Doug Lorimer
The Danish government's defence of the publication by a Danish newspaper of caricatures of the prophet Mohammed, including one with the 7th century Arab religious leader wearing a turban with a bomb attached to it, has provoked widespread protests by justifiably angry Muslims around the world.
A small number of Muslims have reacted violently, burning down the Danish embassies in Damascus and Beirut. In a statement issued on February 7, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the 57-country Organisation of the Islamic Conference, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, declared their understanding of the "anguish in the Muslim world at the publication of these offensive caricatures", but called on Muslims to carry out peaceful protests.
Reflecting Muslim outrage at the cartoons, Anjem Choudary, spokesperson for Al Ghurabaa, a Muslim group that organised protests in London, was quoted by the February 6 Christian Science Monitor as saying: "This is a revival of the Crusades of old. European nations are joining hands against Islam. We have seen the invasion of Iraq, the banning of the hijab in France, and now this."
Ahmed Abu-Laban, who leads a mosque in Copenhagen's Muslim neighbourhood and has been blamed for instigating the protests against the cartoons, told the US Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRN) chain on February 7 that Danish officials had brought the crisis on themselves by not criticising the cartoons when they were first printed.
He said he had also sought an apology from the Danish newspaper that commissioned and printed the cartoons, but his requests had been ignored. The editor of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten Carsten Juste made a qualified "apology" on January 30 after Muslim countries started boycotting Danish goods. But the paper's culture editor (who commissioned and authorised the printing of the cartoons) was reported by the February 7 London Guardian as saying he did not regret publishing them.
Abu-Laban blamed the West's view of Islam as the primary cause of the violence. "This protest is not about the cartoons, offensive as they are", he told KRN. "The cartoons are merely the final drop that caused the cup to overflow. The Muslim faith has been under attack for years. There has been intense psychological pressure on Muslims. We have heard Western politicians relate our faith to terrorism, over and over again, and it is too much. This was the response."
Western defenders of the publication of the caricatures of Mohammed have claimed that the newspapers were simply exercising "free speech". But Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons, refused in April 2003 to print drawings caricaturing Jesus Christ, on the grounds that "they will provoke an outcry" from Christians.
The double standard applied by the Western corporate press does not only relate to religious matters. When a cartoon appeared in the British Independent in 2003, depicting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — who was found responsible by an official Israeli inquiry for the murder of Palestinian refugees, including children, during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon — eating the head of a Palestinian child while saying: "What's wrong? You've never seen a politician kissing babies before?", Zionist Jews and the Western corporate media condemned the cartoon as "anti-Semitic".
When a new TV series "Knight Without a Horse", containing strong criticism of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, was produced by the private Egyptian Dream TV company in 2002, the US government, with the backing of Israel, used its diplomatic personnel to try to stop the series being broadcast on private Arab TV stations.
It's not just the double standards of the Western corporate media that have generated Muslims' anger over the supposedly "satirical" depiction of Mohammed. As the February 6 Detroit-based Arab-American Weekly observed: "This double standard extends beyond issues of free speech to actual policy in the region. When the US was attacked on 9/11, we responded a month later, unleashing our total firepower on Afghanistan and later on Iraq. But when Palestinians respond to 60 years of brutal occupation and state-sponsored terrorism with stones and people strapping bombs to their bodies as their only weapons, the US wants them to lay down their 'arms' before even talking with them. Yet Israel has the world's fourth strongest army and more than 200 nuclear weapons in its arsenal."
"I support free speech, but I believe that we must speak out when free speech crosses the line and incites hatred, as the publication of these extremely offensive cartoons has done", Nemer Ziyad, vice-president of an Arab-American company that is the exclusive importer of a number of Danish food products, told the Arab-American News, after his company suspended its imports from Denmark.
By publishing a cartoon depicting Mohammed as a terrorist, Western newspapers are promoting the Islamophobic view that all Muslims are terrorists or supporters of terrorism, and therefore justifiable targets for the Nazi-like methods used against "suspected terrorists" by the US government in its global "war on terror". These methods range from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention without charge or trial, to systematic torture, illegal invasion and occupation and the destruction of villages, towns and cities (like Fallujah in Iraq) in retaliation for acts of resistance.
In a hypocritical bid to curry favour with Muslims at home and abroad, US State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack told reporters on February 3: "We all fully recognise and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable."
Commenting on Washington's position, James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, told Reuters: "It's a sound response on this issue that escapes the fire, but repairing the US standing in the Muslim world is already so out of reach that this move can't provide any help."
From Green Left Weekly, February 15, 2006.
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