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Two interesting articles worth reading and sharing. Not that I agree with this or that, but two different views of infamous cartoons that will make you set for a while and think; what a crazy world we are living in:
Anti-Western Muslims
by Palden Jenkins - England"The world's going through an immense historical process, and it seems that crises are a way that movement is accelerated. Western people are going through a humbling process, in which we get reduced to a more equal place amongst the world's population. And Muslims are going through a process of taking back their future, their culture and fate - but in the process these are transforming too. It's all rather a wrench, rather painful. We need to cool it a bit so that too much damage is not done, but I think this is all very valid as a part of this longer-term process - catharsis and outbursts of uncomfortable truth.
It's so ironic that Scandinavians, often regarded as some of the more harmless folks on this Earth, have suddenly hit the button! Whoops! Their problem is that they actually have little experience of multiculturalism - the North is not a central place, and they were not significant imperialists in the colonial period - so they're on a rapid learning process. But as human groupings go, they're also quite fair minded, and I think this will be good for improving their relations with Muslim countries, and vice versa.
In a sense, culturally and psychologically, they're a contrast to Israeli Jews: Denmark has roughly the same size and population as Israel, yet Danes impact very differently on the world. Danes will accommodate, acknowledge and correct their behaviour, and this is perhaps quite good for many of the more anti-Western Muslims to get to grips with. Allah/God is busy teaching his children some new lessons. Let us hope humans get the message! Here's a great quote from a mad rabbi I know: God is too big to squeeze into just one religion!."
The second article:
Print | | Digg | Stumble | delicious | Tweet | Technorati | Reddit | Yahoo | GoogleNo Clash of Civilizations, Unless We Make It So
Source: Independent/UK
[Feb 07, 2006]Robert Fisk's analysis of the Prophet Mohamed cartoon controversy shaking up Europe and the Middle East.
So now it's cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb-shaped turban. Ambassadors are withdrawn from Denmark, Gulf nations clear their shelves of Danish produce, Gaza gunmen threaten the European Union. In Denmark, Fleming Rose, the "culture" editor of the pip-squeak newspaper which published these silly cartoons - last September, for heaven's sake - announces that we are witnessing a "clash of civilisations" between secular Western democracies and Islamic societies. This does prove, I suppose, that Danish journalists follow in the tradition of Hans Christian Anderson. Oh lordy, lordy. What we're witnessing is the childishness of civilisations.
So let's start off with the Department of Home Truths. This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam. For Muslims, the Prophet is the man who received divine words directly from God. We see our prophets as faintly historical figures, at odds with our high-tech human rights, almost cariacatures of themselves. 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 ever since Matthew Arnold wrote about the sea's "long, withdrawing roar". That's why we talk about "the West versus Islam" rather than "Christians versus Islam" - because there aren't an awful lot of Christians left in Europe. There is no way we can get round this by setting up all the other world religions and asking why we are not allowed to make fun of Mohamed.
Besides, we can exercise our own hypocrisy over religious feelings. I happen to remember how, more than a decade ago, a film called The Last Temptation of Christ showed Jesus making love to a woman. In Paris, someone set fire to the cinema showing the movie, killing a young man. I also happen to remember a US university which invited me to give a lecture three years ago. I did. It was entitled "September 11, 2001: ask who did it but, for God's sake, don't ask why". When I arrived, I found that the university had deleted the phrase "for God's sake" because "we didn't want to offend certain sensibilities". Ah-ha, so we have "sensibilities" too.
In other words, while we claim that Muslims must be good secularists when it comes to free speech - or cheap cartoons - we can worry about adherents to our own precious religion just as much. I also enjoyed the pompous claims of European statesmen that they cannot control free speech or newspapers. This is also nonsense. Had that cartoon of the Prophet shown instead a chief rabbi with a bomb-shaped hat, we would have had "anti-Semitism" screamed into our ears - and rightly so - just as we often hear the Israelis complain about anti-Semitic cartoons in Egyptian newspapers.
Furthermore, in some European nations - France is one, Germany and Austria are among the others - it is forbidden by law to deny acts of genocide. In France, for example, it is illegal to say that the Jewish Holocaust or the Armenian Holocaust did not happen. So it is, in fact, impermissable to make certain statements in European nations. I'm still uncertain whether these laws attain their objectives; however much you may prescribe Holocaust denial, anti-Semites will always try to find a way round. We can hardly exercise our political restraints to prevent Holocaust deniers and then start screaming about secularism when we find that Muslims object to our provocative and insulting image of the Prophet.
For many Muslims, the "Islamic" reaction to this affair is an embarrassment. There is good reason to believe that Muslims would like to see some element of reform introduced to their religion. If this cartoon had advanced the cause of those who want to debate this issue, no-one would have minded. But it was clearly intended to be provocative. It was so outrageous that it only caused reaction.
