THAT'S A RELIGION???-- A GUEST BLOG ABOUT ALL THE CARTOON & RIOTING HUBBUB
A RELIGION???-- A GUEST BLOG ABOUT ALL THE CARTOON & RIOTING HUBBUB'> A RELIGION???-- A GUEST BLOG ABOUT ALL THE CARTOON & RIOTING HUBBUB'> A RELIGION???-- A GUEST BLOG ABOUT ALL THE CARTOON & RIOTING HUBBUB'> A RELIGION???-- A GUEST BLOG ABOUT ALL THE CARTOON & RIOTING HUBBUB'>> A RELIGION???-- A GUEST BLOG ABOUT ALL THE CARTOON & RIOTING HUBBUB'>
Two of my oldest friends, Sandy Pearlman (1965) and "Gracie" (1967) warned me about a breaking story early last week. I didn't pay it enough attention because it seemed so utterly silly to me: some primitive religionist fanatics acting like children far, far away.
This morning "Gracie" suggested I read an editorial in the TELEGRAPH called "Democracy Has a Gun To Its Head" and the L.A. TIMES' "Drawn Into A Religious Conflict". After some discussion I asked him to do a guest column for DWT. Being a public figure and a celebrated writer-- you're about to see why-- he asked me to use his old Harvard nom de camp. "I don't want to die the Death of a Thousand Cuts," he IM-ed. "These people are lunatics!!!" So with no further ado, I give you... "Gracie"...
I see that certain politicians have issued what may turn out to be the most craven statements of their careers (Bill Clinton, Jack Straw, et al) indicating that they feel the pain of the Muslim rioters who are burning embassies and threatening death to those responsible, in any way whatsoever, for the publication of some not-very-good cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. It's a sin to depict he who is presumably without sin (yeah!), and it is proscribed for Muslims to do so. Now it seems to be a sin for everyone else as well. Apparently, commission of this sin by non-Muslims (!) is rightfully met by the retaliations of mobs shrieking of fire and blood to be heaped upon all those responsible, even unto the destruction of property (and lives) belonging to the governments of the artists who created the cartoons. This cannot stand.
One is reminded of those stories in the local section of the newspaper, wherein a fight breaks out in the pre-dawn hours of a Burger King, and someone is shot and killed by a gunman who justifies the act with such defenses as "He gave me the evil eye," or "he dissed my bitch." Murder is not, by our dear old Western standards, the remedy for these humiliations, but these killings are few, don't attract much attention, and are understood to be some primitive sort of revenge for emasculating the perp, using superstition and macho pride as an excuse. The law, in those countries whose culture derives from Enlightenment principles, does not allow for the Superstition Defense in cases of violence nor for paralyzing threats of revenge and murder by mobs. That is as it should be.
The unspeakable American State Dept. issued an opinion that "Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief." Well, unacceptable to whom? And what are to be the penalties for this unacceptable behavior? It is unacceptable to fart in a nice restaurant, but there are no penalties other than social. Penalties, on the other hand, should be, and are, available against physical demonstrations like rioting and threatening death to the offenders. But when it comes to the scary mob in London promising a repeat of the bus and subway bombings of last summer? That's OK, according to British government official Jack Straw. Jack knows how irretrievably you’ve been damaged upon learning of the existence of these cartoons.
Bill Clinton as well understands your pain at being confronted by such unacceptable drawings. What a pussy.
More rational by far is the statement by a Member of Parliament named Mr. Winnick, who acknowledged that the cartoons were offensive to hundreds of millions of Muslims, but added “it is totally unacceptable that, on British soil, there should be thugs demonstrating for people to be beheaded and actually glorifying the atrocities of July 7. It is to be hoped that prosecutions will follow very quickly indeed." Winnick added that those responsible who were temporarily in Britain should be deported. Bravo.
Bravo as well to the German political leader who made it clear that at the heart of the civilization of Western Europe is freedom of expression, perhaps the most treasured of "civilized" values. One hopes that sensible, non-slavering politicians in Europe (it is too much to hope for in America) will continue to make it clear that governments facing destructive rampages by outraged Muslims can be expected to respond, not in kind, but in declarations and actions of support for free speech and free expression. Those who do not care to live under such governments are welcome to leave at any time and had better consider their possible departure quite seriously; because if fanatics bring destruction in the name of their god or prophet or whatever-the-fuck into the cities of Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Scandinavia, etc., then they are bad citizens, and should be sent to a place where their sentiments have greater resonance among their fellows than in the West. Such as prison, or Saudi Arabia. (Or, they can just be killed and boiled, like those chickens who won't lay eggs in Pride and Prejudice, but I know it makes me one of them to say that, so I won't.)
