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MNN Mohawk Nation News - February 9, 2006
A Native American view point on the cartoons
By Kahentinetha Horn
Are the Muslin riots against the cruel depictions of their Prophet Muhamad really about freedom of speech?
Whose freedom? The Euro-western corporate media define freedom of speech as the freedom to depict the world as they see it, without respect for other people’s points of view. They pretend to represent the dominant culture in the world. According to the UN Convention on the Rights of Minorities, all states are required to educate the majority population in the perspective of the minorities. But the international press doesn’t give two hoots about that. Why should they? They’re not states. They haven’t signed any conventions. But this doesn’t stop them from relying on these very Conventions to support their “freedom of speech”.
As far as they are concerned, they can write, print or depict anything they want the way they want. This right is really based on “might makes right”, a very selective cherry picking approach to international human rights law.
We, the voiceless people of the world, don’t have the same kind of freedom.
We all know that the media are an arm of the big business mega corporations of the world. We also know they want to maintain control of us all.
The Muslims make up a large part of the world they want to control. They’re sitting on oil the Americans want, damn it! Anything that serves to dehumanize and belittle the Muslims helps to justify the corporate takeover of the highly coveted resources that the Muslims happen to be sitting on.
Major media is one sided. This is the same problem that we Indigenous People of Turtle Island have. We sit on valuable resources. So we can’t get our side of our story into the press. So the press is not really free, is it? They invoke violence everyday against those whose resources they covet and to whom they give no voice. The Muslims are now making themselves heard in the only way that is open to them.
U.S President George Bush called for people to stop rioting “to protect property” and to protect his diplomats. This is the last thing he should ask for. Property is being denied them. Diplomats are there to colonize them.
One Danish writer stated in a children’s book he wrote on Muhammad, “It’s about internal politics in many of these countries, and it’s about frustrations which have accelerated for years”. What’s he talking about? The pressures are being applied from the outside!
Let’s look at what happened when Indigenous elder, David Ahenakew, expressed his contrary opinion privately about the official view on the Jews and the holocaust in Germany during World War II. Why were
his views, which most native people probably don’t agree with, published in the Regina Leader Post and blasted all across the country and the world? Because it was said by an Indigenous person and the press never misses a chance to demonize us. This lead to attacks on Indigenous people. Sometimes I would like to pelt my views at some of these corporate media for the way they continue to depict us. There doesn’t seem to be anyway to stop them. Indian Affairs has been paying a Montreal public relations firm $17,000 a month to bash the Mohawks. We can’t get in a word edgewise no matter how much evidence we have.
In the United States and Canada Indigenous People are told, “Why don’t you bring a class action suit against not only the media, but all the education institutions in North America, that continue to generate hatred and lies against you?”. These would be in their courts, at their beck and call and they would sit in judgment. What kind of relief does that give us?
At a mainstream university where I have been teaching non-native students, they arrive in my classes without a shred of knowledge about Indigenous people and history. Others come with distorted information that borders on racism. These non-native students should sue their educational institutions for being duped and mislead. They are being taught lies and fables about the real gory foundation of American and Canadian society. They should put a stop to being lead under false pretenses to swallow concocted tales as story behind their colonial presence on our land.
The powers that be refer to their embellishing of facts as “freedom of speech” and “artistic merit”. All these fabulists should be punished. Rights to freedom are for the privileged who can laugh and make fun of us because we Indigenous and other voiceless people can’t do anything about it. It is those privileged who stop us from exercising our rights. Why don’t the privileged ever lose their rights? They can’t, of course, then it wouldn’t be privileged anymore.
They tell us that democracy is the freedom to vote for the candidates that the privileged put in front of us. We are being fooled all the time.
Editors, politicians and corporate businessmen are free to make choices every day. We don’t have access to the corporate press, so they can pass us off anyway they want. This takes away our power to chose and to object. If we did, the ground has been laid so that nobody will listen to us anyway.
What is the bottom line for the media – sales and profit by pushing the mega international agenda. Just like us, the Muslims are yelling about it. The publishing of those cartoons tell us a lot.
February 10, 2006
Another American Indian’s view of cartoons
Such depiction has been used as a weapon
against oppressed peoples for centuries
By ROBERT ROBIDEAU
Reading the first news reports about the cartoons depicting Muhammid as a terrorist reminded me of the unfriendly media that printed the then Attorney Gerneral of for South Dakota, William Janklows` vigilante order, "The only way to deal with the Indian problem in South Dakota is to put a gun to the AIM leaders' heads and pull the trigger." Such ethnically hostile and abusive reporting by mainstream media was what helped to kill more than 60 American Indians and assault hundreds more during the federal governments reign of terror that occurred between 1973 and 1975 on the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota reservation.