And this is not a great time to heat up the old Samuel Huntingdon garbage about a "clash of civilisations". Iran now has a clerical government again. So, to all intents and purposes, does Iraq (which was not supposed to end up with a democratically elected clerical administration, but that's what happens when you topple dictators). In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 per cent of the seats in the recent parliamentary elections. Now we have Hamas in charge of "Palestine". There's a message here, isn't there? That America's policies - "regime change" in the Middle East - are not achieving their ends. These millions of voters were preferring Islam to the corrupt regimes which we imposed on them.
For the Danish cartoon to be dumped on top of this fire is dangerous indeed.
In any event, it's not about whether the Prophet should be pictured. The Koran does not forbid images of the Prophet even though millions of Muslims do. The problem is that these cartoons portrayed Mohamed as a bin Laden-type image of violence. They portrayed Islam as a violent religion. It is not. Or do we want to make it so?
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Several disjointed observations, if I may.
First, the reaction in the West is not, in my opinion, that Muslims should not be offended by the Danish cartoons. Even in the secular West (and much moreso in the religious United States), people object all the time when one religion or another is satirized, mocked, or even just depicted in a way that offends one believer or another.
The West is, however, reacting to several of the means by which some Muslims are expressing their outrage at having been offended. We're not for burning embassies. This is especially the case when it is quite obvious that the government in Syria could have prevented the burning of the embassies in Damascus (it protected the American and French embassies, not wanting to give those countries a casus belli, and sent the mob down the street to burn the Danes and the Norwegians). Many of us suspect that the embassy attacks were essentially engineered to send a message: "Stop putting pressure on the Assad regime, because Syria is a bomb ready to explode and only Ba'athist oppression can prevent it from going off."
We also object strongly to demands from Muslims that the government take action. We have worked long and hard in the West to prevent government from regulating free speech, and we react badly to the idea that such regulation might return just because a few people are offended. True, some Western governments, particularly in Europe, can limit the free press for some purposes, but we view this fact as a "bug," not a "feature."
Now, what is the right of free speech all about? It is the right to offend people. As I wrote in a post yesterday, "the right of free speech is an entirely meaningless construct for speakers and writers who do not offend people. Popular speech that offends nobody needs no right to protect it. The right of free speech is only important for people who speak and write unpopular or offensive things. In a world of free people governed by laws, the only legitimate "consequences of exercising that right of free expression" are that sometimes the reaction to unpopular speech will be such that the speaker needs to be defended. That is why we have police, courts and, yes, sometimes armies."
The problem, of course, is if large numbers of Muslims do not subscribe to this basic idea — that the right to free speech exists precisely to protect unpopular people and offensive ideas — then we can see at least two troubling consequences. First, genuine democracy stands no chance in the Muslim world, for the right of free speech is essential to the proper functioning of a democracy. How can there be a loyal opposition if the government can suppress unpopular or objectionable speech? The first application of that power will be against the government's opponents. Second, how does the West deal with the Muslim world if its leaders reach in and demand that we extinguish one of our most cherished rights just because it is offensive to them?
Now, if you were to say that the West has been messing around in the Arab and Muslim world for two hundred years and that we are hypocrits for objecting so loudly when Arabs and Muslims reach try to dictate how our countries will be governed (which is what the activists are trying to do), you would be right. Unfortunately, resting on the idea that there is something historically just in the Muslim reaction is no way to avoid a clash of civilizations that will be painful for everybody but devestating for the Muslim world.
Just a quick FYI: 'The Last Temptation of Christ' is a very tame movie when it comes to religious provocation.
No, if you want the real deal, you should ask the Danes. *cough*
In 1993 the late Danish filmmaker and provocateur extraordinaire Jens Jørgen Thorsen finally made his movie "The love affairs of Jesus Christ" after a 16 year long court battle to secure the equivalent of €500,000 in public funding for the project. I will not even begin to descibe what happens in it, except to say that some scenes takes place in a bathroom. The movie was later shown in theaters all over Denmark, and at the time got a fair bit of attention in the local media.
The movie was intended to be the final straw to break the camels back in a decade long anti-Christianity campaign in Denmark, sponsored by the Danish neo-nazi government (at the time headed by the self proclaimed 'social democrats' (HA!) party) and their labdogs-on-a-leash in the state owned press and media. The intention was to marginalize, humiliate and eventually ban the spreading of the Christian message among the population. This way huge sums of public spending, previously used for churches, cemetaries, the education of priests and the printing of relevant religious books, could be used to expand the Nuclear strike capability of the Royal Danish Air Force.
For the sarcasm impaired: The previous paragraph is pure fiction, the one about Jens Jørgen Thorsen's movie is not.
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[...] inions. Roba Assi is angry at the reaction of the Islamic world, Haitham Sabbah shares two articles on the cartoons, saying "What a crazy world we live in [...]
[...] inions. Roba Assi is angry at the reaction of the Islamic world, Haitham Sabbah shares two articles on the cartoons, saying "What a crazy world we live in [...]
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