Posted on 02/05/2006 11:46:47 AM PST by lancer
WASHINGTON: Tempered reaction among US Muslims to the row over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) can be partly attributed to their integration into American society, community leaders say.
Fear of reprisals and the fact that the offending cartoons have not been reprinted in any major US newspapers may also have contributed to the lack of street protests and violence, they add. “There is better integration here of communities into the general society than in Europe where integration has not been very effective,” Kareem Shora, of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said.
“This (controversy) echoes the historical problems that Europeans had with anti-Semitism,” he added. “Now Islamophobia seems to be an acceptable form of public discourse in Europe.”
Osama Siblani, publisher of The Arab American News in the state of Michigan, which has the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Middle East, said he believes the country’s 6-7mn Muslims had not taken to the streets to express outrage in part because of fear of retaliation by authorities.
“People are scared,” he said. “We have a government saying it is spying on us and it’s scaring the living daylights out of people.
“But they still feel the same about this issue and are very angry.” Siblani blasted the cartoons as proof of Western insensitivity to Islam and double standards in dealing with the Muslim world. “The other day the president of Iran made a statement about the Holocaust and the whole world condemned him,” he said. “Here you have a statement offending 1.3bn people around the world. Why don’t we see condemnation?”
“There is one set of rules for the West and another set for everyone else,” he added. “Where do we draw the line on your freedom of speech and hurting my feelings and principles and irritating the hell out of me?”
Several community leaders warned that the crisis could easily escalate if the West fails to fully grasp the reasons behind the uproar over the cartoons, which have been printed in several European newspapers and which Muslims regard as blasphemous.
Islamic tradition bans depictions of the Prophet (pbuh). “Instead of encouraging constructive integration, this (cartoon controversy) does nothing but add to the divide and perception that there is an us-versus-them mentality,” Shora said.
He said ADC planned to meet next week with members of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCRIF), a government body that promotes religious tolerance, to discuss the uproar.
Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said he hoped the controversy would not escalate any further and that reason would win over violence.
“We hope and pray that cool heads will prevail in the next few days and weeks as this controversy comes to our shores,” he said. “That extremism and bigotry will not be allowed to shape the debate between America and the Muslim world.”
The United States backed Muslims on Friday against European newspapers that printed the blasphemous cartoons in a move that could help America’s battered image in the Islamic world.
Inserting itself into a dispute that has become a lightning rod for anti-European sentiment across the Muslim world, the United States sided with Muslims outraged that the publications put press freedom over respect for religion.
“These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims,” State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said in answer to a question.
“We all fully recognise and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.”
The United States stopped short of urging US media not to republish the cartoons.
American Muslims welcomed the position despite some misgivings that unpopular US policies such as the Iraq war and perceived pro-Israeli stances in the Palestinian conflict meant there was little America could do to repair its image.
The Hamilton Spectator
Hamilton, Ontario
editorial cartoons
By Dianne Rinehart
The Hamilton Spectator
Feb 4, 2006
We are all Danes now, as Paul Belien, editor of the Brussels Journal
said in his editorial this week.
Or we should be.
Because today Denmark is taking a beating for us all, fighting for press
freedoms that can mean the difference between democracy and
totalitarianism, between free speech and terror, between sleeping at
night and being afraid of the knock on the door, between light and despair.
And that tiny democracy is doing so under threat of economic sanctions
-- and death for its citizens and those of other Western countries where
news media have rallied to the defence of free expression.
Think I'm overstating the danger of the outpourings of threats, violent
protests and intimidations from radical Muslims over the Danish
government's refusal to shut down Jyllands-Posten -- a newspaper in the
Free World, after all -- after it published 12 cartoons depicting
Mohammed, including some that appeared to be commenting on terrorism
carried out in the name of religion?
Consider this news sampling: Fatah gunmen took over the French cultural
centre headquarters in the Gaza strip to protest the refusal,
Jyllands-Posten received bomb threats, its cartoonists death threats,
Libya announced it would close its embassy in Denmark, and Pakistan's
ambassador -- eeek! --urged the Danish prime minister to "penalize the
cartoonists!"
Meanwhile one Muslim leader noted if Satanic Verses author Salmon
Rushdie had been killed for his writings about Islam -- "this rabble who
insult our Prophet Muhammad ... would not have dared to do so."
