Michael Karadjis
In the international blow-out over the publication of racist, anti-Islamic cartoons by the right-wing Danish Jyllands-Posten daily, a number of leftists have played along with the dominant "free speech" rhetoric of most Western governments and mass media.
Even if some of the cartoons are "offensive to Muslims", they claim this is no different to other "blasphemous" images in art and media that lampoon other religions. Unless socialists defend "the right to blasphemy" in all cases, they argue, we pave the way for right-wing Christian fundamentalists to hold sway over what the media and artists produce, setting back democratic rights won long ago by working people.
This deference to "free speech" has even led to certain left-wing publications joining those European capitalist newspapers in not just defending the "right" of Jyllands-Posten to publish, but in republishing the racist images in alleged solidarity with this "sacred right". In fact, it was the republication of the racist images by many European papers earlier this year, beginning with the Norwegian Christian paper Magazinet on January 10, that led to the upsurge of anger among Muslims.
However, what is ignored in these arguments in defence of "free speech" is the political context in which the cartoons have been published — the systematic racist depiction by the Western corporate media of Muslims — a besieged minority within Western countries and a majority in a number of countries now under Western military occupation.
The cartoons do not merely "lampoon" Islam. A number send the message that violence and terrorism stem from the nature of Islam itself — from Mohammed with his bomb-for-turban and his heavenly welcome to suicide bombers and despair that he had "run out of virgins" with which to reward them.
This is the key propaganda message of the phoney imperialist "war on terror" — that the "civilised" West must impose its allegedly "democratic" principles on the "barbaric" Middle East.
Anjali Kamat, writing in the February 9-15 Egyptian Al Ahram weekly, pointed out: "Depicting the Prophet as a wily blind sheikh with a sword and flanked by two wide-eyed veiled women or, with a bomb growing out of his elaborate turban, is not offensive simply because it 'hurts the religious sentiments of Muslims' or because it is an affront to the Prophet. The images are violent, and they incite and rationalize further violence against Muslims. They are inseparable from overused platitudes about Islam as a ticking time bomb, which in turn cannot be understood apart from policy and national security decisions based on a tacit understanding of all Muslims as potential terrorists who have no rights under the law."
Islamophobic provocation
The Jyllands-Posten newspaper has reportedly been connected to either the anti-immigrant Conservative People's Party and the virulently racist Danish People's Party, both of which are currently in the Danish governing coalition.
The paper published the racist images on September 30, 2005, as a provocation. Cultural editor Flemming Rose claimed the aim was "testing the limits of self-censorship in Danish public opinion" as "in a secular society, Muslims have to live with the fact of being ridiculed, scoffed at and made to look ridiculous".
Danish people, Rose claimed, "are no longer willing to pay taxes to help support someone called Ali who comes from a country with a different language and culture that is 5000 miles away".
Leftist advocates of the "free speech" line ought to reflect on why a right-wing Danish paper publishes images aimed at demonising a religious minority in a context in which the Danish government has not yet allowed a mosque to be built in Copenhagen, or any Muslim cemeteries in Denmark, for the 200,000 Muslims residing there. The government has also set about severely restricting immigration.
The Danish minister for cultural affairs, Brian Mikkelsen, asserts that "in Denmark we have seen the appearance of a parallel society in which minorities practice their own medieval values and undemocratic views. This is the new front in our cultural war."
Denmark was among the European countries that supported the US invasion of Iraq and has troops occupying that country. In the context of the Western occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the war drive against Iran and the continued total US support to Israel's creeping annexation of more and more of Palestine, the virulent Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism explicit in these images is part of the propaganda offensive to maintain Western public support for these wars and occupations.
This is the political context that those on the left emphasising "free speech" have completely ignored.
Censorship?
On the other hand, some of those who correctly recognise the right of Muslims to be angry and to demonstrate against this racist campaign have bought the opposite liberal argument that justifies censorship, demanding that images that offend religious beliefs be banned.
This attitude is dangerous as it endorses the "rights" of capitalist governments to suppress the expression of views critical of religious beliefs, and thus opens the way to empowering such governments to censor critical political views.
The Western governments are the most hypocritical. An Austrian court on February 20 imposed a three-year jail sentence on David Irving, an apologist for Hitler who has written books denying that the Nazis systematically murdered 6 million Jews during World War II. Irving's views are factually inaccurate and politically repulsive. They should be refuted. However, jailing him for expressing them affords him martyr status among the neo-Nazi right.
