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News :: Civil & Human Rights |
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Cartoon controversy hits U. of I. |
Current rating: 0 |
by Jodi S. Cohen, repost Chicago Tribune
(No verified email address) |
10 Feb 2006
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The University of Illinois student newspaper Thursday published six caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have sparked violent protests in the Middle East and Asia. |
Nearly every major U.S. newspaper, including the Chicago Tribune, has not published the cartoons. They were first published in late September by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and they were reprinted in other European publications in recent weeks.
While UN Secretary General Kofi Annan chastised newspapers Thursday that continue to publish the cartoons, Daily Illini editor-in-chief Acton Gorton said he decided to print them so students could better understand the Muslim response.
"All across this nation, editors are gripped in fear of printing ... for fear of the reaction. As a journalist, this flies in the face of everything I hold dear. By refusing to print these editorial cartoons, we are preventing an important issue from being debated by the public," Gorton wrote in a column next to the drawings.
The cartoons portray the prophet as a terrorist, including one that depicts Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb and another showing him turning away suicide bombers from paradise because, he says, heaven ran out of virgins to be given to martyrs. The cartoons have led to protests in Denmark, Iran, Lebanon, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
In a letter to the Daily Illini to be published Friday, U. of I. Chancellor Richard Herman wrote that he is "saddened" that the newspaper decided to publish the cartoons. He suggested that the editors could have informed the public by giving readers a Web link to the cartoons instead.
"I believe that the DI could have engaged its readers in legitimate debate about the issues surrounding the cartoons' publication in Denmark without publishing them," he wrote. "It is possible, for instance, to editorialize about pornography without publishing pornographic pictures."
The Tribune has chosen not to publish the cartoons because editors decided the images inaccurately depicted Islam as a violent religion, and that it was not necessary to print the cartoons in order to explain them to readers.
U. of I. senior Ehav Yasin, a Muslim student from Carpentersville, said he was upset by the Daily Illini's decision. |
This work is in the public domain |
Comments
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Re: Cartoon controversy hits U. of I. |
by Dawn
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
10 Feb 2006
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Mr. Gordon's decision to publish the cartoons was the correct decision. If we are to tout the ideals of Freedom of Speech and the idea that news is meant to inform so that we can come to our own conclusions through intelligent and informed debate, we must publish these political cartoons.
I spent a few days reading articles about the cartoons, but could not figure out what the controversy was about because I had not *seen* the articles in question. I could not formulate an opinion without all the information.
Thank you DI for publishing the content in question. It *is* controversial, just as most political cartoons are. They are supposed to be. They are meant to create controversy and dialogue. |
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Re: Cartoon controversy hits U. of I. |
by wayward
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
10 Feb 2006
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By this logic, should newspapers publish examples of child pornography so that people can see what's wrong with it? |
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Re: Cartoon controversy hits U. of I. |
by Luz
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
10 Feb 2006
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People always support free speech except when their ox is being gored... |
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Re: Cartoon controversy hits U. of I. |
by Mink!
mink (nospam) tcp.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
10 Feb 2006
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So how about that dust-up over "I hate Pam" a few years back? |
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Re: Cartoon controversy hits U. of I. |
by wayward
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Feb 2006
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People always support free speech except when their ox is being gored...
Small but important distinction - I'm not saying that it should be illegal for the DI to print the cartoons. However, I think it was cheap and tasteless. It's like, "Look, we can get lots of visibility by running images that many other papers deem too offensive to print! Even if we can't quite pull off the journalism thing, we can always go for the shock jock effect." I don't exactly find this impressive. |
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Re: Cartoon controversy hits U. of I. |
by Luz
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Feb 2006
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Now I can agree with you, wayward. Anyone who wanted to see those cartoons could easily find them on the internet. That's what I did. It was gratuitous and pointless for the Daily Illini to print them as well. The DI editor seems to have a big ego and poor judgement. It's not a free speech issue at all, but rather one of human decency. People on all sides of the political and religious spectrum can learn a lesson from this if they remove their blinders. |
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DI Full of Bull |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Feb 2006
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In an editorial published that day right next to the cartoons, the DI's staff mused that they longer need to worry about covering breaking news, because of advances in the availability of such news via the internet, etc. -- something about how the DI was going to give you the local angle and that is what they do best nowadays.
