Light fuse and retire (cont)

To: Retort


Apologies for editorial bungling which had Ignacio saying:
"I believe that religious intolerance in public life should not be tolerated." 

Ignacio actually wrote:
"I believe that religious tolerance in public life should not be tolerated." 

Bravo! 
IB<x-tad-smaller>

</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>PS</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller> A reminder of the context: </x-tad-smaller> "To have safeguards against stigmatizing people for their innate qualities - such as race, gender, birthplace, genetic makeup, things that they cannot choose or change - is clearly in a different place for me than to expect that we should tolerate ("respect") any and all attempts at ideological domination, especially when they overflow onto our common life and space.  I believe that religious tolerance in public life should not be tolerated.  But again, I do not think this is really what is being contested here." 

---------------------------------------------------
Rebecca writes:
In some sense the cartoons are minor, a sign, a code for something major, so the question is what is the major thing these scribbles signify in the Islamic world? A sense of being scorned by the west, a pattern of hypocricy and colonial patronization? The west's sense of the right to dictate not only where the oil goes but what the meanings are? Much more savage desecrations at Guantanamo and elsewhere in the theater of the "war on terror" that people everywhere should be furious over? Perhaps the deepest irony is that the cartoon was meant to mock not the Prophet but his followers as violent, and a lot of the subsequent demonstrations don't exactly disprove the point. Which was a dumb point because violence is probably more a minority sport in the Moslem world than in the European, historically and counting state violence--including the US's right now in Iraq. 

Reportedly what prompted the cartoon was the fact that an author attempting to do a book on Mohammed couldn't find an illustrator, because the artists he approached were afraid or at least reluctant to take on the subject. That the author wanted an artist to represent Mohammed seems ignorant at best--and one can imagine a fine book that showed places and things and maybe other people but not Mohammed and explained why; that this clumsy and thwarted attempt at multicultural understanding prompted a nasty attack on Islam by Danish newspapers on the religion is just kind of weird and, of course, ironic. One of those if we can't come to your party, we'll throw rocks through the window. Even if the rocks were conceptual in form. 

And yes, I do wish that Egypt didn't run a state-owned television station special based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that the president of Iran didn't claim the Holocaust didn't happen. Or that Amy T. didn't report back from Turkey that everyone there seemed to believe that Jews evacuated the Trade Towers before the attack (by Israel). A funny I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I taunting seems to be taking place, on the grounds that if they can wallow in antiJewish propaganda, we can defame their prophet.  And I agree with Fran Liebowitz that the Jews deserved an autonomous homeland after the Holocaust and that the obvious place they should've been given was Berlin. Her idea; I think Krakow and maybe a few other nice cities--Vienna?--would've made sense too.    
Today, I checked the death toll on 9/11 online to see: though we're getting close, we haven't killed as many US citizens in this war as Al Quada did on 9/ll, but we have killed far, far more noncombatants just in Afghanistan alone in a nice tasteful state-violence kind of way, which differs from terrorism but I forget how.  The sad thing about this cartoon-provoked violence in the middle east is that it serves us much better than it serves them; it provides a week of distraction from Abu Ghraib and the torture policies, for one thing. Or from the fact that an average of three women a day are murdered by their male partners and exes in the US, but that is of course never framed as a political issue, so nevermind.  

Rebecca
--------------------------------
Banafsheh writes:
I am with Eddie on about 90 per cent of this. But the thing is, from a pseudo-iranian point of view if you will, this whole idea of not representing in images the prophet et al is not necessarily a "religious fact", but as most things taken today from the Koran, an interpretation, a way of manipulating words to fit the agenda.  Because an agenda definitely exists on that side of fundamentalists, as on this one.  I think it equally abominable to provoke with these caricatures as I find it for the new Iranian president to make outlandish remarks about the holocaust or whatever.  But these are the elements of today's war, aren't they?  A war of images and words, a war of sides, us and them. Unfortunately no one on either side is smart enough (or cares enough) to put an end to it all... silence is sometimes golden.

As for Iran, I can say that many, if not most, Iranians don't give a damn about it all. The nicely framed images of the Iranian "hezbollahis" climbing over the Danish embassy (probably filmed by Iranian TV itself for quick export over the wire) maybe make it seem as though Iranian people are really insulted by this...but the fact is that they are a minority today, and hopefully will be a minority elsewhere very soon. No thanks to these caricatures of course.  This was, like Eddie says, oil on a fire that unfortunately already burns.

I myself have a hard time deciding what is "right"...unlike the day the law in France was (re)applied to expel veil-wearing girls from public schools. Unfortunately that law has made communication more difficult, not to mention the exponential growth in the number of trendy chadors in the streets. Where has our good taste gone?

Bani