I don't think we have any discussion about the Danish Muhammad cartoons....

He should really have his own column in the Evening Standard

Along with well-known right-wing radicals Yasmin Alibia (sp?) Brown and Francis Wheen?

One rule for him and another for the 8NP?

I have to say that the difference in reactions just demonstrates how different political culture and, dare I say it, sophistication, is between the West and the Muslim world (on average). Weren't these kinds of reactions predictable? Certainly for the French et al, who decided to jump on the bandwagon later.

The interesting discussion is the one about how some Muslims see the way Western countries interact with their part of the world on a par with the way the Nazis treated the Jews. I'm not saying I find the comparison fair, but more people should think seriously about how and why people in the Middle East think that way.

"According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the Nazi Germany SS helped finance al-Husseini's efforts in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann actually visited Palestine and met with al-Husseini at that time and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin.

In 1940, al-Husseini requested the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right:

... to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy.

While in Baghdad, Syria, al-Husseini aided the pro-Nazi revolt of 1941. He then spent the rest of World War II as Hitler's special guest in Berlin, advocating the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts back to the Middle East and recruiting Balkan Muslims for infamous SS "mountain divisions" that tried to wipe out Jewish communities throughout the region.

At the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny (subsequently executed as a war criminal) testified:

The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. ... He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.

With the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Mufti moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero. After the war al-Husseini was indicted by Yugoslavia for war crimes, but escaped prosecution. The Mufti was never tried because the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if the hero of Arab nationalism was treated as a war criminal.

Haj Amin al-Husseini eventually died in exile in 1974. He never returned to Jerusalem after his 1937 departure. His place as leader of the radical, nationalist Palestinian Arabs was taken by his nephew Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini, better known as Yasser Arafat. In August 2002, Arafat gave an interview in which he referred to "our hero al-Husseini" as a symbol of Palestinian Arab resistance.

"The Danish government says it does not control what is in the country's newspapers and that courts will determine whether the newspaper that originally published the cartoons is guilty of blasphemy."

Is that sloppy reporting or does Denmark really have a law against blasphemy?

SOME OF US JUST FIND THAT (A) DEPRESSING ENOUGH THAT WE DON'T GET BONERS EVERY TIME WE POINT IT OUT, PLUS (B) SO TOTALLY OBVIOUS THAT THERE ARE MAYBE MORE COMPLICATED AND INTERESTING ASPECTS OF THIS TO TALK ABOUT

-- nabisco (--...), February 7th, 2006.

Honestly, I find it odd that some people on this thread get so uncomfortable talking about the violence, when that seems to be the most worrisome aspect of all of this.

see, here's where i get all ARGH-y. whatever you think of the cartoons, i don't think there's any fair way to see this whole thing as just "a way of annoying all Muslims." the paper's stated reasons and context are very clear. people keep wanting this to be simple xenophobia, because oh how much easier the argument would be, but that's just not what happened. i'm not saying xenophobia hasn't gotten bound up with the issue -- a lot of things have gotten bound up in the issue. but like the guy from die welt says in that wapo piece, it's too simple and smug to just see this as "european intolerance vs. muslim intolerance." it really does have to do with press freedom and pluralism.

(btw who is brandon flowers?)

however i can envisage much the same situation developing over works of art which depicted mohammed - and there, even the basest of shock-tactic motivation would be perfectly valid, i feel.

there's an argument that this isn't so much ISLAM vs THE WEST but rather RELIGION vs SECULARISM. and maybe i have too many emotional stakes in this one (i would quite like to see all religion obliterated etc) but there's no question over which 'side' i'm taking.

i think this is very much a bad thing. otoh open criticism of a religion or aspects associated with a religion in the interests of healthy debate and social progression is a very good thing. it seems they may not have got the balance quite right. but i'm sure this has already been argued to death.

but then we know The Lex loves to deliberately rile certain groups ;)

i really do want to think of it as Religion vs Secularism but who can judge that and would they be right? to the people who burned flags and buildings, they presumably deem the cartoon to be just as bad as actual murder. which is baffling and disturbing, but then why else would they have done what they did? if that attitude is to be challenged it can probably be done only by committing to a belief that 'we' are right and 'they' are wrong - logic is perhaps useless as a weapon. see also convincing a large proportion of people in the world (i don't really want to single out a group e.g. big proportion of Jamaican men) that homosexuality is NOT evil.

steve, no, i definitely think deliberately riling and shocking religious groups is a good thing! unchallenged religion is, i feel, a very dangerous thing.

but then why else would they have done what they did?

because they're idiots?

if that attitude is to be challenged it can probably be done only by committing to a belief that 'we' are right and 'they' are wrong - logic is perhaps useless as a weapon.