Since the cartoons ARE widely and easily available via the internet, there was really no reason to reprint them in the DI, unless they wanted to be sure that local Muslims are locally insulted by a bunch of two-bit local college kids.
The only thing "Dawn" has right is that they were published "to create controversy" as they could just have easily had dialogue without reprinting the cartoons.
As for dialogue, the last time most reasonably thoughful people started a dialogue with a series of insults was on the playground in junior high.
This is not about "free speech." This is about the immaturity and poor judgment of a DI staff that increasingly is nothing more than an echo chamber for the right wing blogosphere. I suppose we'll next be treated to caricatures and stereotypes from various KKK and neo-nazi rags. I'm sure that's a sure fire way to start another such "dialogue" also. But I suppose once you're done mascotizing Native Americans, there is nowhere to go but down. |
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When a cartoon is not a cartoon |
by via the Internet
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Feb 2006
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What is funny about a demonized prophet & terrorists?
Behrooz Ghamari
February 4, 2006
iranian.com
Last September Jyllands-Posten, a Danish conservative daily, published twelve cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. The cartoons were the paper’s response to a Danish author’s complaint that he could not find an artist who would be willing to draw illustrations for a book on the life of Prophet Mohammad. The paper ran twelve cartoons, in all of which the Prophet was depicted in derogatory ways. One cartoonist portrayed him as an apparent terrorist with a bomb-shaped turban, and in another he appears above the clouds warning the apparent martyrs that heaven had ran out of virgins.
Three weeks ago, the cartoons were reprinted in Magazinet, a Christian evangelical newspaper in Norway, but later the newspaper decided to withdraw the cartoon from its website in the face of death threats. While the first run of the cartoons sparked some protest in Denmark, the reprints generated intense outrage in Muslim communities around Europe, and in the last few days, in many Muslim countries. Muslim groups in Europe and in the Middle East have called for a boycott of Danish products, and have demanded an apology from the offending newspapers. The protests that began as peaceful condemnation has now turned violent and has escalated into an international crisis.
One of the cartoons, drawn by Lars Refn, prophesized the “seriousness of the Muslim threat to free speech.” Refn drew a student named Mohammad in front of a chalkboard on which is written in Farsi “Jyllands-Posten’s journalists are all reactionary provocateurs.” The paper has since apologized for offending Muslims, but maintains that “the 12 drawings were sober. They were not intended to be offensive, nor were they at variance with Danish law, but they have indisputably offended many Muslims for which we apologize.”
But now Jyllands-Posten’s apology and the Danish government’s damage-control efforts are becoming irrelevant, as other European papers and governments, led by the French in their assiduous thirst for freedom, have come once again to the defense of freedom of speech. On Wednesday, February 1, France Soir published the twelve original cartoons and added an additional one in which Buddhist, Jewish, Christian holy figures console the Muslim Prophet, “Don’t worry Muhammad, we’ve all been caricatured here.”
Publications in Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands have all reprinted these cartoons in support of free speech. One Dutch commentator observed, “we fought for freedom of religion and we need to defend it!”
While most pundits have tried to sell the case as a high-minded defense of free expression, I don’t buy it! At what point does an expression transgress the boundaries of decency and become hate-speech, and therefore not protected by laws or basic principles of freedom?
Denmark is home to more than 200,000 Muslim immigrants whose very presence in Danish society has fueled anti-immigrant sentiments. This of course is not a Danish problem. Rather than a sudden urge to defend the freedom of religion, the reprinting of the cartoons by many newspapers in different parts of Europe suggests that the Danes are not alone in their disdain of their Muslim minorities.
The Europeans share a skepticism that Muslims have no intention of assimilating into their societies and will exploit the generous European systems of social support without sharing the social values that come with it. In my opinion, the cartoons are not about Islam or the Prophet Muhammad. They are about Muslims whose presence disturbs European notions of the political, cultural, and aesthetic order.
