I turn on the tube and what do I see
A whole lotta people cryin' 'Don't blame me'
They point their crooked little fingers at everybody else
Spend all their time feelin' sorry for themselves
Victim of this, victim of that
Your momma's too thin; your daddy's too fat
Get over it
Get over it
All this whinin' and cryin' and pitchin' a fit
Get over it, get over it
- The Eagles, "Get Over It"
This song kept running through my mind as I was reading the news this morning about reactions to cartoons featuring unflattering images of the Prophet Muhammad. Syrians starting fires at the embassies of European countries (and Chile?!) in Damascus. Massive street protests in large parts of the Muslim world, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey. Palestinians attacking various European institutions in their territories (this after the EU countries defied the US and idicated it would continue to support the Palestinian Authority financially after Hamas won a parliamentary majority.) Iran's nut-case president threatens to abrogate commercial agreements with various countries.
The Bush administration came out with a statement on the controversy so mealy-mouthed it sounds like they would have been better off to just say, "No comment". Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel had a more comprehensible and sensible reaction:
Sie verstehe zwar, dass die Mohammed-Karikaturen in einigen Zeitungen die religiösen Gefühle von Muslimen verletzt hätten, erklärte sie auf der Sicherheitskonferenz in München. Die Gewalttaten seien als Reaktion aber inakzeptabel. Die Pressefreiheit sei ein unantastbares, hohes Gut und "als Bestandteil der Demokratie nicht wegzudenken". (Abdruck der Mohammed-Karikaturen: Jordanischer Chefredakteur festgenommen Der Spiegel Online 04.02.06)
[She certainly understands that the caricatures of Muhammad in some newspapers would have injured the religious sensibilities of Muslims, she declared at the security conference in Munich. But the acts of violence are unacceptable as a reaction. Freedom of the press is a inviolable, major good, and it "cannot be thought of as other than an essential element of democracy".]
Leaders to whom "democracy" means more than a slogan to justify war are free to speak clearly about such matters.
Pope Ratzinger I's Vatican uses the opportunity to declare that things should be like in the good old days when you could be burned at the stake for blasphemy. (Note to the literal-minded: My unflattering interpretation of the Vatican's position.)
Have all of you lost your minds? Yes, this goes double for you, Pope Ratzinger. And quadrupule for you, Peter Pace, Edmund Giambastiani, Michael Hagee, Peter Shoomaker, Michael Mullin, and Michael Moseley, aka, our Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The JCS went into Francisco Franco mode and addressed a formal letter in their official capacities to the Washington Post complaining in thoroughly dishonest terms about a cartoon that legitimately criticized the misanthropic war criminal we call our Secretary of Defense.
We're talking about cartoons, people! A few [Cheney]ing cartoons!! If the God of the Christians and the Muslims is so thin-skinned he has to go into clothing-rending mode about being insulted by a few non-very-impressive caricatures of one of his more famous earthly representatives, then he really should consider a self-esteem workshop or something.
But I generally think it's silly to blame God for human stupidity. This is ridiculous. Fine, I understand that for the last 14 centuries Muslims have not been in the habit of representing Muhammad in art. Or at least not his face. And so these cartoons offended a lot of them. Hundreds of millions of them even.
But we're talking about a few cartoons here! If you don't like the cartoons, then well, maybe you should just not look at them. Or, hey, send a nasty letter to the newspaper. Start a blog and bitch about it there. What the hell sense does stuff like the following make in any religion? From the Egyptian Gazette 02/03/06 (page down to ME [Middle Eastern] anger over cartoons mounts):
In the radical camp in the Middle East, the head of Lebanon's Shi'ite Hizbollah claimed that if Muslims had executed British novelist Salman Rushdie others would not have dared to insult Islam.
Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa or religious edict in 1989 demanding Rushdie's execution over his best-selling novel the "Satanic Verses," which was deemed blasphemous.
