[Peace-discuss] Tariq Ali on the cartoon uproar

[Morton K. Brussel]

I'm with him on this, especially the point that the Danish Imams  
should be more violently protesting what's happened to their  
confreres/consoeurs in Iraq and Palestine. --mkb

Published on Monday, February 13, 2006 by the Guardian/UK
This is the Real Outrage
Amid the cartoon furore, Danish imams ignore the tragedies suffered  
by Muslims across the world
by Tariq Ali

The latest round of culture wars does neither side any good. The  
western civilisational fundamentalists insist on seeing Muslims as  
the other - different, alien and morally evil. Jyllands-Posten  
published the cartoons in bad faith. Their aim was not to engage in  
debate but to provoke, and they succeeded. The same newspaper  
declined to print caricatures of Jesus. I am an atheist and do not  
know the meaning of the "religious pain" that is felt by believers of  
every cast when what they believe in is insulted. I am not insulted  
by billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believing there is a God  
and praying to this nonexistent deity on a regular basis.

But the cartoon depicting Muhammad as a terrorist is a crude racist  
stereotype. The implication is that every Muslim is a potential  
terrorist. This is the sort of nonsense that leads to Islamophobia.

Muslims have every right to protest, but the overreaction was  
unnecessary. In reality, the number of original demonstrators was  
tiny: 300 in Pakistan, 400 in Indonesia, 200 in Tripoli, a few  
hundred in Britain (before Saturday's bigger reconciliation march),  
and government-organised hoodlums in Damascus burning an embassy.  
Beirut was a bit larger. Why blow this up and pretend that the  
protests had entered the subsoil of spontaneous mass anger? They  
certainly haven't anywhere in the Muslim world, though the European  
media has been busy fertilising the widespread ignorance that exists  
in this continent.

How many citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really  
was? French philosophers did take humanity forward by recognising no  
external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side.  
Voltaire: "Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes."  
Hume: "The black might develop certain attributes of human beings,  
the way the parrot manages to speak a few words." There is much more  
in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the  
Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the  
generalised anti-Muslim ravings in the media.

What I find interesting is that these demonstrations and embassy- 
burnings are a response to a tasteless cartoon. Did the Danish imam  
who travelled round the Muslim world pleading for this show the same  
anger at Danish troops being sent to Iraq? The occupation of Iraq has  
costs tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Where is the response to that  
or the tortures in Abu Ghraib? Or the rapes of Iraqi women by  
occupying soldiers? Where is the response to the daily deaths of  
Palestinians? These are the issues that anger me. Last year Afghans  
protested after a US marine in Guantánamo had urinated on the Qur'an.  
It was a vile act and there was an official inquiry. The marine in  
question explained that he had been urinating on a prisoner and a few  
drops had fallen accidentally on the Qur'an - as if pissing on a  
prisoner (an old imperial habit) was somehow more acceptable.

Yesterday, footage of British soldiers brutalising and abusing  
civilians in Iraq - beating teenagers with batons until they pass  
out, posing for the camera as they kick corpses - was made public. No  
one can seriously imagine these are the isolated incidents the  
Ministry of Defence claims; they are of course the norm under  
colonial occupations. Who will protest now - the media pundits  
defending the Enlightenment or Muslim clerics frothing over the  
cartoons?

It's strange that the Danish imams and their friends abroad ignore  
the real tragedy and instead ensure that the cartoons are now being  
reprinted everywhere. How will it end? Like all these things do, with  
no gains on either side and a last tango in Copenhagen around a  
mountain of unused butter. Meanwhile, in Iraq, Afghanistan and  
Palestine the occupations continue.

Tariq Ali is the author of Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads  
and Modernity. Email: tariq.ali3 at btinternet.com

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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