The old adage that was popularized in Hollywood westerns," White man speaks with forked tongue" had a special meaning. It denoted the deceit of European settlers who often lied to North American Indian
people as they stole coveted lands and nearly decimated them as a people. The recent split tongue approach used in defending Danish racist cartoons as freedom of speech must be loudly condemned as just more attacks on the rights of Muslims to defend their lands, culture and self determination.
Most European and North American newspapers support the editor of, Jyllands-Posten, the first paper to publish the offensively racist cartoons, expressed position, "we cannot apologize for freedom of
expression."
The word "but" is a favorite transition of hypocrites who would have us believe on one hand that freedom of speech is a democratic principle to be defended at all cost, while on the other hand are quick to condemn when it attacks and incites hatred toward them and those they wish to protect.
Many "Democratic" European countries have laws against anti-Semitism, which are exclusive; they do not protect other cultures from racial attacks. You can insult the prophet of Islam with offensive cartoon
messages that deface his image, to create an atmosphere of hatred for Muslims, but dare not tread on the special rights and protections they have formed laws around to protect anti-Semitism.
For years Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian Muslim, had exercised his right to free speech at his Finsbury Park mosque in London. The British authorities attempted to revoke his citizenship and for years
never brought criminal charges against him. With the new atmosphere created around the global war on terrorism (GWT) an English tribunal recently convicted and sentenced Hamza to seven years in prison for
allegedly "directly and deliberately stirring up hatred against Jewish people and encouraging murder of those he referred to as non-believers." Certainly the same could be said of the cartoonist.
Despite the fact that more then 10 people have died as a result of the Danish cartoons there has been no criminal charge laid against the offending papers nor the Danish cartoonist. Some countries say that they are looking for ways to prosecute. The cartoons, which many Danish and Scandinavian newspaper editors defended in the name "radical Islam" predictably, resulted in stirring the anger of the Muslim world, rightly so. In defense, they have taken to the streets in unified protests that will, I hope, send shock waves throughout the European Union for sometime to come.
With all the comparisons that have been made and continue to be made between the struggles of Muslim people and North American Indian people, it did not come as a surprise to find similar cartoons
historically used to create racism, hatred and war against American Indians. Portraying the popular sentiment about Indians in the 1800`s. A cartoon by Grant Hamilton, called the, "The Nation's Ward"
portrayed the Indian as a savage snake constricting a pioneer family. It shows further the American Indian being fed by Uncle Sam while the pioneers' home burns. This cartoon and others like it protested the
U.S. treaty promise of giving out food rations to Indians through hard winters. Political propaganda fed through various printed media has helped to create the mentality that allowed wholesale, systematic
and frenetic killings of Indian men, women and children. One example of such an atrocity took place at Sand Creek when Phil Sheridan gave U.S. soldiers permission to butcher women and children and to hang
their sexual body parts on public display at the Denver opera house. Such atrocities have occurred in today’s modern wars currently being waged against Muslim people under Bush’s doctrine of “preemptive
strike“ that has killed more civilians then fighters.
More recently, the United States federal government began using the FBI as a national political police force to put down legitimate protest movements of the 1960“s. A program called the counter intelligence program (cointelpro) was developed to assist the FBI. This program used offensive cartoons as a method to fan the flames of racism that had been spoon-fed to the Euro-American public through newspapers, books, cartoons and Hollywood westerns became part of their standard bag of dirty tricks in putting down peaceful protest.
Today, the FBI, with a mad infinity for maintaining the imprisonment of now world famous American Indian activist, Leonard Peltier, not to long ago, used a cartoon posing him as an Indian terrorist killing their fellow agents. This cartoon is still today on their website, despite the fact that even prosecutors who tried the case admit they "do not know who killed the two FBI agents" during the Pine Ridge reign of terror on June 26, 1976. Leonard Peltier has been confined 30 years in federal prisons as a result of FBI manufactured evidence,much of which the federal government has since admitted to.
There is no question that sports teams who use Indian Mascots, cartoons that portray inaccurate images, symbols insulting to American Indians. One professor speaking out against the use of Chief
Illiniwek by the U of I football team in the late 1990s, said," "I've often visited Germany and speaking to younger people there, they all feel great pain when they consider the recent past. Not one
university in Germany would contemplate having a rabbi as a mascot."
Freedom of speech and of the press has been used as a weapon against oppressed people for centuries. It has been nothing more than a smokescreen to justify the actions of a few but in reality incite religious and ethnic hatred. The editors knew these cartoons were clearly drawn as deadly propaganda tools, created with malice and forethought, to neutralize Muslim groups in struggle and deny them "respectability" in the world community. Who now should be charged for inciting a riot? Who now should be held accountable to the Muslim communities for these slanderous, racist cartoons that has forced communities to take sides against each other? How can we share this world, respecting the diversity of ethnic origins if the powers on
hand continue to pump the public with hate filled propaganda! It is time for the media to step up to the plate accepting responsibility for their actions and what better place is there to start than in Denmark!