but don't most of us believe that we ARE right and they ARE wrong? that a cartoon drawing of a religious figure is pretty unimportant in the overall scheme of things? i'm not suggesting that anyone should force religious crazies to believe any differently - merely that a) we should have more faith in our values, and b) religious values should not be allowed to shape how a society operates.

haha - good luck with that.

oooh! a contest over who can be the most offensive! (I'm pretty sure the West is gonna win this one...)

because they're idiots?

unsatisfactory. granted this was my kneejerk reaction when i saw them on TV, and that's part of the problem. members of the B the N and oh yes the P, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and Hitler were/are all scumbags but not idiots etc. - they all had blinkered, bigoted views but often such views are based on being educated a certain way.

just as much as we believe we are right and they are wrong, so do they believe they are right and we are wrong. Unstoppable force, immovable object. Which will give? If either can?

(b) I restate that we do not have to choose sides. I disapprove of violence far more than I disapprove of anything the newspaper did, and I approve of one of the newspaper's principles (free expression) far more than I approve of one of the frothy-mouthed's (repression), but nothing in the world necessitates taking sides, especially when that's what the worst on each "side" are trying to push us into doing.

(c) Gypsy you keep clinging to the "context" that made this worthwhile -- but you've also said many times that there would have been much better ways to address the same point. Why do you think the newspaper chose this one? It's not, I don't think, incompetence or blindness. They knew what the implications and results of this would be, and I distrust their motives in making the choice they did.

(d) xpost stuff: Going back to my first point and my all-caps shouting above, I can take Gypsy's framing and offer a few reasons why the multiculturalism vs xenophobia framing is more important to me. One is that I think the religion vs secularism one -- at least as framed against Muslim extremists -- is largely settled, in the west and definitely on this board. There's not a question of what "we" (the west) are going to do on that front. There is a question on the latter. We do have xenophobes around us, on this board even, and if you want to get personal, chances are just as likely that my life will be negatively affected by xenophobia as by Muslim extremists. (And I live in New York! Those scales would tip a lot more in Kansas!) Focusing only on the violence (instead of having a conversation about the world) bugs me when I read it as filled with xenophobic self-satisfaction (i.e., "The only thought I'll take from this whole experience is 'They're Bad'"), and it bugs me because it's never expressed what anyone thinks should be done with that disapproval. The implication is that they're Bad, and so we'll fight them. This is weird, because it seems to me more responsible to think about what we can do to support them in being less Bad. This isn't imperialist guilt or asking us to cave on principles -- it means thinking about ways to help. Even Bush at least seems to believe there's a point in encouraging democracy and moderation and development there, whatever the problems with his methods. I worry that these cartoons want (or anyway just will) lead some down a path to giving up on even that -- writing off a whole portion of humanity. Very European, that -- insularity, xenophobia, and maybe even worse impulses.

(e) Which is, for those wondering, why someone like Bush will condemn the cartoons. The whole logic of his mid-east plan is that people really want freedom and democracy, and they've just been hijacked by theocrats and extremists. It's absolutely essential to him to make that distinction, and it was critical in selling military action there -- i.e., "once we get rid of extremists and corrupt governments, the bulk of the citizens will be relieved and just want to go about their lives." Again, methods aside: the general thrust there is better than this. Plenty of people will still believe lots of the same things that extremists do. But this is a long-term project. And I think we should commit to the spirit of the long-term project, if not the invasions -- which is that breaking down extremists demagogues and empowering people in the mid-East to participate fully in their own societies will lead to new generations for whom this kind of fundamentalism has no appeal. This is a big project, but it's the only thing that can work. Rehabilitation is the only option here, because you can't imprison or execute an entire culture.

Is the secularism vs. religion questions really settled? It would certainly not seem so in the U.S. where intelligent design and Ten Commandments debates have begun to flare up more and more and where more Americans are referring to themsleves not only as religious but as 'evangelical'. It does not seem to be the case in Iran or even Egypt. That Europeans do not wish to backslide with the rest of the world makes sense to me.

but is this because they believe they can change things? and would refusing to take a side result in no change occurring?

if it's true that the desire to offend wouldn't exist without the desire to get upset about that which you do not agree with, how can this vicious circle be broken? or do we just allow the circle to continue? is it easier to encourage newspapers to not be so sensationalist and provocative, rather than to dissuade a faction of one culture/group to not react so strongly to provocation? should we be trying to do one, both or none of these things?

Is this true? Is this not equally true if not more so of China, Iran, or Sudan? The West's guilt wrt to the last several hundred years doesn't exonerate present crimes or misdeeds committed by their onetime victims.