Admittedly, a fine line separates hate-speech from free speech. This line becomes thinner when the speech is expressed in cartoons or other forms of visual art. Controversies arise when symbols and signs are used to humiliate a group of people who have been degraded and dehumanized in the past, or do not presently have the same means and powers to disseminate their own symbolic language. A cartoon ceases to be comic if the same groups of people who find that cartoon amusing have violated the dignity of its subject.
Western societies typically uphold the belief that expressions which incite violence and are generally regarded as demagogic, should not enjoy legal and political protection.
We have many examples of these ugly and degrading racial expressions in American society that ended only after decades of struggle and protest. I have no doubt that no one would think twice about suppressing reprints of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda in American or European papers. Indeed, in June 2003, responding to pressures from several prominent Jewish groups, the Chicago Tribune issued an official apology for printing an offensive cartoon by Dick Locher. It depicted a hook-nosed figure of Ariel Sharon gazing at rows of dollar bills that President Bush is carefully laying down across a bridge called “MIDEAST GULCH.”
The Sharon figure exclaims, “On second though, the pathway to peace is looking a bit brighter.” The confident Yasser Arafat awaits him on the other side. It is not hard to see the anti-Semitic insinuation of the cartoon, as it invokes a stereotypical portrayal of “the avaricious Jew” who would do any deed for money. Anything that resembles Nazi propaganda rightfully generates anxiety and anger among Jewish people. There is no satire in cartoons which remind us how historic degradation of European Jews justified their massacre.
The Chicago Tribune had to apologize and it did. And no one accused Jewish groups who demanded an apology of intolerance. Nobody declared that Jewish groups did not respect the freedom of expression. Not a single newspaper in Europe or North America would reprint a Nazi cartoon with a caption that reads: “The God of the Jew is Money. And to gain money, he will commit the greatest crimes... ” They should not, because this is not a matter of free expression.
To give another example, when in 1993, the American actor Ted Danson appeared in black face at a Friars Club roast of the actress Whoppi Goldberg, there was an outcry in the black community about his insensitivity to the history of black oppression and how minstrel acts intended to dehumanize blacks. The Friars Club apologized and Danson suffered career setbacks for his poor judgment.
Another example of demagogic expressions and demands for apology: Today there is an ongoing struggle over the usage of Native American mascots for American sports teams. The imagery and actions associated with these mascots reinforce stereotypes of indigenous peoples as “demonic,” “aggressive,” and “war-mongering.” They turn the image of a native warrior into a savage caricature.
Mascots turn people into mere historical objects without contemporary relevance. The supporters argue that mascots entertain audiences and should not become the subject of political debates and historical investigation. Fun is fun and by definition should not be taken seriously. For native peoples who were prohibited by Europeans from performing their own rituals in public, seeing whites dancing with colored faces and heads decorated with eagle feathers does not evoke humor or entertainment.
As one Native American leader commented: “We experience [the use of Native mascots] as no less than a mockery of our cultures. We see objects sacred to us - such as eagle feathers, face painting and traditional dress - being used not in sacred ceremony, or in any cultural setting, but in another culture's game... Yes, we are proud of the warriors who fought to protect our cultures from forced removal and systematic genocide and to preserve our lands from the greed of others. We are proud, and we don't want them demeaned by being "honored" in a sports activity on a playing field.” (See: Barbara Munson -- http://www.tolerance.org/teach/activities/activity.jsp?ar=46)
That was why in April 2003, the US Commission on Civil Rights called on school and professional sports teams to eliminate all derogatory symbols that trivialize Native American religions and cultures.
The case of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad is no exception to the public recognition of the difference between freedom of expression and hate-speech. What is considered to be demagogic and what is satirical, what is regarded as degrading and what is entertainment, what expressions ought to be prohibited and what is permissible are political questions with historically specific answers.
Those in Europe who think that they need to fight a battle for free speech and freedom of religion need to think harder and more reflexively about whose war they are fighting and who their enemies are. A bomb-turbaned Prophet turns all Muslims into terrorists. One must be free to satirize suicide bombers or terrorists of any persuasion. But lampooning Islam as inherently intolerant and Muslims as terrorist is neither wise nor commendable. In the American context, no one would call the spectacle of whites mocking blacks humorous.