The same reactionary and racist views, whether anti-Semitic or Islamophobic, are on the internet and giving Irving martyr status can even make them seem radical to disaffected people influenced by the far right.
When the European corporate media rush to reprint virulently Islamophobic images using the "free speech" argument while a Holocaust denier is imprisoned for his views, further reveals the West's extraordinary hypocrisy for many Muslims.
A cartoon depicting Moses, rather than Ariel Sharon, launching helicopter gunships into the backs of fleeing Palestinian refugees would send the anti-Semitic message that the Jewish religion is responsible for Zionist repression, an equivalent message to that of the Danish cartoons. If any of the newspapers publishing these cartoons had tried to publish such a cartoon of Moses they would rightly be accused of promoting anti-Semitism.
In an interview posted on the Aljazeera website on February 5, Aziz Duwaik, a newly elected Hamas MP in the Palestinian parliament, made the connection between European anti-Semitism in the 1930s and Islamophobia today: "Press freedom is a great ideal. However, could one argue that Hitler and the Nazis were practising their freedom prior to the Holocaust? We know the Holocaust started with cartoons like this against Jews, and with books like Mein Kampf, and then came Kristallnacht ... and then we know what happened.
"These cartoons are a reflection of rampant Islamophobia in Europe, which is very similar and nearly as virulent as the anti-Semitism that existed in Europe, especially in Germany, prior to World War II. This anti-Semitism eventually led to the Holocaust and the deaths of millions of human beings.
"You see, when you send out thousands of hate messages against a certain ethnic or religious community every day, you make people hate these people, and when mass hatred reaches a certain point, nobody would object to the physical extermination of the hated community when it happens."
In this context, the demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people across the Muslim world are entirely justified. However, some charge that these demonstrations have been "whipped up" by various Islamic fundamentalist clerics and repressive governments in the Middle East as a way of consolidating their hold over the masses.
Political context
While the cartoons themselves may seem trivial compared to the decades-long brutal occupation of Palestine and the killing of at least 25,000 Iraqis during the US-led invasion of Iraq, it is impossible to see the mobilisation of Muslims against the cartoons apart from the context of the West's military attacks on predominantly Muslim nations. The cartoons were merely the spark that lit the fuse of mass anger towards the imperialist marauders. As Kamat pointed out, the images are not merely "offensive" — they distort reality. "It is, after all, Muslims who are overwhelmingly at the receiving end of Western violence."
Reactionary Third World rulers sometimes lead demagogic campaigns against imperialism as a way of consolidating their power and it may be true that some are taking advantage of mass anger at the cartoons in this way.
In each case, the left needs to ask whether this particular mass mobilisation is supportable in and of itself. If reactionary clerics called demonstrations to demand the right of Muslim men to carry out "honour killings" and used anti-Western demagoguery, the secular left would obviously oppose such a campaign. However, when hundreds of thousands mobilise against the Islamophobia of Western invaders and occupiers, it is a different matter.
Opposition by Western leftists to such protests will merely help right-wing Muslim forces to identify everyone in the Western world with its imperialist governments, thus contributing to one of the key aims of these governments' anti-Muslim propaganda — the undermining of anti-imperialist solidarity between working people in the West and the Middle East.
Western leftists who buy into the "free speech" argument, oppose the Muslim demonstrations and even republish the racist cartoons are giving the worst "help" they can to progressive and secular forces in the Middle East. Reactionary figures can then point out that it is not only Western imperialist newspapers, but also "godless communists" who are part of the imperialists' racist campaign.
Others point to the fact that some demonstrations have included violent slogans threatening the newspaper editors, or Danes and Westerners in general. However, as Palestinian human rights advocate Omar Barghouti pointed out in an article posted on the ZNet website on February 5, "The international media focused on the anarchic, misguided and often offensive and violent expressions of outrage in several Muslim countries, but most ignored the more civil, organized and still huge demonstrations and the myriad rational and balanced opinions expressed by many in the Arab and Muslim worlds."
The mass media in some Muslim-dominated countries often displays anti-Jewish images. Some Western leftists have used this fact as an argument to justify the publication of the anti-Muslim cartoons by Western papers. This is a very strange argument for leftists to make. Would the conservative, liberal and leftist newspapers that have rushed to republish Islamophobic cartoons from a far-right paper similarly rush to publish anti-Jewish cartoons from an Egyptian paper if Jewish groups protested against them? To ask the question is to answer it and leave the "free speech" rhetoric exposed as naked hypocrisy.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 8, 2006.
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