[Peace-discuss] re: Those cartoons of the Prophet

[Tom Mackaman]

Reply to Mort's article from Z:  from http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/feb2006/cart-f08.shtml  "Death toll mounts in worldwide protests against anti-Muslim cartoons"
   
  "It is noteworthy that those who have rallied to the defense of the right-wing anti-immigrant newspaper in Denmark that first published the racist cartoons have had little to say about the violence of repressive governments across the Middle East against their own people registering outrage over the widely disseminated insult to their religion.".... and
   
  "Let us pose a question to the crusaders for press freedom. Suppose, on Martin Luther King Day last month, a daily newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama had published a derogatory and racist cartoon of the murdered civil rights leader—something that could only serve to legitimize the revival of racial stereotyping and repression.
   
  "Suppose further, that this provocative cartoon resulted in angry and even violent protest demonstrations, and that, in “solidarity,” major daily newspapers in the United States proclaimed it their duty to defend “press freedom” by reprinting the overtly racist cartoon on their front pages? What would be the reaction of those who are today lining up behind the right-wing provocateurs in the name of “press freedom”?
   
  "In the heyday of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, American newspapers outside the South would, on occasion, take note of such stereotypes in the Southern press as proof of the ingrained racism of the entire Southern ruling elite. Today, by contrast, press barons are lined up in defense of a right-wing racist provocation against the Muslim population of Western Europe, whose conditions of life, including poverty, job discrimination, housing segregation, police harassment and denial of democratic rights, greatly resemble those of black Americans in the old South.
   
  "There is no more “democratic” value in the anti-Muslim cartoons than in the Holocaust-denying screeds of anti-Semitic British author David Irving. But today, as Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul observed aptly, hostility against Muslims has replaced anti-Semitism as a staple of the European and American press."
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