Muslims who turn to violence in order to register their displeasure with the cartoons only turn themselves into the same caricatures against which they protest. Demanding an apology or boycotting consumer products are legitimate means of expression so long as they do not trade in words for bullets. Fists are the strongest when they are waved in the air, not when they land on the opponents face.
Instead of congratulating themselves for upholding the fine tradition of the freedom of speech, and savoring their prophesy of “Muslim Rage,” the French, British, Germans, Dutch, and Belgians shall recall Algeria, India, the Congo, and Indonesia. The Jyllands-Posten scandal is not about a cartoon, it is rather a reminder of a postcolonial world that has not yet come to terms with its own past.
About
Behrooz Ghamari is a professor of history and sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the forthcoming book Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran.
From: http://www.iranian.com/Ghamari/2006/February/Cartoon/index.html
BTW, you can go to this webpage and see that some of the cartoons are reprinted there, but in the context of other racist stereotypes, which is an appropriate way to go about starting a useful dialogue about the dangers of such "free speec' rather than worrying about some non-credible threat to journalistic freedom to publish. ML |
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Re: Cartoon controversy hits U. of I. |
by nate
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
11 Feb 2006
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Interesing company the editorial staff of DI keeps - or maybe not so suprising. Read on.
Denmark and Jyllands-Posten: The background to a provocation
--Peter Schwarz, WSW
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/feb2006/denm-f10.shtml
The taz newspaper, which has close links to the German Greens, declared the conflict was about reducing the influence of all religions, including Christianity, “to a tolerable measure.” In Spiegel.online, Henryk M. Broder condemned the halfhearted apology made by the publishers of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, which unleashed the caricature controversy, as an “example of how democratic public opinion capitulates to a totalitarian standpoint.”
An examination of the prevailing political conditions in Denmark reveals how bogus such arguments are. One would be hard pressed to find another European country where political changes over the past few years have found such a clear—and repellent—expression.
In a country renowned for its tolerance and openness, the social crisis and the betrayals carried out by the old working class organizations have opened the way for the emergence of political forces which systematically encourage xenophobia and racism. The newspaper Jyllands-Posten has played a prominent role in this process.
Last autumn Jyllands-Posten assigned 40 prominent Danish caricaturists to draw the Prophet Muhammad. Twelve responded and the results were published on September 30. The project was deliberately designed to provoke.
According to the cultural editor of the newspaper, Flemming Rose, it was aimed at “testing the limits of self-censorship in Danish public opinion” when it comes to Islam and Muslims. He added: “In a secular society, Muslims have to live with the fact of being ridiculed, scoffed at and made to look ridiculous.”
When the anticipated reaction by the Muslim community failed to arise, the newspaper continued its campaign, determined to create a full-scale scandal. After a week had gone by without protest, journalists turned on Danish Islamic religious leaders who were well known for their fundamentalist views and demanded: “Why don’t you protest?” Eventually, the latter reacted and alerted their co-thinkers in the Middle East.
At this point the head of the Danish government, Andres Fogh Rasmussen, and the xenophobic Danish People’s Party, which is part of the ruling coalition, swung into action. Fogh Rasmussen demonstratively turned down appeals by concerned Arab ambassadors for talks to clarify the issue. Even after 22 former Danish ambassadors appealed to the prime minister to hold discussions with the representatives of Islamic states, Rasmussen maintained his stance, arguing that “freedom of the press” could not be a topic for diplomatic discussion.
The chairperson of the Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjaersgaard, insulted Danish Muslims who complained about the caricatures, publicly denouncing them as national traitors because they supposedly placed their religious beliefs above free speech.
From the start, the campaign had nothing to do with “free speech” and everything to do with the political agenda of the Fogh Rasmussen government, comprising of a coalition of right-wing neo-liberals and conservatives, together with the Danish People’s Party.
