|
2006-02-24 Terror Networks
|
|
Good read : "Danish Cartoons, Manipulation or Capitulation?"
|
1
Long (needs to be p. 49-ed) but interesting.Translated from the French: Caricatures danoises : lintolérable manipulation face à linacceptable capitulation
In the past weeks, one of Western democracy's essential principles, freedom of speech, has been under attack. With a number of exclusive informations, we shall attempt here to establish a frame of reference to help understand the context of the current situation.
A short recap of the facts
On September 30, 2005, a Danish newspaper, the Jylland-Posten, published twelve cartoons representing the prophet Muhammad. One showed him wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a lit fuse.
The newspaper chose to commission those cartoons after the Danish author Kare Bluitgen expressed regrets that he could not find an artist who'd dare illustrate his book on Muhammad.
On October 19, 2005, eleven ambassadors from Muslim countries, posted in Denmark, formally protested against the cartoons. At the time, the Danish Prime Minister refused to receive them.
On December 29, 2005, the Arab League condemned the cartoons.
On January 10, 2006, a Norwegian paper, Magazinet, published the cartoons.
On January 23, 2006, a boycott of Danish products was launched from Saudi Arabia.
On February 1st, the French daily France-Soir published the twelve Danish cartoons. The same evening, the paper's managing director, Jacques Lefranc, was fired by the paper's owner, the French-Egyptian businessman Raymond Lakah.
On February 8, the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, published all twelve cartoons as well as a number of cartoons of their own on the subject.
By the end of January, 2006, European embassies as well as cultural centers located in Muslim countries were trashed in the name of the defense of Islam.
Continued from Page 4
It is worth recalling that according to international law, attacks directed against embassies of sovereign countries are a serious matter, engaging the responsibility of the host countries, a point of international diplomacy well noted in the leading article of Le Monde on February 13, 2006.
In the following days, an Italian priest was murdered in Turkey while violent demonstrations against the cartoons in Muslim countries, most notably Pakistan, caused fatalities among the rioters.
By early February, the manipulation behind the international crisis was exposed: the Danish Muslim spiritual leader, Abu Laban, had initiated a specific campaign in a number of Arab countries in order to incite a worldwide boycott of Denmark, then Norway.
It is now proven that the outrage wasn't so much caused by the initial twelve Danish cartoons, but by three additional and gravely insulting cartoons, added by Abu Laban to the portfolio he showed to Arab Muslim authorities. The apocryphal cartoons, designed to add fuel to the fire, showed the Prophet Muhammad as a paedophile; another showed a praying Muslim being sexually assaulted by a dog; and the third represented Muhammad with the facial features of a pig.
The use of inflammatory fake images has been a well-known strategy to whip up the Middle East into a frenzy. One notorious example is of course the fake footage by French State Television France 2 cameraman Talal Abou Ramah purporting to show the alleged death of a Palestinian child at the beginning of the second Intifada, shown on French TV on September 30, 2000, and redistributed worldwide, to predictable results: an exacerbation of anger and violence in the Palestinian territories, whipped into a murderous frenzy by a conveniently made-up "martyr."
Meaning and use of words who and what "Prophet"?
In the affair of the cartoons, it is worth noting how the name Muhammad and its variations, and the title of "prophet" have been used.
Most of the French media (and history books) use the name "Mahomet" when they mean the Prophet of the Muslims. This is a Turkish transcription of "Mohammed", the Arab name of the Muslim prophet.
Since the large majority of French Muslims have their roots in the Maghreb (North Africa), the use of "Mahomet" could be considered inadequate and quite logically replaced by "Mohammed".
Most if not all French media also refer to the "Prophet" when they mean Muhammad. This is reductive and would appear to deny the quality of Prophet to any other prophet of any other religion.
The cartoons: Political context
For several years, France and the Western world in general have experienced crises in which the Western and Muslim view of society have clashed, sometimes violently.
The British publication of the Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in 1989 caused outrage among a number of Muslims who opposed the book. Several of Rushdie's publishers were bodily attacked while Iran's Ayatollah Khomeiny launched a fatwa calling for Rushdie's assassination.
After a few vacillations, the Western world responded firmly, defending Salman Rushdie's freedom of artistic expression, and devoting vast sums for his physical protection. At the time, some Western leaders, such as Jimmy Carter, had already shown an inclination toward appeasement, while Britain's Chief Rabbi seemed to bow to a commonality of narrowly-understood special interests in saying that the book "should not have been published" and demanding laws to "curb the excesses of freedom of speech."
1989 was also the year in which the Islamic veil first appeared in French schools.