ROBERT ROBIDEAU is co-director of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. He can be reached at: americanindianm@telefonica.net
The Jewish Week – February 8, 2006
The Respect Of A Cousin:
Cartoon Controversy - A Jewish Perspective
Edward Miller
After the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Postenāe™s 12 caricatures of the prophet Muhammad were republished in European newspapers, riots erupted in Damascus, Gaza, Beirut and elsewhere throughout the Muslim world. The violence is an extreme manifestation of the deep hurt felt by virtually all Muslims.
As we condemn the violence on the streets, perhaps we should take a moment to understand the hurt in the hearts of the great majority of Muslims who did not engage in violence.
For Muslims, the mere rendering of an image of Muhammad is sacrilege. The portrayal of Muhammad in a pejorative fashion is to them an inconceivably offensive desecration, on the level of what would be for us the defilement of a Torah scroll. Because it was done in newspapers across Europe, it was a slap in the face repeated thousands of times.
Perhaps it is a question of respect, not freedom. Freedom of _expression theoretically protects the right of a non-Jew to desecrate a Torah scroll. Yet we would all view freedom of _expression as a hollow defense to such a vile act.
Some say Muslims can't take criticism and simply don't understand freedom of the press. In my own limited experience, that has not been the case. For the past year I have written a column in a Muslim newspaper, Muslims Weekly, in which I have criticized suicide bombing, the treatment of Jews under Islamic rule, the anti-Jewish rantings of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even Muslims Weekly's own reporting about Israel. But it was all done with respect, an informed appreciation of the wonderful benefits that Islam conferred upon the Jewish people, along with a willingness to look at our own imperfections together with those of the other.
Regardless of whether or not the European press was constitutionally free to publish the offensive images, the act was a blatant and vulgar act of disrespect to Islam. Such insults no doubt contribute to the frightening specter of a clash of civilizations.
What can we do as Jews to lessen the hostilities? Perhaps, just perhaps, a little respect would help. Rather than ripping the wounds wider with editorial musings extolling freedom of speech and condemning violent protests, is it not time for a bit of healing?
The pages of this Jewish newspaper present a place for a small start by showing Muslims right here that though we too have the freedom to say anything we like, we choose to convey respect to our Muslim cousins. Printing something positive about Muhammad best does this.
There is a space between romanticizing the past and vilifying it. There is a time to focus on the dark side of history and a time to view the other in the best light. There is a time to cull from our rabbinic writings the good our sages saw in Islam and there is quite a bit of such sentiment recorded. We Jews need to learn to be more flexible, pursuing the claims of Jews expelled from Arab countries and criticizing anti-Jewish TV programs and cartoons in the Muslim media, while at the same time displaying gratitude for all the good Islam did for us. There is a time to jump over our pain and see the humanity of the other. That time is now. Let us start:
There is a Hadith (oral tradition concerning the words and works of Muhammad) recorded by Bukhari in the name of Amer Bin Rabiha that reads as follows:
A funeral procession passed us and the Prophet stood up for it. We said, but Prophet of God, this is a funeral of a Jew. The Prophet responded, rise.
One can search the writings of the ancient non-Jewish world for a more powerful example of a public display of respect for the humanity of the Jew. There simply is no more powerful statement than the single word uttered by Muhammad nearly 14 centuries ago.
Some readers will bombard this newspaper with reams of material showing a darker side to Islam, as if it were just too much for them to hear one good thing. But it is there, it is a sacred part of their tradition, it is good and we should hear it and respect it.
When you give respect you get it. When you take criticism, you earn the right to give it. Perhaps this article will be republished in Muslim newspapers, compete with its critical comments about the pain we feel in the face of anti-Jewish cartoons and worse in Muslim media. Muslim readers may come to understand that an article by a Jew, in a Jewish newspaper, was one of respect, telling its audience: We know that the one mocked in newspapers in Europe is the one who had the humanity to tell his companions to rise for the funeral procession of a Jew.
Edward Miller, a local attorney, is active in efforts to reconcile Jews and Muslims.
February 9, 2006
Message from The Fellowship of Reconciliation
Offensive Cartoons: Respecting what is Sacred
The response in parts of the Muslim world to publication of crude and deeply offensive cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad is shocking and distressing. Yet the pain felt by Muslims is real and understandable. By insulting the core of their religion, the cartoons constitute a vile attack on Muslims everywhere. But despite the egregious nature of the insult, it cannot not justify mass violence, arson and death threats.