This is a powder keg of violence, we should note, created by Danish
Muslims who enjoy Danish freedoms -- including the rights to pen their
own opinions for publication and to hold protest rallies, if they'd
cared to -- who toured Arab countries in January denouncing Denmark and
demanding a boycott of Danish products.
(They got that. Arla Foods, Denmark's biggest exporter to Arab
countries, announced this week it would lay off 125 staff as a result of
lost sales.)
And what did some publishers of newspapers -- which are supposed to
defend free speech -- do in the face of terror?
Fold.
Ironically the first "beheading" occurred in the homeland of the great
French philosopher Voltaire whose views were once summed up as: "I do
not agree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to
say it."
Would that the publisher of France-Soir had remembered those words
before firing his editor after the paper republished the original
cartoons along with another depicting Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and
Muslim gods sitting on a cloud that said: "Yes, we have the right to
caricature God."
Meanwhile a Jordanian newspaper reprinted the cartoons to show readers
"the extent of the Danish offence" -- along with an editorial entitled
"Muslims of the world be reasonable."
"What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures
of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the
camera?" wrote editor Jihad Momani -- before he was fired.
Whether you find the drawings clumsy, offensive or dead on (they're on
the web) is not the issue.
The issue is that the paper had a right to print them. And a proper
response is to write back to express views -- not violence.
It's called democratic debate, and there's too precious little of it in
this so-called Free World anymore where governments and powerful
institutions, including religions, use politically correct blankets to
smother debate and criticism -- for their own purposes.
Ironically, the world's most beloved religious leaders -- who so often
fought despotic rulers for the right to freedom of religion, expression
and peace -- must be mourning this turn of events from the heavens.
And so in the spirit of the solidarity in which the Danes defended Jews
in the Second World War -- by suggesting if the Nazi's ordered Jews to
wear armbands in Denmark they would all be Jews.
And in the spirit of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy's "I am a
Berliner" speech -- defending democracy over Communist tyranny.
And in the spirit of the editorial in the French paper Le Monde after
9/11- "We are all Americans."
I agree with the Brussels Journal: We are all Danes.
And I for one am going out to buy some Danish cookies and jams today.
And if you care one fig for freedom, so should you.
Dianne Rinehart is a former magazine editor and news correspondent who
has worked in Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Moscow.
* Freedom of the press includes defending the right to criticize religion
HINDUS CONSIDER it sacrilegious to eat meat from cows, so when a Danish supermarket ran a sale on beef and veal last fall, Hindus everywhere reacted with outrage. India recalled its ambassador to Copenhagen, and Danish flags were burned in Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi. A Hindu mob in Sri Lanka severely beat two employees of a Danish-owned firm, and demonstrators in Nepal chanted: ''War on Denmark! Death to Denmark!"In many places, shops selling Dansk china or Lego toys were attacked by rioters, and two Danish embassies were firebombed.
It didn't happen, of course. Hindus may consider it odious to use cows as food, but they do not resort to boycotts, threats, and violence when non-Hindus eat hamburger or steak. They do not demand that everyone abide by the strictures of Hinduism and avoid words and deeds that Hindus might find upsetting. The same is true of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons: They don't lash out in violence when their religious sensibilities are offended. They certainly don't expect their beliefs to be immune from criticism, mockery, or dissent.
But radical Muslims do.
The current uproar over cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper illustrates yet again the fascist intolerance that is at the heart of radical Islam. Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest daily, commissioned the cartoons to make a point about freedom of speech. It was protesting the climate of intimidation that had made it impossible for a Danish author to find an illustrator for his children's book about Mohammed. No artist would agree to illustrate the book for fear of being harmed by Muslim extremists. Appalled by this self-censorship, Jyllands-Posten invited Danish artists to submit drawings of Mohammed, and published the 12 it received.
Most of the pictures are tame to the point of dullness, especially compared to the biting editorial cartoons that routinely appear in US and European newspapers. A few of them link Mohammed to Islamist terrorism -- one depicts him with a bomb in his turban, while a second shows him in Heaven, pleading with newly arrived suicide terrorists: ''Stop, stop! We have run out of virgins!" Others focus on the threat to free speech: In one, a sweating artist sits at his drawing board, nervously sketching Mohammed, while glancing over his shoulder to make sure he's not being watched.
