I had not seen this coming
Feb. 5th, 2006 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbWhen I posted about the Muhammad cartoon controversy, I did not realize that it was becoming a worldwide affair. I had been aware of it as one of very many areas of conflict between Islam and the rest of the world, less serious than Kashmir or Mindanao or North Nigeria, less threatening than Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. But just as I was registering my disgust at the crass cowardice of the Norwegian government, everyone else seemed to catch fire on the same subject and at the same time.
On the Muslim side, it seems clear, there was a calculated, ruthless and hypocritical drive to inflame the masses, orchestrated by certain very definite clerical groups; especially those that gather around the popular tele-sheikh Yussuf al Qaradawi, notorious for preaching the death penalty for homosexuals and justifying the murder of Jews. No less an authority than the great Shia Grand Ayatollah Al Sistani noticed and condemned this planned encouragement to violence. (Al Sistani had been consistently wise and courageous in his opposition to violence and his belief in the use of law to achieve his religion's goals; one does not have to agree with those goals to remark that there is one of the rare great men of our age.)
Part of this orchestration has been the incredible behaviour of the Danish Muslim leaders, who have spent half their time in Denmark speaking about peace and reconciliation, and the other half in the Muslim world encouraging violence, slandering their country, spreading downright lies about the views of the Danish government, falsely declaring that Jyllands-Posten was owned by the government, and even showing to a fatuously indignant Muslim public the famous three false cartoons that nobody had seen before. The Danish imams lived in the bizarre hope that nobody in Denmark could understand Arabic, and now they are discredited with at least one of the sides they deceived. Unfortunately, it will be very difficult to convince the other that they have been played for fools - it's only the truth, after all, and the Muslim world's reaction to the stream of lies from Denmark is a classic instance of the old proverb that a lie is half-way around the world before the truth has got its boots on.
On the Western side, the reaction has been a good deal more interesting, and shows to what an extent this confrontation has become systemic and inevitable. Most governments have been silent; among those that have spoken, there is a clear split between the Anglo-Saxons - both Britain and America have disgracefully aped the craven statements that issued from Norway - and the continental Europeans, who, though supposed by the American right to stand for giving in to the Muslims, have taken a much firmer line. The German government has made it clear that they do not see that there is anything to apologize for, and that what the Muslim world has seen is nothing more than freedom of thought and expression in action. This split is not easy to understand in terms of rational politics, and suggests a certain element of "I'm all right Jack" - for once, Britain and America are not in the front line of Muslim hatred, and there is a certain temptation to stand back and watch the Europeans, whom many feel have had it much too easy for much too long, ache. Nothing else can explain the truly bizarre behaviour of the British and American media; while the continental newspapers, from Spain to Poland and from Norway to Italy, presented an almost united front, reprinting the cartoons in twenty languages, no major British or American news outlet has done so. Even when reporting the nasty events at France-Soir, where an editor who had published the cartoons was sacked by wire by the paper's Arab owner, British and American newspapers whited out the cartoons themselves.
This is extraordinary because it is clear that at the back of the European reaction there is the coming together of the journalistic profession across Europe. It is no more than the truth that, until now, most European newspapermen and women have been clearly, sometimes disgustingly, partisan, pro-Arab and anti-Israeli; but faced with an assault upon their own freedom to publish and discuss as they please, they have rediscovered, virtually as one, their own journalistic independence, and fiercely asserted themselves against Muslim threats and intimidation. All across Europe, nervous or timid politicians are being towed behind by indignant journalists (and bloggers - never forget the bloggers). The defiance of the newspapers is exactly what is angering the Arab street, where nobody can conceive that newspapers can be anything but the mouthpieces of Government; they imagine, in their innocence, that what a Norwegian or French newspaper says has anything to do with the views of the French and Norwegian governments - who, poor corrupt fools, would give ten years of their lives to have anything like the control over newspapers that their Arabic colleagues enjoy as a matter of course.
That being the case, the silence of the Anglo-Saxon press is astonishing. It is more than astonishing: it is, even more than the cowardly loquaciousness of the State Department and the Foreign Office, symptomatic. It shows an ingrained unwillingness to identify with Continental interests, even where those interests are shared and common, as they are in the matter of the Press' freedom to publish as it likes. Newspapers which delight in attacking or insulting their own governments and in tearing down in public the image of any public person to which they have a dislike, become unaccountably quiet and respectful when it comes to European colleagues under direct threat from Muslims. General De Gaulle was right: Britain and America will always look to each other, and neither has any real, instinctive sympathy for continental Europe.