That's for starters. One would like to hear from at least one American politician, blogger, or Wise Man, NOT merely that we feel the pain that descends upon Muslims when they hear about a cartoon, but that they'd better cool it, because nations created according to Enlightenment principles will not tolerate the injection of despotic, medieval, theocratic, destructive political activities in their midst.
One is reminded of the very hilarious 1955 B-movie "Cult of the Cobra," wherein snoopy soldiers on some Pacific island put on schmattas (like Michael Jackson going to the market in Dubai) and infiltrate a religious ceremony featuring a cobra in a basket which turns into a beautiful priestess (Faith Domergue) upon hearing the appropriate chants. Some dumb American shoots off a flash bulb, there is a riot, the temple is burned, and the surviving soldiers are hustled back to their little lives in New York. Following them, however, is the enchanting/enchanted priestess herself, who seduces the disrespectful soldiers one at a time, turns into a cobra when she gets them alone, fatally envenomates them, and then leaves thru a slightly cracked-open window. Towards the finale, one survivor has this process figured out, and hauls his girlfriend into a taxi to rescue the other survivor from the fangs of Faith; his angry companion wants to know why he's urging on the cab driver so vehemently that she can barely put her makeup on, and so he tells her this story: "Well, when we were stationed on......and I guess we desecrated their religion, so the Cobra In Chief is back here killing us all." Astonished, the hero's girlfriend stares at him, and exclaims "THAT's a religion???"
My sentiments exactly; in other words, keep it as you will, but kindly do us the courtesy of keeping it to yourselves, out of sight.
MONDAY MORNING UPDATE
Gracie sent along an article from THE GUARDIAN for us all to read. These primitive folks get so incensed with all their superstitious nonsense. At least when that artist put the image of Christ in a jar of urine all the far right Christian nutcases did was stage a coup and give us 8 years of George W, Bush and the destruction of American democracy; who could have handled a bunch of rioting Christian fundies?
posted by DownWithTyranny @ 3:11 PM
4 comments
|
Reddit
4 Comments:
FLOGGING THE SIMIAN has a perspective on this well worth taking a look at too-- as well as access to all the "offending" or "unacceptable" cartoons.
My friend David sent me this article from THE NEW YORKER. If you liked Gracie's piece, you might want to take a look at this:
ELECTION DISPATCH
WATCHING HAMAS
by Ari Shavit
Issue of 2006-02-06
Posted 2006-01-30
Shalom Harari is a former Israeli Military Intelligence officer who has been following the rise of Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—for almost a quarter century. An awkward, voluble man of nearly sixty, Harari gained a measure of fame in intelligence circles when he began to tell his colleagues in internal reports that Hamas, founded in 1987, and initially a small outgrowth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, would, with its platform of armed resistance, grassroots politics, and Islamic ideology, come to dominate Palestinian politics. Six years ago, while most of his colleagues were anticipating peace, Harari was rightly predicting a second intifada; that uprising led to the decline of Yasir Arafat’s creation and power base, the Fatah Party.
Last Thursday night, just hours after it was announced that Hamas had crushed Fatah in legislative elections––an event that caused some right-wing Israeli politicians to declare the birth of a terrorist “Hamastan”—Harari welcomed a visitor to his home, in the town of Yavne, near the Mediterranean. While most Israeli and Arab-language news channels were broadcasting scenes of Hamas supporters in the Gaza Strip waving green flags as they celebrated their stunning victory, Harari had tuned in to a seemingly tedious military ceremony on Egyptian state television. “Look at the wives of the generals,” he said. “Many of them are wearing traditional head scarves. This was not so ten years ago. And this tells you where we are heading. When the women of Egypt’s pro-Western military élite are dressed like that, you know that the Hamas victory is not about Palestine. It’s about the entire Middle East.”
Harari, who served as an intelligence officer in the West Bank and then as the adviser on Palestinian affairs to the Israeli Defense Ministry, is still closely connected to his former colleagues, and he said he had heard that, some weeks ago, the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, who was afraid of a Hamas rout at the polls, begged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to exert United States pressure and postpone the scheduled elections. Rice refused, Harari said, and told Abbas to go forward. (A State Department spokesman declined to confirm the details of their conversation.)
And yet Harari would like to believe that the American “mistake”––if that is what it was––was a blessing in disguise. “At least, now we know what we are faced with,” he said. “Now we can make a real diagnosis and understand what is truly the malaise.”
Harari said that he first took note of the Palestinian Islamists in the early nineteen-eighties, shortly after the Iranian revolution, when Islamists won student elections in the prestigious universities of the West Bank. A decade later, Islamists won elections in chambers of commerce in the occupied territories and, more recently, started to win in municipal elections. Now Hamas has taken control of the parliament, he said, and is sure to challenge Abbas for the Presidency.