That anything so mild could trigger a reaction so crazed -- riots, death threats, kidnappings, flag-burnings -- speaks volumes about the chasm that separates the values of the civilized world from those in too much of the Islamic world. Freedom of the press, the marketplace of ideas, the right to skewer sacred cows: Militant Islam knows none of this. And if the jihadis get their way, it will be swept aside everywhere by the censorship and intolerance of sharia.
Here and there, some brave Muslim voices have cried out against the book-burners. The Jordanian newspaper Shihan published three of the cartoons. ''Muslims of the world, be reasonable," implored Shihan's editor, Jihad al-Momani, in an editorial. ''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?" But within hours Momani was out of a job, fired by the paper's owners after the Jordanian government threatened legal action.
He wasn't the only editor sacked last week. In Paris, Jacques LeFranc of the daily France Soir was also fired after running the Mohammed cartoons. The paper's owner, an Egyptian Copt named Raymond Lakah, issued a craven and Orwellian statement offering LeFranc's head as a gesture of ''respect for the intimate beliefs and convictions of every individual." But the France Soir staff defended their decision to publish the drawings in a stalwart editorial. ''The best way to fight against censorship is to prevent censorship from happening," they wrote. ''A fundamental principle guaranteeing democracy and secular society is under threat. To say nothing is to retreat."
Across the continent, nearly two dozen other newspapers have joined in defending that principle. While Islamist clerics proclaim an ''international day of anger" or declare that ''the war has begun," leading publications in Norway, France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have reprinted the Danish cartoons. But there has been no comparable show of backbone in America, where (as of Friday) only the New York Sun has had the fortitude to the run some of the drawings.
Make no mistake: This story is not going away, and neither is the Islamofascist threat. The freedom of speech we take for granted is under attack, and it will vanish if it is not bravely defended. Today the censors may be coming for some unfunny Mohammed cartoons, but tomorrow it is your words and ideas they will silence. Like it or not, we are all Danes now.
Is protecting freedom of speech in Western nations as important as protecting Danish Jews? Yes it is.
Further, this furor is manufactured. The pix in question were first published some months ago, weren't they?
Mass publishing of the cartoons in question by Western press would put the Islamofacists on notice that lots of people care about their Western liberties such as freedom of speech. Perhaps it would have a "chilling effect" on escalating violence against innocent Westerners or attempts to install Sharia in Western countries. Of course it would have to be followed up with equally gutsy, and consistent, actions by the West (I fear that my whole scenario is a pipedream, sadly).
Sure, but where did Gilbert and Sullivan get that name...hmmmm? (I'm just playing with the name; it struck me as sounding like PBUH.)
As soon as they have the numbers you'll see the same sort of thing that you're now seeing in Europe and worse. And GWB, the Republican Party, and establishment conservatism thinks it's just wonderful that they are flooding into this country. Not one has the nuts to demand a moratorium, as we had a moratorium in the 20s when it became obvious that immigration was damaging our culture.
That one is not only one of the most intellectually dishonest posters on FR, but a consistent Islamo-fascist appeaser, to boot.
If Islamo-fascism ever managed to conquer the United States, "sinkspur" would be a proud Kapo in the camps they'd set up for "infidels": he loathes his country, and the people that populate it, period.
It's not silly, it's potentially lethal - unlike drawing cartoons. There's something much deeper going on here.
The reason people usually end up objecting to Muslims is not because they are strange and smell funny but because when they start to congregate in large enough swarms their true nature emerges - and it's not pretty. Deep down in their black hearts they are psychos, unfit and unwilling to peacefully live and let live with their neighbors. The only way they will ultimately agree to live at peace with you is if you become a member of their murderous cult, become their Dhimmie, become their slave, or become dead. Personally, I'm not willing to live with any of those choices. It's unAmerican and against everything a reasonably sane American should stand for. Period.
If they don't like it they can go back to the ghastly hell-holes they've already conquered and polluted and from which they emerged. Such people aren't welcome here - nor should they be!
Thanks, Oregon (pineconeland) I've copied both of these for reading later.
If everyone who wrote to FR would write to their reps, maybe (just maybe) it would make a difference. The only thing the reps listen to is public opinion. That's what gives CAIR the appearance of power. We are more numerous; we have to make our voices heard loud and clear. Contributing to the Republican party is no answer; we can't compete with Abramoff. We need a lobby for conservative values.
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