Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Un'opinione equilibrata sulla faccenda delle caricature

Condivido completamente.
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2006/02/danish-cartoons-not-pastries.html
Danish Cartoons (not pastries): the controversy continues, and the
protests have spread. Israel was bombing South Lebanon yesterday, after
killing an innocent Lebanse shepherd, and the protests against the
cartoons increased in intensity.
There are so many layers to the story. As those who know me know, I
used to draw political cartoons-and sometimes I still do it--, so I
have a particular fascination with and admiration for cartoonists,
worldwide--the good ones for sure. I discovered many great cartoonists
in the US over the years (Toles at WP and Mike Luckovitch at the
Atlanta Journal and Constitution, etc).
 But this one started with several cartoons, that offended the
religious beliefs of Muslims, who were insulted not merely-as is
mistakenly being implied-for the depiction of the Prophet (whose
images and portrayals are banned-and this is a central belief of
Islam) but also due to the intention of the cartoons to associate the
ugly menace of terrorism with Islam, the religion. The cartoonists knew
what they were doing, for sure, even though they did not anticipate the
reactions.
The offense got worse, when European publications began reprinting them
in the name of "freedom of speech." Really? Would those same
publications dare to reprint the grotesque anti-Semitism of, say the
Nazi "historian" David Irving (who sits in an Austrian jail for
violating the law there which bans anti-Semitic speech, and we don't
see people defending his right of freedom of speech--I would not
either), in the name of "free speech"? This is something that is at
the heart of the controversy. The double and triple standards of
Western governments are quite clear, even if you take "freedom of
expression" as a criterion of analysis.
Al-Manar TV, for example, has been banned from Europe and the US for
anti-Jewish messages and statements contained in a few of its programs.
European media did not defend Al-Manar, and did not rebroadcast the
programs in question in the name of solidarity. And the very political
(in the vulgar sense) director of Reporters without Borders (who seems
to have become almost a member of the Lebanese Hariri movement)
stressed this notion of journalistic solidarity.
 I did not see this eagerness on his part when Iraqi (and other)
journalists were being killed in Iraq, either by insurgents or by US
troops. I don't remember him ever speaking about the lack of press
freedoms in Saudi Arabia, for example, or the harassment of journalists
by Israeli occupiers? If this was a matter of freedom of speech in a
fair world, I would understand, and I would have been one to express
solidarity too.
But the hypocrisy is only increasing, and angering even me-somebody
who refused, and still refuses, to be more outraged at the cartoons
than I am about poverty, occupation, and oppression. I rank my
outrages, and refuse to make reactions to cartoons high on my list.
Just as Western media and governments did in the case of Salman Rushdi
(and I signed petitions in support of Rushdi and still support the
right of artists, writers, poets, and journalists to offend). But
Western governments and media (I remember a particularly offensive
spectacle in New York City led by the leading poseur, Christopher
Hitchens,) took turns in publishing and publicly reading extracts of
the Satanic Verses. Just to offend Muslim sensibilities further. These
same people would never publicly read, in the name of free speech,
racist or anti-Semitic discourse. I would not either. I am not willing
in the name of free speech to read aloud extracts of racist or
anti-Jewish or anti-anything writings of hate.
But that is exactly what those ostensible defenders of freedom of
speech do but only in the case of speech that offends Muslims and
Islam. Only in that case. Those people would not dare read Moby Dick in
public, I gaurantee you. And in the history AND present of Western
(ideology of) hostility to Islam and Muslims, the cartoons are not, and
should not, be judged in a vacuum, even if one supports the right of
the cartoonists, as I do.
And just as anti-Semitic works have been used to justify and instigate
violence against Jews historically, Western anti-Muslim
"literature"-including medieval Christian polemics against
Islam-were not separate from wars against Islam.
People in the Middle East do know how to connect the dots. This
explains why some of the demonstrations against the cartoons turned in
some cases to demonstrations against Israel and US. And Denmark sent
troops to Iraq.
And people in the Middle East, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding,
do read, and do follow closely international developments. They know
what we know: that you have to also analyze the cartoons in the context
of Danish politics, and the rise of racist, xenophobic movements in
Europe, and especially in Denmark which has one of the largest
percentage of foreign-born populations in the world.
Having said that, there is also much about the Arab/Muslim reactions
that are either outrageous or hypocritical, or both, or worse. I mean,
to hear Hamid Karzai, a man who was installed in power by foreign
occupiers, and whose very name is now used as an insult, or even an
obscenity-literally-speak ostensibly in the name of Muslims is
laughable. I assume that he was put at the podium by US soldiers who
protect him. I mean, his credentials regarding Islam are as flimsy as
those of the fanatical Taliban.