In that same year, the popular singer Véronique Sanson was forced to stop singing her song Allah in concerts after a series of violent threats.
A number of provocations were subsequently organized by Islamic organizations, French or foreign-based, with the aim of testing the West's strength of purpose in defending its secular principles and freedom of speech.
A noteworthy analysis of this situation was published by Olivier Roy in Le Monde on February 9, 2006: "The Arab regimes have always tried to use European immigration as a useful diaspora which they can mobilize for national causes. The Maghreb countries consider that even the second French-born generations automatically retain their parents' nationality. Their Consulates act as arbitrators in case of religious tensions, and campaigned heavily to control the elections to the CFCM (Conseil Français du Culte Musulman, the representative body of French Muslims.)
As a result of such interventions, for instance, the Mayor of Lille, Mme Martine Aubry, created segregated women's time slots in her city's taxpayer-funded swimming pools.
In November, 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was slaughtered by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamist who protested his movie denouncing the forced submission of Muslim women.
And so we witnessed, little by little, with the occasional spectacular action bombings in Paris, London, Madrid, New York, Washington, in Israel, in Iraq, in Bali, in Istanbul, in Jerba and many other places a concerted and resolute effort by the Islamists to intimidate the West as well as those within their own societies who opted for a Western way of life.
The outcome of these attacks was, from the Islamist point of view, largely positive, since many Western political leaders have now adopted their reasoning and their dialectic. In France, the former Foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, now uses the Islamist rhetoric. Similarly, the well-connected geostrategist Pascal Boniface now relays a dogma directly inspired from the Arab League line.
Mobilization in Muslim countries
The cartoons-inspired agitation swelled to considerable proportions; with large demonstrations in many Muslim countries. The dictatorial nature of many of the countries where these demonstrations took place mean that they had to be at the very least authorized, and in the main encouraged, by the governments. The religious crisis has evolved into a major political crisis.
It is obvious that the whole "cartoons affair" was whipped up through the distribution of the inflammatory fakes, then used as a political diversion by dictatorial regimes undergoing internal troubles (Syria) or external pressure (Iran.) More on these manipulations from the February 10, 2006 issue of Valeurs Actuelles, or from Claude Moniquet's excellently-sourced ESCIC study.
As for the twelve Danish cartoons, leaving aside the three additional fakes, the one which shocked the most is the drawing in which Muhammad's turban is figured by a bomb.
And yet, don't the terrorists who blow themselves up claim that they do it in the name of Islam?
Isn't it more shocking or insulting for Islam, and its millions of believers, to see murderers invoke it to justify their acts?
Why haven't we heard these believers protesting when their religion was so scandalously hijacked and caricatured?
These are precisely the questions asked by Jihad al-Momani, the editor of the Jordanian weekly Shihan, when he decided to publish three of the Danish cartoons. "Muslims of the world, be reasonable," he wrote. "What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras, or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?"
Mr. al-Momani was since jailed, then released.
He was not alone is taking a courageous stance. Hamadi Redissi, a professor of political science in Tunis, said (quoted in an Agence France Presse February 8, 2006 wire story): "You must not give in. If you yield, the battle is lost. Every pretext will be used; there will be no limit. It is understandable that Muslims are forbidden to insult the Prophet. But in this case, the ban is being extended to you, all Westerners. It's an attempt to impose Sharia, Islamic law, to the entire planet."
These two statements are reassuring. They are in all likelihood representative of the majority of the world's Muslims, who have no desire of being utilized by the Muslim Brotherhood, and who reject such attempts at manipulation.
The cartoons crisis is artificial, based not only on the use of fakes, but also on a disputed, and disputable, interpretation of the Koran. It has been argued that Islam does not forbid the representation of Muhammad. It certainly was not always forbidden in the past.
Furthermore, even if one followed the most rigid interpretation advocated by some imams, it still would only apply to Muslims and shouldn't be imposed to anyone else.
Meanwhile, the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, demanded from Javier Solana, the High Representative for EU Foreign and Security Policy, that bills should be passed against "islamophobia," which in the understanding of the OIC amounts to imposing some areas of Sharia law in Europe. In the same spirit, Mr. Solana was asked, and did not refuse to consider, to have a new code devised for the European media, according to which "specific Muslim sensitivities would be taken into account." A last proposal would have the UN define a code which would set out "the limits of freedom of speech pertaining to religious symbols."
If these proposals are passed, it will amount to a crowning victory for the Muslim Brotherhood and their worldwide strategy of intimidation and blackmail targeted at the West. To be forgiven the so-called Danish cartoons "fault", the Western world will adopt legislation directly inspired by Islamic law in complete contradiction with the European democratic tradition of freedom of speech.