The Anglo-Saxons will, in time, wake up, because anyone who imagines that this tide of factitious but real hatred will spare them is living on the Moon. No two countries are more hated by Islamic extremists than the past and the present Empires, with their armies in four Muslim countries (apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, you have to remember Bosnia and Kosovo) and their word heard in every Arabic capital; no, not even Israel. Who can forget that they danced in the streets when the Twin Towers were destroyed? At the same time as they were telling the world that Mossad had done it? There is nothing that Muslim extremists cannot blame on London and Washington, and nobody needs have any doubt that the two chancelleries will gain precisely nothing from their ridiculous attempt to distance themselves from freedom of speech, thought and publication - any more than Norway has, now that their flags are being burned all over the Middle East together with Denmark's.
In the middle of this whirlwind of self-assertion and selfishness, as ever, stands the Vatican. The Church is too used to the nasty side of freedom of expression to be fully in sympathy with the demand to allow any and every subject under the sun to be freely published; too many of the professional people who now howl and yell for their right to publish as they please have, as they pleased, published packs of lies and insults at the expense of the Catholic Church, or libertine and atheist propaganda. But she has made a decisive and (in spite of the ugly noises always to be heard from the fringes) final decision in favour of freedom of conscience as an inalienable part of God-given human freedom, and must pronounce in its favour. As a result, the Vatican issued a document that each side, as they do, has torn apart to use out-of-context quotations to defend its views - or, more basely, to demonize the Church (more than one American newspaper reported that the Vatican was in favour of limiting freedom of expression). The truth however is that, in spite of its evidently noxious and abusive uses, the Vatican has come down firmly in favour of freedom of expression, and that its call for "mutual respect" is intended at least as much, if not more so, for the mobs of Muslim demonstrators, as for the mobs of Western editors. (That is made very clear in the newspaper of the Italian bishops, Avvenire, which has a long habit of having to reply to the packs of anti-clerical lies routinely published by the leading Italian press organs.)
The Vatican's position, in the end, is that which most Europeans will instinctively take; and that is what makes the conflict inevitable and systemic. In the face of every scream, threat and insult in the sun, there comes a time when the average European citizen tends to say: "well, sorry, I can see you are upset and all that, but I simply won't do that." Not every European who will defend the position of the newspapers will be in sympathy with their ability to lie and slander as they please, with their destructive politics, or with their caste interests; but having to choose between that and having their editorial decisions made by unaccountable sheikhs backed by the threat of mob violence, the average European citizen will in the end make a troubled but final choice.
This is our instinct; and the instinct of the average Muslim extremist is precisely the opposite. They really cannot understand opposition. Their feeling is that the intensity of their anger is evidence of the justice of their cause, and they cannot imagine any opposition as being due to anything except ingrained evil and rebellion against God. In their minds there are only two positions, submission to God (as they understand Him) or wilful rebellion; they do not understand the Christian instinct, bred even in people generations removed from any Church attendance, that the essence of Man is to be, as Chesterton says, "a free knight/ That loves or hates his Lord;" the vision of God and Man, as painted by Michelangelo on the vault of the Chapel where Popes are nominated, as two mighty, unequal, but equally free powers; the notion that even though God had known that man would misuse the freedom He had given, nevertheless, as Dante said -
Lo maggior don che Dio per Sua grandezza
Fesse creando, ed a la Sua bontate
Piu' conformato, e quel ch'E' piu' apprezza -
Fu della volonta' la libertate!"
The greatest gift that God gave in His greatness
And closest to His shape of goodness still,
And that in His creation pleased Him best -
It is the freedom of intelligent Will!
On the Muslim side, it seems clear, there was a calculated, ruthless and hypocritical drive to inflame the masses, orchestrated by certain very definite clerical groups; especially those that gather around the popular tele-sheikh Yussuf al Qaradawi, notorious for preaching the death penalty for homosexuals and justifying the murder of Jews. No less an authority than the great Shia Grand Ayatollah Al Sistani noticed and condemned this planned encouragement to violence. (Al Sistani had been consistently wise and courageous in his opposition to violence and his belief in the use of law to achieve his religion's goals; one does not have to agree with those goals to remark that there is one of the rare great men of our age.)