But look around, Harari said: “In Jordan, too, wherever there are free elections––trade unions, student unions, professional guilds––the Islamists have the upper hand. If the Hashemite kings”––Hussein and Abdullah––“had not played all kinds of tricks, the Islamists would have had a large representation in parliament as well. And when Egypt held its American-inspired parliamentary elections recently, the number of seats won by the Muslim Brotherhood rose fivefold. Throughout the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood is the main power with grassroots support. The Islamists are less corrupt. They are the ones with integrity and compassion. They are of the people and they speak for the people. Today in the Arab world, the choice is clear between democratically elected Islamists and Western-leaning dictators.”
Rising heavily from the sofa in his living room, Harari held up a small prayer carpet he acquired in Gaza almost ten years ago. The rug had been woven by handicapped children in a philanthropic workshop run by Yasir Arafat’s brother, Fathi. “Look at it,” Harari said. “It has a map of the entire land—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. But the land is all green. All Muslim. No place for Jews here, no mention of Israel. Acre, Jaffa, Nablus—no Tel Aviv. Yet this was woven in a Fatah institution. Back in the Oslo era, the Hamas terminology was already taking over Arafat’s movement.
“Now look at these campaign posters,” he went on, gesturing at his collection. “They are all from recent weeks. Notice the difference: while the Hamas ads are calm and tranquil, with no hint of violence, the Fatah ads are full of guns and grenades and jihad rhetoric. While Hamas projects religious dignity, Fatah goes back to its aggressive revolutionary ethos. There was no real talk of peace. The decades of work that Hamas did in mosques and schools and charity organizations transformed Palestinian society from within. What suddenly erupted today has been simmering beneath the surface for a generation. There was not one moderate option that represented the whole Palestinian people. Americans, Europeans, and moderate Israelis like me wanted to believe that Arafat and Abbas were the sole representatives of the Palestinian people, but they were not. Hamas claimed all along that it had the support of forty per cent of the Palestinians, and it was probably right. Among the fundamentalists, the idea that Islam is superior to other religions has become predominant. Long before it took over the Palestinian parliament, Hamas managed to turn what we thought to be a national conflict into a religious war.”
Harari, as a retired brigadier general, admits to being impressed by the resilience of the Hamas leadership in the face of Israeli attacks. The issue, of course, is whether this revolutionary movement, whose charter is devoted to the elimination of Israel, could develop into a ruling party interested in territorial compromise. On that Harari is doubtful. “It would take years before real negotiations could resume,” he said. “An over-all peace agreement is out of the question for a long time. ”
Yet the impact of the Hamas victory, he said, is not local but regional. “As we speak,” he said, “there are growing fears not only in Israel but in Jordan, Egypt, and even Syria. The Hamas victory is a Middle East earthquake. Its shock waves will be felt in every town between Casablanca and Baghdad.”
Gracie asked me to post this update on the cartoon crisis:
February 7, 2006
The Cartoon Crisis Conspiracy and Moderate Muslims
By Thomas Lifson
The cartoon crisis which has left embassies ablaze and sparked riots from Beirut to Bangkok and Jarkarta was a set-up job, planned and executed by a group of Muslim leaders from Denmark in concert with leading lights of the Islamic world. The conspirators used supremely inflammatory phony cartoons never published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten to gin up a campaign of violence and intimidation against Denmark, the EU, and the West.
The instantaneous availability of Danish flags for burning in obscure outposts of the Muslim world suggests a great deal of advance planning.
Those involved in taking a four-month-old incident in far-away Denmark and making it into a crisis roiling the streets of Beirut, Bangkok and Jakarta among other Muslim outposts, include Arab League Secretary Amr Moussa, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi, and Sunni Islam’s most influential scholar, Yusuf al Qaradawi, according to Lorenzo Vidino of the Counter Terrorism Blog.
These are very heavy hitters in the umma, the world community of Muslims.
Two questions raise themselves about this crisis manufactured by a who’s who in the world of Islam: Why was a plan created and put into effect? And why now?
The answer to the second question is likely found in the need to whip up Muslim unity in the face of several severe challenges on the world’s political agenda. As Richard Baehr notes, the new Hamas government of the Palestinian territories needs to continue on life support via cash infusions from the European Union and other donor nations, including the United States. Fear and chastening have usually worked to unlock resources and sympathyin the past, so why not now?
Meanwhile Iran is facing potentially serious consequences from the referral of its nuclear program to the UN Security Council, not to mention a possible military attack on said facilities. Syria and its clients in Lebanon also face ongoing pressure and consequences from the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri. At such a time, anti-Western anger serves to unite the fractious Sunni and Shia elements of the umma, and make the infidels more cautious about the Arab or Muslim street, in case they plan any actual use of force or other compulsion.
