Wednesday - February 08, 2006

The Blame Game

The Washington Post has decided that neo-con right-wingers in Denmark and theocratic fascists in the Middle East are to blame for all the trouble over “those cartoons”. I think the problem goes back a lot further than that and it actually started with socialists in Europe and Liberals in America about thirty years ago. What say you ... ?

The Uses of Cartoons
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
(WASHINGTON POST)

Extremists and political opportunists across the Muslim world are rushing to exploit the controversy over the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Late to the game but conspicuous in its crudeness is the Iranian government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which yesterday oversaw a second day of demonstrations outside European embassies while a newspaper it controls announced a contest for Holocaust cartoons. The Taliban is probably behind violent demonstrations in Afghanistan, including one directed at the largest U.S. military base in the country. And the Bush administration has rightly fingered the secular but cynical government of Syria for orchestrating the burning of embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

A clash of civilizations between Muslims and the West is the fondest ambition of al Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist organizations, from Britain to Indonesia. But it also is a convenient refuge for authoritarian regimes hoping to resist the rising pressure for political liberalization in the Middle East. That explains why Muslim outrage over the original publication of the cartoons in Denmark was patiently cultivated not by Osama bin Laden but by the Egyptian and Saudi governments. According to an account in the Wall Street Journal, Egypt’s ambassador in Denmark worked with local Islamic clerics as they prepared an inflammatory propaganda campaign about the cartoons for dissemination through the Middle East last fall. In December a delegation of the Danish militants was received by senior clerics and government officials in Cairo, where the manufactured outrage contrasts with the quotidian persecution of a Christian minority and publication of anti-Semitic libels in the government-controlled press.

Europeans, too, have participated in the stoking of passions, if for different reasons. The cartoons, whose vulgarity and offensiveness are beyond question, were published as a calculated insult last September by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem. The Danish government depends for support in Parliament on a far-right populist party with an anti-immigrant agenda: Maybe that’s why Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen arrogantly refused to meet with ambassadors from Muslim countries last fall, when the controversy might have been defused.

- More noise from WAPO here...

Posted by The Skipper     on 02/08/2006 at 08:31 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • RoPMA •  
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