Part of this orchestration has been the incredible behaviour of the Danish Muslim leaders, who have spent half their time in Denmark speaking about peace and reconciliation, and the other half in the Muslim world encouraging violence, slandering their country, spreading downright lies about the views of the Danish government, falsely declaring that Jyllands-Posten was owned by the government, and even showing to a fatuously indignant Muslim public the famous three false cartoons that nobody had seen before. The Danish imams lived in the bizarre hope that nobody in Denmark could understand Arabic, and now they are discredited with at least one of the sides they deceived. Unfortunately, it will be very difficult to convince the other that they have been played for fools - it's only the truth, after all, and the Muslim world's reaction to the stream of lies from Denmark is a classic instance of the old proverb that a lie is half-way around the world before the truth has got its boots on.
On the Western side, the reaction has been a good deal more interesting, and shows to what an extent this confrontation has become systemic and inevitable. Most governments have been silent; among those that have spoken, there is a clear split between the Anglo-Saxons - both Britain and America have disgracefully aped the craven statements that issued from Norway - and the continental Europeans, who, though supposed by the American right to stand for giving in to the Muslims, have taken a much firmer line. The German government has made it clear that they do not see that there is anything to apologize for, and that what the Muslim world has seen is nothing more than freedom of thought and expression in action. This split is not easy to understand in terms of rational politics, and suggests a certain element of "I'm all right Jack" - for once, Britain and America are not in the front line of Muslim hatred, and there is a certain temptation to stand back and watch the Europeans, whom many feel have had it much too easy for much too long, ache. Nothing else can explain the truly bizarre behaviour of the British and American media; while the continental newspapers, from Spain to Poland and from Norway to Italy, presented an almost united front, reprinting the cartoons in twenty languages, no major British or American news outlet has done so. Even when reporting the nasty events at France-Soir, where an editor who had published the cartoons was sacked by wire by the paper's Arab owner, British and American newspapers whited out the cartoons themselves.
This is extraordinary because it is clear that at the back of the European reaction there is the coming together of the journalistic profession across Europe. It is no more than the truth that, until now, most European newspapermen and women have been clearly, sometimes disgustingly, partisan, pro-Arab and anti-Israeli; but faced with an assault upon their own freedom to publish and discuss as they please, they have rediscovered, virtually as one, their own journalistic independence, and fiercely asserted themselves against Muslim threats and intimidation. All across Europe, nervous or timid politicians are being towed behind by indignant journalists (and bloggers - never forget the bloggers). The defiance of the newspapers is exactly what is angering the Arab street, where nobody can conceive that newspapers can be anything but the mouthpieces of Government; they imagine, in their innocence, that what a Norwegian or French newspaper says has anything to do with the views of the French and Norwegian governments - who, poor corrupt fools, would give ten years of their lives to have anything like the control over newspapers that their Arabic colleagues enjoy as a matter of course.
That being the case, the silence of the Anglo-Saxon press is astonishing. It is more than astonishing: it is, even more than the cowardly loquaciousness of the State Department and the Foreign Office, symptomatic. It shows an ingrained unwillingness to identify with Continental interests, even where those interests are shared and common, as they are in the matter of the Press' freedom to publish as it likes. Newspapers which delight in attacking or insulting their own governments and in tearing down in public the image of any public person to which they have a dislike, become unaccountably quiet and respectful when it comes to European colleagues under direct threat from Muslims. General De Gaulle was right: Britain and America will always look to each other, and neither has any real, instinctive sympathy for continental Europe.
The Anglo-Saxons will, in time, wake up, because anyone who imagines that this tide of factitious but real hatred will spare them is living on the Moon. No two countries are more hated by Islamic extremists than the past and the present Empires, with their armies in four Muslim countries (apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, you have to remember Bosnia and Kosovo) and their word heard in every Arabic capital; no, not even Israel. Who can forget that they danced in the streets when the Twin Towers were destroyed? At the same time as they were telling the world that Mossad had done it? There is nothing that Muslim extremists cannot blame on London and Washington, and nobody needs have any doubt that the two chancelleries will gain precisely nothing from their ridiculous attempt to distance themselves from freedom of speech, thought and publication - any more than Norway has, now that their flags are being burned all over the Middle East together with Denmark's.