These answers to question 2 alone may seem to be sufficient to generate an answer to question 1. But there are longer term, far more important strategic goals being advanced, matters beyond the immediate tactical considerations of hardball geopolitics, no matter how serious these immediate concerns may be.
The battle for moderate Muslims
President Bush has repeatedly made the argument that we must work with and strengthen the forces of “moderate Islam” to combat those who have “hijacked a great religion.” Although it is far too impolitic for any political leader to admit, the real terms of the struggle we face are as follows:
1. A subset of the world’s 1.4 billion or so Muslims wants to destroy freedom of religion and impose Sharia law on all humanity. The Global Caliphate is the name for this ideal state toward which they strive, and for which many will happily sacrifice their lives. Even the smallest estimates number these activists, recently labeled Islamofascists but existing virtually throughout the almost 1400 years of Islam, in the millions.
Ever since Muslim conquerors rode out of Arabia in the century following Muhammad’s death, Islam has sought to spread the True Faith throughout the world. The injunction to force the rest of humanity to choose between conversion and death or Dhimmitude is not merely a matter of saving souls, the power driving Christian evangelism, or compassion for fellow men trapped in suffering, the motive driving Buddhist outreach. Islam as dictated by its scripture is not merely a matter of personal faith, it is also a political system, forever unchangeable, based on the Quran and Hadith.
2. A much larger subset of the umma lacks deep commitment to establishing a Global Caliphate, and watches for signals to guide its behavior toward each other and other faiths.
Most Muslims, like most other human beings, just want to get along and take care of their families and their lives. For them, whatever political and religious system has power where they live is the one they will follow, however grudgingly or enthusiastically their circumstances and values may incline them.
3. There is abundant scripture and tradition sanctioning the use of extreme violence against those who in any way are seen to deny, mock, or insult Muhammad and Islam, or any of their teachings.
4. The only way that Islamofascism can be defeated and the world’s Muslims live in harmony with other faiths in today’s interconnected world is for questions of faith to be discussed without fear. Fundamental questions need to be debated among Muslims about the use of violence against unbelievers and those Muslims who dare question any scriptural teachings. The rest of us must be permitted to express opinions as well.
Muslim immigrant and Dutch Member of Parliament Hirsi Ali (who now lives in hiding under death threats) makes the point convincingly:
"A free discussion of Islam remains rare and dangerous, certainly in the Islamic world, and even in our politically correct times in the West… Apostasy is still punishable by long prison sentences and even death in many Islamic countries such as Pakistan and Iran…”
"You cannot liberalize Islam without criticizing the Prophet and the Koran…You cannot redecorate a house without entering inside.”
Those who seek the same goal as the Islamofascists, the global reign of Islam as the unchallenged religion of humanity, understand Hirsi Ali’s point very well. For them it is essential that ordinary members of the umma never see fundamental questions raised and never start raising them on their own. For once degrees of individual autonomy are granted on spiritual questions, and the right to question and make up one’s own mind becomes established, the top-down pattern of divinely-sanctioned authority inherent in the ideal of a Global Caliphate collapses.
“Moderate” Muslims by definition are people who recognize some limits on scriptural injunctions to spread the faith by violence. Questioning religious injunctions from others and deciding for oneself the best answers is the only way such moderation will spread in the umma.
By seeking to establish a global norm-– a custom enforced by social sanction, not law-– that Sharia restrictions shall apply even in non-Muslim lands, the Islamofascists are engaging in prophylaxis: preventing the “disease” of free discussion and debate over topics they wish to control exclusively from ever gaining traction and possibly spreading to their own constituency.
It is quite understandable that caring, sensitive Westerners seek to avoid offending the religious sensibilities of any serious believers, Muslims included. Such empathy is normally a highly commendable impulse.
But acceding to the demand that those most willing to use violence be allowed to control the discussion and stifle debate, among infidels and Muslims alike, is a betrayal of not only the moderate Muslims, but of all those who hope someday to live in peace with an Islam that grants legitimacy to religious dissent and to the claims of other faiths.
Holy cats, you know Sandy Pearlman, too?! After graduation from West Point, I reported in to Fort Ord, California and rented a house with three other like-minded grads. One of the first things we did to the house was re-tile the shower with BOC's twisted cross around the drain. We stencilled it on the walls. Man, Pearlman and that band made great, great music. It still sounds good -- lean and funny. Thank you Sandy Pearlman.
You do write a lot, I'll have to look around some more to find out who you are.
All the best with your blogging,
-- Steve Barton
Post a Comment
<< Home