The latter rose to prominence in the 1990s when all of the country’s bourgeois parties—including the then-governing Social Democrats—responded to a mounting social crisis with xenophobic campaigns. The People’s Party declared at the time that Islam was a “cancerous ulcer” and “terrorist movement.” Kjaersgaard, notorious for her racist outbursts, declared that the Islamic world could not be regarded as civilized. “There is only one civilization, and that is ours,” she said.
Fogh Rasmussen, at that time the chairman of the right-wing Venstre party, adopted much of the racist demagogy of the People’s Party. In the election campaign of 2001he demanded, among other things, that “criminal foreigners” be thrown out of the country within 48 hours.
His campaign utilized an election poster featuring pictures of Muslim criminals to suggest that all Muslims were violent. Venstre won the election and, together with the traditional conservative party, formed a minority government, which was supported by the extremist People’s Party.
Danish politics lurched far to the right. The country’s immigration laws were drastically tightened, while spending for development aid was cut back. In the Iraq war, which was opposed by the majority of the Danish population, Fogh Rasmussen lined up behind the Bush administration and sent a contingent of Danish troops to help occupy the country.
The campaign unleashed by Jyllands-Posten is a continuation and intensification of this reactionary trajectory, aimed at bolstering the xenophobic policies of the government and strengthening its support for US imperialism.
The caricatures themselves are patently racist. They suggest that every Muslim is a potential terrorist. Reports and pictures of outraged Muslims protesting the defamation of their prophet are used to reinforce this slander.
Official politics and the media throughout Europe are increasingly preoccupied with such agitation. Muslims are collectively held responsible for acts carried out by terrorist groups, although they bear no responsibility for them. In the German state of Baden-Württemberg, Muslims seeking to stay in the country must answer a catalog of questions probing their religious beliefs.
Television news presenters regularly malign Muslims for being prepared to protest against the defamation of Muhammad, but not against acts carried out by terrorist groups in the name of Islam, suggesting that they secretly support such acts.
A campaign is emerging to depict Islam as an inferior culture that is incompatible with “Western values.” There are clear parallels here to the anti-Semitic caricatures that were spread in the 1930s by fascist newspapers such as the Nazi Stürmer. The depiction of Jews as sub-humans served as the ideological preparation for the Holocaust.
Today the systematic defamation of Muslims is being used to prepare public opinion for new wars against countries such as Iran and Syria—wars which will be even more brutal than the Iraq war, and could well involve the use of nuclear weapons.
It is no coincidence that it was the Jyllands-Posten that took up this initiative. The newspaper is notorious for its declarations of support for the Nazis in the 1930s, and has played a key role in Denmark’s recent shift to the right.
With editorial offices in the rural area of Arhus, Jyllands-Posten remained a relatively insignificant provincial newspaper until the beginning of the 1980s. At that time it began an aggressive policy of expansion. It bought up smaller regional and local newspapers and launched a price war with the two established newspapers in the Danish capital—Berlingske Tidende and Politiken—and rapidly built up its circulation to 170,000, becoming the biggest circulation newspaper in the country.
In the 1990s the decidedly conservative paper increasingly developed into a mouthpiece for openly xenophobic, right-wing forces. Nearly a quarter of the editorial board was dismissed, and the quality of the paper sank as its aggressiveness rose.
Shortly before the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, Jyllands-Posten ran a headline reading, “Islam is the Most Belligerent.” The newspaper ran an exposé about an alleged Muslim death-list of Jewish names—until it emerged that the whole thing was a fabrication.
One year ago the editor-in-chief resigned because the newspaper carried a report, in the midst of an election campaign, alleging the systematic abuse of welfare rights by asylum-seekers. The sensational charges were published against his will.
The notorious right-wing sympathies of Jyllands-Posten are no secret. The Süddeutsche Zeitung describes it as “a newspaper with an almost missionary zeal, boasting that it has been successful in breaking the ideological and political grip of left-wing liberals over Danish society.” According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, it would be “an inadmissible simplification” to equate Jyllands-Posten with the People’s Party, but they are certainly “fellow combatants in the broader sense.”