In the middle of this whirlwind of self-assertion and selfishness, as ever, stands the Vatican. The Church is too used to the nasty side of freedom of expression to be fully in sympathy with the demand to allow any and every subject under the sun to be freely published; too many of the professional people who now howl and yell for their right to publish as they please have, as they pleased, published packs of lies and insults at the expense of the Catholic Church, or libertine and atheist propaganda. But she has made a decisive and (in spite of the ugly noises always to be heard from the fringes) final decision in favour of freedom of conscience as an inalienable part of God-given human freedom, and must pronounce in its favour. As a result, the Vatican issued a document that each side, as they do, has torn apart to use out-of-context quotations to defend its views - or, more basely, to demonize the Church (more than one American newspaper reported that the Vatican was in favour of limiting freedom of expression). The truth however is that, in spite of its evidently noxious and abusive uses, the Vatican has come down firmly in favour of freedom of expression, and that its call for "mutual respect" is intended at least as much, if not more so, for the mobs of Muslim demonstrators, as for the mobs of Western editors. (That is made very clear in the newspaper of the Italian bishops, Avvenire, which has a long habit of having to reply to the packs of anti-clerical lies routinely published by the leading Italian press organs.)
The Vatican's position, in the end, is that which most Europeans will instinctively take; and that is what makes the conflict inevitable and systemic. In the face of every scream, threat and insult in the sun, there comes a time when the average European citizen tends to say: "well, sorry, I can see you are upset and all that, but I simply won't do that." Not every European who will defend the position of the newspapers will be in sympathy with their ability to lie and slander as they please, with their destructive politics, or with their caste interests; but having to choose between that and having their editorial decisions made by unaccountable sheikhs backed by the threat of mob violence, the average European citizen will in the end make a troubled but final choice.
This is our instinct; and the instinct of the average Muslim extremist is precisely the opposite. They really cannot understand opposition. Their feeling is that the intensity of their anger is evidence of the justice of their cause, and they cannot imagine any opposition as being due to anything except ingrained evil and rebellion against God. In their minds there are only two positions, submission to God (as they understand Him) or wilful rebellion; they do not understand the Christian instinct, bred even in people generations removed from any Church attendance, that the essence of Man is to be, as Chesterton says, "a free knight/ That loves or hates his Lord;" the vision of God and Man, as painted by Michelangelo on the vault of the Chapel where Popes are nominated, as two mighty, unequal, but equally free powers; the notion that even though God had known that man would misuse the freedom He had given, nevertheless, as Dante said -
Lo maggior don che Dio per Sua grandezza
Fesse creando, ed a la Sua bontate
Piu' conformato, e quel ch'E' piu' apprezza -
Fu della volonta' la libertate!"
The greatest gift that God gave in His greatness
And closest to His shape of goodness still,
And that in His creation pleased Him best -
It is the freedom of intelligent Will!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
I rather had, unfortunately.
Date: 2006-02-05 06:35 pm (UTC)Quite right. Another possible excuse for this seemingly uncharacteristic behavior is that Bush (I don't know really about Blair.) is trying desperately to appease the politically correct in this country as well as, as you mentioned, not take on any more possible heat from the Arab world. He's got an image to protect you know... and funding to secure from Congress.
Nothing else can explain the truly bizarre behaviour of the British and American media;...
Correct. Nothing usually can.
It shows an ingrained unwillingness to identify with Continental interests, even where those interests are shared and common, as they are in the matter of the Press' freedom to publish as it likes.
Alas... I believe that trend has a long and bloody history and is unlikely to take a back seat to anything short of all-out Arab war against the Continentals. I believe there may be more to it, more long-term concerns going on, but right now they only can be classified under "conspiracy theory" (or distinctly possible Machiavellian scheming).
They really cannot understand opposition. Their feeling is that the intensity of their anger is evidence of the justice of their cause, and they cannot imagine any opposition as being due to anything except ingrained evil and rebellion against God.
Absolutely spot on, and that's why it's my figuring that this whole affair can't end anything other than very, very badly. I wish it weren't so.