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MSNBC – February 9, 2006
U.S. Muslims react to furor with deft diplomacy
Muslim-Americans condemn cartoons - and violence that's come with them
By Michael E. Ross
As Muslims in Europe and the Middle East have led violent protests against cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, American Muslims have responded to the furor with quiet diplomacy, condemning the violence accompanying those protests while explaining why the caricatures drew such an angry reaction.
"There's outrage," said Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), "but there's just an appropriate response to the concerns that Muslims feel."
To Hooper, communications director for CAIR, a Washington-based civil rights and advocacy group, the anger of American Muslims is much the same as their foreign counterparts - just more moderated.
American Muslims, he said, have "faced depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in the past, and we've dealt with them in the appropriate manner - by writing letters to the editor, by working with the media. The American Muslim community is aware of how to deal responsibly with these kinds of things."
For Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, there were few surprises in the way U.S. Muslims have reacted.
"It was exactly what I expected," said Bray, the public-policy arm of the Muslim American Society, based in Falls Church, Va. "The Muslim community is appalled by the cartoons, but we're experienced enough to deal with controversy. While we condemn the cartoons, we also condemn the violence connected to it."
Bray said his organization had recently met with the Danish, Norwegian, French and Australian ambassadors to express their concerns. "We've done what any advocacy group does when things are done wrong: find positive and nonviolent ways to respond," he said.
On Wednesday CAIR, Hooper's organization, issued a statement calling on an Iranian newspaper to abandon plans to solicit cartoons denying existence of the Nazi holocaust. "Now is the time for responsible people of all faiths to avoid inflammatory actions that are clearly designed to incite hatred," the statement read in part….
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11239054/
Columbus Dispatch- February 9, 2006
Exercising free speech doesn't mean
spreading hatred is acceptable
By Asma Mobin-Uddin
The controversy started by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten when it published insulting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad has ignited debates throughout the world about freedom of speech and the place of respect for religious sensitivities.
People are taking sides and hardening their positions. Newspapers across Europe have reprinted the cartoons, citing rights to free speech while Muslim nations and people are expressing offense at the vilifying depictions of Muhammad and their faith by protesting, recalling ambassadors and boycotting Danish products.
Just because one has the legal right to say something doesn't mean it should be said or it is the right thing to say. In a free society, we can publish speech that humiliates, slanders, and incites hate. But should we? Freedom of speech should not be used as a license to spread hatred.
In December 2005, when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a myth, his comments were censured and condemned around the world, and rightly so. His comments were hurtful and denigrated the memory of the many innocent people who died in that dark chapter of history. The fact that Ahmadinejad could and did say something outrageous in denying the Holocaust was not hailed as a victory for free speech; nor were his words continuously reprinted to celebrate freedom of expression. Instead, his comments were referred to only as people expressed their outrage and condemnations.
The British newspaper The Guardian recently reported that the Danish newspaper that initially ran the cartoons defaming Muhammad had refused to run drawings lampooning Jesus Christ three years ago on the "grounds that they could be offensive to readers and were not funny." With this revelation, the newspaper's intent became clear. In today's polarized world, newspapers hiding behind freedom of speech in an effort to provoke and demean a disenfranchised European Muslim minority is nothing to celebrate.
As a Muslim and an American, I cherish the right to speak freely, but I also believe this right should be exercised with responsibility and respect. U.S. State Department spokesperson Kurtis Cooper stated: "We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable." The Vatican's position is that "the right to freedom of thought and expression . . . cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers."
Muslims clearly have the right to protest the defamatory and insulting attack on their faith and beloved prophet. But even though some European newspapers may be misusing freedom of speech in order to humiliate and sow hatred, it certainly does not give Muslims the excuse to behave in a violent, outrageous manner. The few Muslims who have chosen to react in violent ways are betraying the example and teachings of the prophet they are trying to defend....
Asma Mobin-Uddin is a Columbus pediatrician who serves as president of the Council on American-Islamic Relation's Ohio chapter.
http://www.dispatch.com/editorials-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/02/09/20060209-A11-00.html
Chicago Tribune - February 9, 2006
Cartoon controversy:
The perspective of a Western Muslim
By Ahmed M. Rehab
As a Western Muslim who fully identifies with both worlds, I have watched the Danish cartoon fiasco unravel with shock and dismay.