"If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohamed ... would not have dared to do so," Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah and emphasised the "need for a vigorous" reaction to the caricatures.
Violent attacks on a country's embassies is serious business. The territory of an embassy is considered the territory of the home country. Remember the seizure of hostages from the American embassy in Teheran in 1979? Al-Qaeda's attack on the US embassy in Kenya in 1998? A country would be on solid grounds to treat attacks on their embassy as an act of war, though presemably Chile is not going to mount an invasion of Syria anytime soon.
Attacking embassies is drastic stuff. And it wasn't the governments of the countries being attacked that published the cartoons (so far as I've heard at all) but rather private newspapers. This is presumably one reason that German Chancellor Merkel was so direct in defending freedom of the press in her statement quoted above: what is going on involves physical attacks on embassies of NATO countries.
It's seemed to me from the diocesan newspapers that I've seen from the San Francisco and Oakland dioceses that the newspapers must be some kind of refuge for some of the dullest and more unimaginative people in the Catholic Church. And the articles that are the most particularly irritating are the ones that bitch and moan about some minor insult to sensibilities of hyper-sensitive Catholics who can't find any real problems to bitch and moan about.
The Christian Right Protestants are past masters at that particular art. See the insane fantasies about the (nonexistent) "war on Christmas". Or the "Justice Sunday" shindigs complaining about how the Republican-dominated federal courts are part of a giant Jewish conspiracy to stamp out Christianity in America.
Marx and Freud both compared religion to a narcotic. People who live to whine about real and (especially) imaginary insults to their relgion are clearly on the OxyContin variety.
Our Joint Chiefs don't have that excuse, though. They're just a bunch of arrogant bullies who don't respect the proper role of military leaders in a democracy. And while the generals leak to the press about how much they dislike Don Rumsfeld and all these meddling civilians, when Rummy snaps his fingers and tells the JCS to make damn fools of themselves by writing a sleazy letter to the Washington Post over a cartoon that surely every one of them know was a spot-on criticism of their Lord Rummy over his outrageous callousness toward the needs of his soldiers, they snivel and kiss his feet and say, "Yes, Lord Rummy, we're happy to do whatever you say".
(Note to comma-dancers: No, I don't have any knowledge that Rummy ordered them to do that. Anyone who can't draw that logical inference, though, should go cold-turkey on the OxyContin for a while, though.)
Yes, it's true that the shallow understanding of Islam that prevails in the US makes it very easy for people to interpret this controversy as evidence of whatever ill-informed prejudices they may have against Islam. From my point of view, it's perfectly legitimate for people to react against offensive cartoons. In sensible ways, that is, not by burning embassies or in the JCS mode of trying to erode basic American democratic freedoms. That's what editorial cartoons are about, a way of stating an opinion. Some of them may be offensive or obnoxious or just plain bigoted. That's one of the main functions of free speech and a free press: to let everyone see who the blithering bigots are.
But what's going on right now with the hoopla over the Muhammad cartoons, whatever use demagogues may make of it, is an example of a clash between freedom of the press and the "shut-up-and-think-what-I-say-you-have-to" mentality, in this case being played out on the stage of a "globalized" world.
What's going on with the Joint Chiefs of Staff stepping way out of their appropriate role in a democracy and trying to use their official military positions to intimidate a civilian newspaper out of criticizing one of the most represhensible civilian officials (Rummy) ever to serve in the United Staes government is one more example of the increasing militarization and authoritarianism that certainly will make our American democracy at best an empty shell if the people don't demand that the process is reversed.
Links:
Articles from Die Welt (Germany)
Manifestantes prenden fuego a varias embajadas en Siria por las viñetas de Mahoma El Mundo 04.02.06
El Vaticano dice que la libertad de expresión no puede ofender las creencias 'de cualquier religión' El Mundo 04.02.06
Defender la libertad de prensa, pero ¿cómo? El Mundo 04.02.06
La polémica sobre las caricaturas, paso a paso El Mundo 03.02.06
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