The cartoons, which depict Muhammad as a violent, degenerate criminal, were first published in a Danish newspaper last September, in an act of extraordinary insensitivity and poor judgment. (Interestingly, the editor who commissioned them now admits to his own ignorance of Islam and of the way Muslims feel about the Prophet Muhammad.)
But ignorance is only part of it. There is clearly a certain malice involved, if not in the first Danish publication of the cartoons, then in their repeated publication in newspapers around the world. No longer can editors claim ignorance. The whole world now knows that the Prophet Muhammad is not supposed to be depicted at all, let alone in a disparaging manner.
Nor can offending newspapers claim that this is valid political or social satire, protected by free speech. These cartoons of the Prophet do nothing but ridicule the core idea of an entire religion. They attack what is sacred. And there is no deeper wound, no deeper fury, than that.
Many Muslims feel an intimate, personal connection to the Prophet Muhammad. When they think of divine mercy, kindness and integrity, they think of the Prophet. He is the embodiment of every virtuous ideal. In fact, the ideal of every Muslim is to become as much like the Prophet as possible. He is regarded as the best of human beings, the exemplar of humanity.
In short, the Prophet Muhammad is sacred to Muslims.
Westerners understand the concept of the sacred. Christians have been hurt and outraged by disrespectful and blasphemous depictions of Jesus. Jews feel pain when the holy Torah, the word of God, is ridiculed, vilified, or desecrated. In this country, burning of the flag -- near-sacred to many -- gives similar offense.
The emotional wound caused by the cartoons cannot be undone, but there is plenty that can be done. After 9/11, a great effort was made in the West to learn about Islam and to understand Muslims. That effort should be stepped up.
The incident also provides an opportunity for people of all faiths to recognize and acknowledge that which is sacred in other religions, even if it is not sacred to them personally.
For Muslims, this is an opportunity to examine the issue of how to respond to what offends them. Retaliating with a call for a Holocaust cartoon contest, as an Iranian newspaper has done, is to fall to the same level of ignorance, bigotry and malice that the original cartoons represent. Instead, Muslims should transform the incident into an opportunity for dialogue, education, and understanding.
There is a story in the Hadith (sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad) that Muhammad was with his companions in the simple mosque of Medina.The mosque had an earthen floor and was open on all sides. A Bedouin man walked in and began to urinate in the corner. Muhammad's companions were incensed, yelling at him to stop and threatening to assault him.
"No," the Prophet told his followers. Let him be. He does not know any better." When the man had finished, Muhammad addressed him gently: "This place is not meant for urine, but only for prayer and the remembrance of Allah." Then he told his followers to get water to wash the floor.
Burning embassies and demanding that editors be executed is not an Islamic response to insult. That response lies in the nonviolent actions of the Prophet Muhammad, as illustrated above. Educate those who have offended by violating what is sacred to you. Reach out to them. Teach them so they may know better.
This statement was written by a team of FOR staff representing the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths.
Jennifer Hyman, Communications Coordinator
Rabia Harris, FOR Chaplain
Ibrahim M. Abdil-Mu'id Ramey, Disarmament Coordinator
Ethan Vesely-Flad, Editor, Fellowship magazine
February 9, 2006
Offensive Cartoons: Respecting what is Sacred
"The response in parts of the Muslim world to publication of crude and deeply offensive cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad is shocking and distressing"
Salaam - while i don't particularly condone violent acts (which in the case of the cartoons has been towards property - and the deaths that have occured have been due to the Afghan puppet regime of Karzai shooting demonstrators)...
I really do have to wonder why is it that Muslims are expected to always "condemn" before making any kind of a statement? And if violence is to be condemned, as it should be, then why are all acts of terrorism (i.e. United States, Israel, and British) not condemned every single day by American Muslim organizations? If we are to have a single standard, then it would seem to me that Muslim organizations should be issuing statements of condemnation every single day against the United States, and Britain primarily - as these states (along with Israel) are the most violent in these times.
As it stands now, American Muslim groups only issue statements when Muslims do some act of violence. This makes the whole condemnation game surreal, to say the least... and one begins to wonder if these condemnations have any meaning left to them...? Or are they being done for the benefit of the state department?
My apologies for any offence - however, I think it is high time that American Muslim organizations begin to recognize where the real horrendous and horribly disturbing and shocking violence is coming from: United States, Israel, and England. Yes, there are some violent acts by Muslims that are horrible - but if these condemnation are to have any meaning, then these statements must concurrently include a proportionate (that would mean a a million times stronger) condemnation of imperial violence.
Altaf Bhimji
Berkely, CA
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