There is no dearth of laws against racism and xenophobia in the European statutes. The goal here is very clearly to forbid any criticism of religion, and to make blasphemy against Islam only actionable by law.
The manipulation campaign was crowned by the scandalous statement by Mr. Ihsanoglu, who said he considered the "cartoons affair" as a "new 9/11" aimed at the Muslim world.
(Until now, we naïvely thought 9/11 had been the work of terrorists invoking Islam to bring the West to its knees...)
The media and the intellectuals in the debate
By and large, there is cause for rejoicing when it comes to the French media and intellectuals. In their large majority, they withstood a number of provocations and attempts at intimidation.
There were exceptions. France 2, the State-run television channel, tried to make us believe that the February 11 Paris demonstration against the cartoons was peaceful which was given the lie by shock footage on the evening news on Arte, the French-German cultural channel, that same evening. You can see some of the images of the February 11 demonstration here, as well as still pictures from anti-cartoons demonstrations, here.
But overall, we can be proud of the way the French media resisted Islamist attempts to manipulate and intimidate the press.
Will it last?
This is far from certain. The flurry of excuses from Denmark, journalistic and political, do not augur well for the future capacity of resistance from many European countries faced with tomorrow's pressures and possible threats.
The Danish editor who first published the cartoons, Carsten Juste, apologized on January 30, 2006, with a letter ending in the following sentence: "Finally, allow me, in the name of my paper, to present my excuses for what happened, and to express my condemnation of all attempts to injure the relevant religions, values or peoples. May Allah accept our commitment."
The Danish cartoons were not published in the United Kingdom, except by a student journal which was pulped before it could reach the stands. An article from Le Monde dated February 11, 2006 explained that since British newsagents are mostly Muslim, British newspapers feared possible lasting reprisals.
It was similarly rumoured that some French newsstands refused to sell the Charlie Hebdo issue reproducing the cartoons, while others ran out in a matter of hours.
The Islamists found unexpected, but steadfast allies on the extreme-Left, whose media and web sites were open to the repressive Islamist line. This alliance is by now a given in the debate. The extreme-Left have already supported the Muslim Brotherhood's recent manipulation campaigns to oppose the law against the hijab in French schools. Similarly, the extreme-Left and the Islamists spoke with one voice in support of the official version denying any religious character to the November, 2005 French riots. Documentation on this unlikely coalition can be found here and here.
Political and trade consequences
The numerous threats against the West, as well as the many Islamist attacks against Europe, Israel, Asia, America and Africa in recent years, are at the root of a fatal temptation toward appeasement among civic and political leaders. The danger today is to repeat the mistakes of Munich in 1938: to apologize, to give up on our basic freedoms and our way of life, rather than inflame an easily-offended Muslim world.
In the year 2006, have Denmark and freedom of speech become the Czechoslovakia of the Thirties, pawns to be abandoned to the Islamists in exchange for a short-term peace?
It's the choice of Jacques Chirac when the French president calls "provocation" the republication of the Danish cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, in a tone reminiscent of the worse speeches of the Collaboration era. But then Mr. Chirac is not new to the habit of capitulation before terrorists who strike France. It's the same Jacques Chirac who opposed the mention of a Judeo-Christian heritage in the preamble to the European Constitution. Why? To please whom? To better open the door for Turkey's entry into the EU?
Similarly, the French Minister for Justice, Pascal Clément, apparently didn't hesitate to try and influence French justice, suggesting that CFCM, the representative French Muslim umbrella body, get an injunction to prevent Charlie-Hebdo's publication. This failed on a technicality, which even obedient magistrates could not let pass.
The US Administration, as well as the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, also clearly sided with the appeasers. An odd choice, until one recalls that their troops on the ground in Iraq are at the front line of the worst terrorist attacks. However, while the White House expressed "understanding" of Muslim anger, its spokesman Scott McClellan also stated: "We would also urge people who are criticizing these cartoons to speak out forcefully against all forms of hate speech, including cartoons and articles throughout parts of the Arab world, which frequently espouse anti-Semitic and anti-Christian views."
Former president Bill Clinton showed no such restraint, telling a conference in Qatar that he feared "anti-Semitism... would be replaced with anti-Islamic prejudice." He condemned "these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam."
Relaying political leaders' surrender, a number of European corporations, notably Carrefour and Nestlé, chose the appeasement path rather than risk a boycott, and withdrew Danish products from their shelves publicly (as Carrefour did in Egypt and in Dubai) or took full-page ads in Arab newspapers to explain, like Nestlé, that they were "not Danish" and that none of their products were "made in Denmark."