The FrankfurtRundshau writes: “Connoisseurs of Danish media will note with no little irony that it is precisely Jyllands-Posten which is now considered to be a beacon for free speech, i.e., the most right-wing of the Danish newspapers, which normally thrashes anyone who dares to advance a different point of view.” |
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'Muslims Angry at War on Terror, Not Cartoons' |
by Baradan Kuppusamy
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Feb 2006
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KUALA LUMPUR - Delegates at an international conference here entitled 'Who Speaks for Islam? Who speaks for the West', were inclined to blame the ferocity of reactions against the cartoon controversy, which gripped the world this past week, on the 'war on terror' in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The cartoons, depicting Prophet Mohammad as a terrorist and first published in a Danish newspaper, dominated the two-day conference which ended Saturday. The timing of the meet was a matter of coincidence.
Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, current chairman of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC), urged Muslims and the western world to join hands against fringe elements in both societies that, he said, are ''hell bent on keeping us apart''. He called for bridges to be built so that ''the West will speak for Islam and Muslims speak for the West''.
Badawi declared possession of the cartoons illegal. Meanwhile, the Borneo-based paper Sarawak Tribune, which reprinted the cartoons, was shut down. The paper had to apologise for what it called an editorial oversight.
Badawi blamed the ''hegemony of the centres of power in the West'' for the widening chasm between Islam and the West. ''They (Muslims) see the subjugation of Palestine as an indirect concretisation of this hegemony. They see hegemony manifested directly in the attack upon Afghanistan and in the occupation of Iraq.''
At the same time, said Badawi, the West wrongly equated Islam with violence. ''They think Osama bin Laden speaks for the religion and its followers. Islam and Muslims are linked to all that is negative and backward,'' he said, adding that the United States-led 'war-on-terror' has widened the chasm.
Badawi told delegates from 100-odd countries that ''those who deliberately kill non-combatants and the innocent; those who oppress and exploit others; those who are corrupt and greedy; those who are chauvinistic and communal,'' cannot speak on behalf of Islam.
''We must acknowledge that in the West, principles such as freedom and equality have found concrete expression in the rule of law, public accountability, acceptance of political dissent and respect for popular participation. However, for a lot of Muslims today, this is not the face of the West that they see,'' he told an audience of academics and policymakers.
Anger against the cartoons has been muted in this multi-ethnic country that officially practices 'Hadhari', a moderate form of Islam on the appeal of which, Badawi enjoys a solid electoral mandate, controlling nearly 90 percent of the 217 seats in parliament.
Prominent among the foreign delegates was former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami who, in comments to reporters, said that he hoped lessons had been drawn from the caricature controversy. ‘'The Muslim world has reacted to this issue and if this policy continues, we will be engaging in continuous violence,'' he warned.
While Malaysian newspapers were full of the rage that swept the Muslim world over the week, none of the anger was reflected in this country's many mosques.
Badawi himself expressed sadness at the mischief the cartoons have caused and went out of his way to say that Malaysia would not boycott Danish products unlike many other Middle Eastern countries.
The only official sign of discomfort was when Danish ambassador Borge Petersen was 'summoned' and told that Malaysia deplored publication of such insensitive cartoons.
Denmark has, in fact, requested Malaysia's help in restraining Muslim rage at the European nation whose media first published the caricatures of Prophet Mohammad but was quickly reprinted by media in other countries.
Malaysian foreign minister Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar said, on the sidelines of the conference, that he took a telephone call from his Danish counterpart Per Stig Moller seeking Malaysian support in containing the rage.
Albar vowed that the fires raging around the world over the cartoons ''would not find kindle wood here in Malaysia.''
Leading Malaysian Islamic thinker Chandra Muzaffar credits the quietness in this country to a lack of fear and insecurity among Malay Muslims.
''Unlike the other Muslim countries caught in the eye of the storm, Malaysia is free of the hegemonic consequences of big powers that are experienced by Afghanistan and Iraq for example,'' said Muzaffar, president of the International Movement for a Just World or JUST, a voluntary agency dedicated to inter-ethnic peace.
''Malaysia is relatively free of the negative consequences of hegemonic trends,'' he told IPS.
