, President Donald Trump, in attacking and eroding democracy in the United States.

To many of us, proponents of freedom of expression outside the West, this exchange was rather amusing. For so long, the West has lectured us on freedoms and criticised us for being unable to achieve them.

On February 14, US Vice President JD Vance caused a stir at the Munich Security Conference when he decided to accuse America’s European allies of practising censorship. Outraged Europeans hit back, pointing at the track record of Vance’s boss, President Donald Trump, in attacking and eroding democracy in the United States.

To many of us, proponents of freedom of expression outside the West, this exchange was rather amusing. For so long, the West has lectured us on freedoms and criticised us for being unable to achieve them.

Last month, we marked 10 years since the brutal attack on the office of French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo and the subsequent march by Western political and economic leaders in Paris in support of cartoonists, journalism, and “the right to offend”, urging the world to be able to “take a joke and laugh at itself”. Freedom of expression is the highest value of Western civilisation, we were told.

It is quite ironic to see a decade later, the political and economic elites of these same Western countries trade accusations of censorship, while in the background actively working to suppress or distort freedom of expression.

Meanwhile, a majority in Western societies remain stubbornly in denial that this is happening at a systemic level and are convinced that only this party or that party is an exception to the democratic rule. They still seem to believe that censorship and repression are, and have always been, Global South problems.

Living in the West for nearly a decade, I have grown used to the wide-eyed reactions when I mention my profession. “A Sudanese political cartoonist? That must be dangerous,” they say, as if freedom of expression is an exclusively Western ideal. And yes, being a cartoonist in some parts of the Global South can be dangerous, and the consequences of crossing red lines can be brutal. Western media like to point that out and show concern.

For example, in 2015, when cartoonist Atena Farghadani was sentenced to years in prison in Iran for depicting parliamentarians as animals, her story immediately made headlines. Tehran was widely condemned for not being able to “take a joke”.

There was also much Western solidarity with Ali Farzat, a prominent Syrian cartoonist, who was kidnapped and his hands broken in 2011 for drawing a cartoon of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. A few years later, news of the death of cartoonist Akram Raslan under torture in al-Assad’s jails also sparked an outpouring of empathy.

But the Western voices of support and condemnation are quieter when it comes to “friendlier regimes”. Egyptian cartoonist Ashraf Omar has been under arrest for six months now, with hardly anyone in the West paying attention. And of course, when it comes to Palestinian artists, there tends to be total silence. In October, an Israeli bomb killed Mahassen al-Khateeb in Jabalia camp in Gaza; her last illustration was of Shaban Al-Dalou burning alive in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital. There was no Western condemnation of her death, or of Israel’s killing of more than 200 Palestinian journalists in Gaza.As the prominent Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said reminds us, the West likes to imagine the East (and other places of the world) in ways that satisfy its own civilisational ego.

“How can one today speak of ‘Western civilization’ except as in large measure an ideological fiction, implying a sort of detached superiority for a handful of values and ideas, none of which has much meaning outside the history of conquest, immigration, travel, and the mingling of peoples that gave the Western nations their present mixed identities?”, he wrote in his famous book Orientalism.

Indeed, censorship in the West is no less real than in the Global South; it’s simply more palatable. It is true that cartoonists in the Global South have to navigate clear red lines – lines we know and learn to work around or leave behind.

But what I struggle to get my Western peers to understand is that the West also has red lines. They just find them hard to see. As a Sudanese proverb goes: “The camel can’t see the curve of its neck”.

Still, there are some red lines in the West that are quite clear cut; they are just not called that. For example, in 2019, a syndicated cartoon published by The New York Times depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog leading a blind Trump was swiftly taken down after it was slammed as anti-Semitic. In the following months, the newspaper decided to stop publishing political cartoons altogether.

In 2023, veteran cartoonist Steve Bell was dismissed from The Guardian also for drawing a cartoon of Netanyahu that was alleged to be anti-Semitic; the newspaper did not reverse its decision even after the Israeli Cartoon Association condemned his firing.