And AlArabiyya TV, yet again as Hassan Az-Zayn wrote in As-Safir, does
not miss an opportunity to please the US. They kept airing the
statements of Karzai-as if they will influence anybody--, and aired a
long interview with the Danish prime minister. Who do they think they
are fooling, outside of the "public diplomacy" people in
Washington, DC that is?
And how can Arab publications speak with any credibility when many of
them, especially those funded by Saudi Arabia or even Iran and the
rest, have published racist and hateful cartoons and articles. They
have as much credibility on the subject of religious sensitivity as
Bush has on the issue of international peace and harmony.
And I have said before: Arab governments have instigated protests: I
particularly noticed the unusual friendliness of (the usually brutal)
Jordanian mukhabarat leading on the demonstrators in Amman after the
Friday prayers yesterday. Those governments, aware of the public anger
of their populations regarding US foreign policy and its alignment with
their oppressive government, do not dare permit anger at the US or
Israel, so they find it tempting, easy, and costless to champion anger
against Denmark or Norway.
But what about mocking religion? Should mocking religion be considered
part of free speech? For me, the answer is a categorical yes. But to
mock religions is free thinking, but to selectively mock one religion
(while showing complete respect for others) is often prejudice. I mean,
if I mock Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc, I
can't be accused of religious bigotry.
But if I only mock one religion, especially in a context of prejudice
against that religion, then I am certainly guilty of religious bigotry.
I mean, if somebody in Israel mocks Judaism-especially if that person
is Jewish, that is not necessarily anti-Jewish (as prejudice). But if
somebody mocks Judaism in, say, Saudi Arabia where religious bigotry
against religions other than Islam is common, then that person is
adding to the body of religious bigotry in the kingdom.
Mocking religion could become non-controversial when religious bigotry
disappears from the world. You see: would Voltaire be considered free
of religious bigotry because he is known as a free thinker with a free
spirit? I say, no. His play Mahomet, for example, was dedicated to the
Pope, and contained (in the introduction) a bigoted comparison between
Islam and Christianity.
 This reminds me of those who are selectively secular: especially in
the West. I am referring to the professional career anti-Islam
polemicists. If you attack Islam from a secular point of view, but
refrain from attacking Judaism and Christianity from that very
perspective, then your secularism is not credible at all, and your
discourse can be seen as an element in the anti-Islam literature.
What is worse is that some in the West want to support anti-Islam hate
in the name of "freedom of speech" while depriving Muslims from the
right to protest also in the name of "freedom of speech".
And it just happened this week that the joint chiefs of the US armed
forces vehemently protested a cartoon in the Washington Post, and Fox
News which at least did not understand Muslim reactions to the
cartoons, totally identified with the outrage at Toles' cartoon.
I know that many Muslims are quite outraged over this. I have mentioned
before my conversations with my mother about it. She always brings it
up now when we talk. Personally, given the many injustices,
oppressions, wars, occupations, and destructions I have enough outrages
on my plate. And I have enough boycotts to adhere to be able to add a
new one, especially over a cartoon, as offensive as it is for Muslims.
I still believe that foreign occupations and wars should anger
Muslims/Arabs more, much more. And yet, the debate about the issue
misses so much of the aspects of the controversy, and some (the
well-meaning and the nasty) resort to Orientalist generalizations to
presumably explain.
Look at Robert Fisk (yes, Robert Fisk): "The fact is that Muslims
live their religion. We do not. They have kept their faith through
innumerable historical vicissitudes. We have lost our faith." What on
earth is that? He sounds like Bernard Lewis here. And you certainly
can't declare the end of religion, especially in the US, but also in
Europe (the old and the new Europe). And now we have seen the US
government taking a stand on the matter. A spokesperson for the US
Department of State criticized the cartoons, I kid you not. The
government of Bush is now expressing sensitivity to Muslims and Islam,
I kid you not. But does the US government think that Danish cartoons
are more offensive to Muslims and Islam than Bush's wars and twisted
US foreign policy? Really.
PS Several developments. Today, in Syria, demonstrators set fire to the
Danish and Swedish embassies. Now, we know that demonstrations in Syria
are never spontaneous, and if they are, they often are met with brute
force. In this case, the regime was hoping to let people let off steam,
and just like the case in Amman yesterday, Syrian mukhabarat men were
atypically restrained and even polite. Who are they kidding. And the
demagogic and consistently insincere Abraham Foxman intruded on the
affair today. And with Foxman, you can always expect him to throw
petrol on a fire, to make things worse, always worse. Sure enough,
Foxman decided to focus exclusively on anti-Semitic (of course, in his
definition, any criticisms of Israel are anti-Semitic) images in Arab
media. But while that may be true (and I don't adhere to Foxman's
definitions-I am reviewing Norman Finkelstein's devastatingly
effective new book on that--), and it is true, this is the fault of the
governments of the region which control the media, or the Saudi royal
family which controls the "free media" of the Arab world, which
exist outside of the Arab world, or in Lebanon. In other words, we
can't deny a Saudi or an Egyptian Muslim the right to protest simply
because Saudi or Egyptian media have in the past published bigoted
images or cartoons. She/he has no control over the official media.