In the face of such cowardice, it is time to let these corporations know that their European customers hold democracy and freedom of speech dear, and can chose in turn to patronize their competitors.
Most of the French media did not report Carrefour's and Nestlé's self-instituted boycotts against Danish products, except for the usually well-informed Jeune Afrique and Libération in its issue of February 16, 2006. It should be noted that Carrefour and Nestlé are some of the French media largest advertisers.
The European Union commissioner for justice, freedom and security, Franco Frattini, said: "It should be crystal clear to all that violence, intimidation and the calls for boycotts or for restraints on the freedom of the press are completely unacceptable and will not bring about a constructive discussion between communities. Indeed, no dialogue is possible with those who would threaten fundamental human rights, nor with those who would resort to terror." However, the same Sr. Frattini was soon peddling a "voluntary code" that would help the European media to "self-regulate" to avoid "causing offense." (Sr. Frattini tried to backtrack after this was published in an interview to the London Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph reporter, David Rennie, then published his full notes from the Frattini interview.)
The Iranian Shoah cartoons contest
In answer to the Danish cartoons controversy, an Iranian magazine launched a contest of cartoons on the Shoah.
The contest could have been launched against Denmark, or even against the Christian religion Denmark is a mainly Christian country and its flag consists of a white cross on a red background.
So why didn't the French and international media express more surprise at Iran's anti-Semitic obsession?
Neither does the French press usually report the anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-Western cartoons and editorials which hammer the same intolerant message day after day, month after month, year after year in the Arab press. And no-one thought of criticizing the French media when they published harsh cartoons against Pope Benedict XVI, or at the end of Pope John Paul II's life.
In conclusion
Neither our media nor our political leaders chose to make clear what is really at stake in "the cartoons affair":
- The West is facing a premeditated worldwide destabilization attempt, orchestrated by powerful Islamist organizations, determined to impose Sharia (Islamic Law) all over the planet.
- One of the goals of the "cartoons crisis" is to weaken Europe and to prevent it from protecting herself by restraining immigration.
- European political leaders (Messrs. Chirac, Solana, Blair) reacted extremely weakly to these provocations; but so did many American authorities (the State Department, the former presidents Carter and Clinton.)
- The Islamic organizations behind the crisis are now justified in believing that France and Europe have lost most of their capacity to resist any new destabilization or future terrorist attack.
- These organizations' global agenda includes a series of future provocations and manufactured "scandals", in France, in Europe and elsewhere.
- The recent publication of 2003 photographs from Abu Ghraib, as well as the recent broadcast of 2004 footage of British soldiers roughing up Iraqi civilians, are part of a global strategy designed to fan the flames of Muslim fury worldwide. For the time being, these provocations have not been successful.
- The appeasing media made the choice to hide from their viewers and readers banners brandished at recent demonstrations, with inflammatory slogans such as "Europe, your 9/11 is coming" and "Behead the enemies of islam".
- The same reflex of appeasement and relativism has led to dubious comparisons in the media between strict practitioners of all faiths, as equivalent to radical Islamists. Yet no Roman Catholic Integrist, Evangelical preacher or Orthodox rabbi has so far sent his flock with explosive belts to blow themselves up in planes, restaurants or trains.
The Munich treaty, in which France, Britain and Italy shamefully abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler's tender mercies, was signed on September 30, 1938.
The staged broadcast of young Mohamed Al-Dura's alleged death, which launched a worldwide wave of Islamic violence, was first broadcast by France 2 on September 30, 2000.
The 12 Danish cartoons, whose worldwide geopolitical ripple effect is far from over, were published on September 30, 2005.
Is the date September 30 forever fated to mark the capitulation of democracies in the face of totalitarianism? 
|
Posted by anonymous5089 2006-02-24 12:16||
||
Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07]
Top
|
|
Posted by Bobby 2006-02-24 17:54||
2006-02-24 17:54||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-02-24 18:05||
2006-02-24 18:05||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by DepotGuy 2006-02-24 18:28||
2006-02-24 18:28||
Front Page
Top
|
|
23:44 .com
23:42 Frank G
23:41 Frank G
23:40 smn
23:21 twobyfour
23:11 trailing wife
23:10 trailing wife
23:07 .com
23:06 .com
23:03 C-Low
23:02 trailing wife
22:58 Barbara Skolaut
22:53 Fred
22:51 trailing wife
22:49 CrazyFool
22:44 Bill Nelson
22:42 Vinkat Bala Subrumanian
22:41 Omavith Gleatle8151
22:38 Frank G
22:35 mojo
22:34 Vinkat Bala Subrumanian
22:31 Frank G
22:29 Alaska Paul
22:28 Frank G
|
