In October 2006, the UN organized a seminar entitled Cartooning for Peace: The Responsibility of Political Cartoonists.220 The seminar had been mooted before the Danish cartoons controversy by Le Monde cartoonist Plantu, but the Muslim reaction to the cartoons, followed by the Iranian exhibit of cartoons denying the Holocaust, gave impetus to the concept and caused former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, to warn against "getting into a kind of a cartoon war" in his address at the seminar.221 There have been five seminars since, with a special edition under the title Cartooning for Human Rights held in Rome from 10 to 12 December 2007 to coincide with Human Rights Day.222
At the first seminar, Annan noted that cartoons "have a special role in forming public opinion—because an image generally has a stronger, more direct impact on the brain than a sentence does" and in a reference to the Danish cartoons, emphasized: "few things can hurt you more directly than a caricature of yourself, of a group you belong to, or—perhaps worst—of a person you deeply respect."223 Annan also argued against censoring cartoonists and urged them to take responsibility for their own creations. Thus, "cartoons can offend, and that is part of their point"; cartoonists, however, should "use their influence, not to reinforce stereotypes or inflame passions, but to promote peace and understanding."224
In the ensuing discussion involving cartoonists from around the world, a representative of the Danish cartoonists pessimistically concluded: "We can't understand them. They can't understand us."225 American cartoonist Mike Luckovich found, on the other hand, that: "I don't think you should incite people just to incite them, and I think that's what the Danish cartoonists, or editors, did."226 The Palestinian cartoonist Baha Boukhari said that he could "measure freedom in every Arab country by how many cartoonists they have."227 He added that he found it "'fascinating' that 'cartooning,' [End Page 874] which he described as a 'language without words,' was now 'added to the languages of the United Nations.'"228