Also, Nir tells me this: "its 1 PM eastern time. i dont know why i
had CNN on, but i did, on the show "in the money"jack kafferty brought
up the muhamad cartoon crisis, and twice he said they were cartoons
depicting "the prophet elijah muhamad."" Good night.

 
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2006/02/danish-cartoons-not-pastries.html
Anche questa:
http://www.juancole.com/2006/02/muslim-protests-against-anti-muhammad.html#comments
Several readers have asked what I think about the protests among
Muslims against the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published by a
Danish newspaper.
Of course people are upset when their sacred figures are attacked! But
the hurt is magnified many times when the party doing the injuring is
first-world, and the injured have a long history of being ruled,
oppressed and marginalized. Moreover, most Muslims live in societies
with strong traditions of state censorship, so they often assume that
if something appears in the press, the government allowed it to do so
and is therefore culpable.
Westerners cannot feel the pain of Muslims in this instance. First,
Westerners mostly live in secular societies where religious sentiments
have themselves been marginalized. Second, the Muslims honor Moses and
Jesus, so there is no symmetry between Christian attacks on Muhammad
and Muslim critiques of the West. No Muslim cartoonist would ever
lampoon the Jewish and Christian holy figures in sacred history, since
Muslims believe in them, too, even if they see them all as human
prophets. Third, Westerners have the security of being the first world,
with their culture coded as "universal," and widely respected and
imitated. Cultures like that of the Muslims in the global South receive
far less respect. Finally, societies in the global South are less
policed and have less security than in Western Europe or North America,
allowing greater space to violent vigilateism, which would just be
stopped if it were tried in the industrialized democracies. (Even
wearing a t-shirt with the wrong message can get you arrested over
here.)
What Muslims are saying is that depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his
turban is insupportable. It is often assumed that in the West we
believe in free speech, so there is nothing that is insupportable.
But that simply is not true. Muslims mind caricatures of Muhammad
because they view him as the exemplar of all that is good in human
beings. Most Western taboos are instead negative ones, not disallowal
of attacks on symbols of goodness but the questioning of symbols of
evil.
Thus, it is insupportable to say that the Nazi ideology was right and
to praise Hitler. In Germany if one took that sort of thing too far one
would be breaking the law. Even in France, Bernard Lewis was fined for
playing down the Armenian holocaust. It is insupportable to say that
slavery was right, and if you proclaimed that in the wrong urban
neighborhoods, you could count on a violent response.
So once you admit that there are things that can be said that are
insupportable, then the Muslim feelings about the caricatures become
one reaction in an entire set of such reactions.
But you don't have to look far for other issues that would exercise
Westerners just as much as attacks on Muhammad do Muslims. In secular
societies, a keen concern with race often underlies ideas of social
hierarchy. Thus, any act that might bring into question the superiority
of so-called white people in their own territory can provoke
demonstrations and even violence such as lynchings. consider the recent
Australian race riots, which were in part about keeping the world
ordered with whites on top.
Had the Danish newspaper published antisemitic cartoons that showed,
e.g., Moses as an exploitative money lender and brought into question
the Holocaust, there would also have been a firestorm of protest. For
the secular world, the injuries and unspoken hierarchies of race are
what cannot be attacked.
Muslims are not, as you will be told, the only community that is touchy
about attacks on its holy figures or even just ordinary heros.
Thousands of Muslims were killed in the early 1990s by enraged Hindus
in India over the Ayodhya Mosque, which Hindus insisted was built on
the site of a shrine to a Hindu holy figure. No one accuses Hindus in
general of being unusually narrowminded and aggressive as a result. Or,
the Likudniks in Israel protested the withdrawal from Gaza, and there
were dark mutterings about what happened to Rabin recurring in the case
of Sharon. The "sacred" principle at stake there is just not one most
people in the outsider world would agree with the Likudniks about.
Human beings are all alike. Where they are distinctive, it comes out of
a special set of historical circumstances. The Muslims are protesting
this incident vigorously, and consider the caricatures insupportable.
We would protest other things, and consider them insupportable.