Muzaffar said social justice, religious harmony and reasonably good governance in Malaysia are the key reasons why the sense of loss and deep grievances, seen in other Muslim societies, is absent here.
''Muslims here don't feel dispossessed or have the same fear that Islam is under threat as Muslims in other countries like Palestine or Afghanistan and Iraq,'' he said.
Muzaffar agreed with Badawi's view that the war on terror has aggravated Muslim insecurity. ''Western media images and commentaries have reinforced the erroneous equation of Islam with terror. This explains why some of the offensive cartoons of the Prophet published in the Jyllands-Posten made that link,'' he said.
''But equating Islam and Muslims with violence and terror is not new. It has been going on for a long time,'' Muzaffar said.
''What Muslims have been witnessing in recent years is the stark consequences of global hegemony reflected in the slaughter of innocent Muslims in Palestine and Iraq, the humiliation of occupation and subjugation, the treachery of double standards and the machinations of exclusion and marginalisation,'' he said.
''It explains to a great extent the explosion of violent fury in different parts of the Muslim world over the abusive cartoons. It is anger that is driven by more than their boundless love for Mohammad,'' he said.
At the close of the conference, Malaysia's deputy prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said the majority of mankind had allowed a few people to voice biased opinions because ''we have allowed them to speak for us''.
''The terrorist who straps a bomb to his chest and blows up a shopping mall,'' does not speak for Islam any more than does a ''newspaper editor who sees fit to ridicule a holy prophet who is venerated by more than one billion people around the globe,'' said Razak.
Razak dismissed talk of a 'clash of civilisations', saying this need not happen if fundamental fault lines between the Muslim and the Western worlds were adequately addressed.
Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service
http://www.ipsnews.net |
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Palace Coup at DI |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Feb 2006
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Looks like the DI's decision to publish the cartoons was a decision made by the editor in chief, Acton Gorton, and the opinions page editor, Chuck Prochaska. Supposedly, "editorials represent the majority opinion" of the DI editorial board, which consists of five other people besides Gorton and Prochaska. Apparently, these right wing zealots missed the ACT question on how to figure out what number constitutes the majority of a seven-person board.
In any case, things are starting to fall apart in an editorial in today's (Feb. 13) DI that DOES apparently represent the majority. It repudiates Gorton and Prochaska's decision, "made by two people behind the backs" of the rest of the board.
Somehow, Gorton and Prochaska managed to include a dissent today that was nearly as long as the majority's opinion, again demonstrating that they're apparently still holding the editorial page hostage from more mature and thoughful discussion on many issues, not just the cartoons.
Most people who have get caught with their pants down in a fit of personal chicanery have the good graces to resign to save themselves more embarassment than they've already caused themselves and their organization. Apparently, Gorton and Prochaska are taking their cues from the White House, which continues to wallow in shameless denial long after it's been caught enmeshed in webs of lies that stretch from the 2000 election to Enron to September 11 to conducting aggressive war to Abu Ghraib to looking the other way as New Orleans floods and Cheney shoots up his hunting companions.
Hold on Acton and Chuck, it's sure to blow over....not! |
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Re: Cartoon controversy hits U. of I. |
by T. White
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Feb 2006
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I stand behind those who chose to print the cartoons in The Daily Illini. This is an excercise of free speech, and it should be thought of as just that. I believe that we have the right to see these cartoons. I myself have seen them. I don't like them, but we have a right to see them nonetheless. Because of the controversial nature of these comics, it is important that the public not only can read others' opinions on them, but also see the comics. This allows us to make our own decisions and allows for true informed debates over the cartoons themselves and the context they are displayed in.
I am extremely proud of those who printed them in the Daily Illini and will stand firmly behind them as well.
-T. White |
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Sure It Is |
by jus passin thru
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
24 Feb 2006
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Sure, this is nothing but a tempest in a teapot about free speech. Just like the Iraq war was all about Saddam's (non-existent) WMD's, I suppose.
Can't conservatives come up with any better defense than sticking to their pre-determined and none too accurate -- but always self-serving -- agendas? |
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