Is this a manifestation of the clash of civilization that political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has predicted for so long?
Or is it precisely the opposite: a clash of the uncivilized?
Both parties at the root of the controversy are making a mockery of their own values as they purport to expose the shortcomings in one another--and they are dragging all of us in with them.
Under the pretense of testing the limits of freedom of expression, the cartoonists and the European newspapers that published their work have, for a moment, invoked flashes of Europe's ugly past.
It is hard to note the shameless and bigoted stereotyping in the cartoons and not think back to the anti-Semitic depictions that engrossed Germany in the 1930s. Like today's cartoons, the ones back then began as a medium that offered a voice to European disenchantment with a religious minority living in their midst, whose growing influence many viewed as a direct threat to traditional European culture and values.
The freedom of expression claim certainly took a knock when the Guardian recently revealed that the same Danish paper that published the 12 Prophet Muhammad cartoons refused to publish cartoons lampooning Christ three years ago "on the grounds that they could be offensive to readers."
As such, I think that self-respecting Muslims are well within their rights to object, but how some have chosen to do so has dismayed me no less than the cartoons themselves.
Under the pretense of rising up to defend the honor of the Prophet, some Muslims have resorted to actions that would have shamed him.
Muhammad's greatest legacy is the values he came to preach. He put the importance of these values above his own person. It may even be said that his personal eminence was but a consequence of his being a messenger of these great values.
Today, many of these very same values are brought to disrepute, not by insignificant Danish cartoonists, but by Muslim societies. Yet no one takes to the streets in defense of those values that were dearer to the Prophet Muhammad than his own image.
Muslims would do well to consider angry and destructive mobs as a personal insult to the Prophet, who preached that "the best amongst you are those who can reign themselves in when angered."
Muslims would do well to consider vindictiveness as an insult to the Prophet, who preached that the best way to respond to an act of evil is with an act of goodness.
Muslims would do well to consider empty expressions of rage as a personal insult to the Prophet, whose emphasis on contemplation and positive solutions catapulted his community from the margins of civilization to a resplendent center of innovation and achievement.
We Muslims have to reassess our commitment to our faith and values, realizing that these values take priority over symbolic gestures, as important as they may be. Perhaps if we Muslims had obsessed over the values of our Prophet as we have over the mention of his name or the use of his image, we would never have had to defend his person.
So what is next?
So long as Western and Muslim societies allow themselves to be defined by those among them who seek self-affirmation by negating the other, clashes are imminent. We should remain ever-vigilant of inciters who attempt to cast Islam and Christianity into competing football clubs and their adherents into worked-up hooligans who clash in artificial and petty rivalries.
These cartoons have been exploited--if not devised--as agents to drive a wedge between a predominantly Christian Western society and Muslims in the West and around the world.
Those who classify themselves as civilized should play no part in condoning or perpetuating this scheme, rather they should champion a dialogue of understanding between the Muslim world and the West. Both civilizations have contributed much to our world, each can offer much to the other. In the recent past, leading Muslim organizations in the U.S. have repositioned themselves to assume that role. They are willing and able. It is time they be fully engaged.
Ahmed M. Rehab is director of communications for the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Chicago.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0602090019feb09,1,1117359.story
AGE - February 9, 2006
The real truth behind the cartoons fury
By Rami Khouri
The whole world has been surprised by the scope and intensity of angry crowds throughout the Islamic realm that are demonstrating against the offensive cartoons about the prophet Muhammad that were published last year in a small, right-wing Danish newspaper.
It is perhaps time that we stopped being surprised by a phenomenon that has become routine: the affirmation of Islamic identity as the dominant form of national self-assertion in developing societies whose citizens suffer major grievances against the quality of their own statehood and governance as well as against Western and Israeli policies.
The cartoons, including one depicting the prophet's headdress as a bomb, are only the fuse that set off a combustible mixture of pressures and tensions anchored in a much wider array of problems.
These problems include the cartoons themselves, provocative and arrogant European disdain for Muslim sensitivities about the prophet Muhammad, attempts by some Islamist extremists and criminal-political elements to stir up troubles, the Europeans' clear message that their values count more than the values of Muslims and a wider sense by many citizens of Islamic societies that the West in general seeks to weaken and subjugate the Muslim world.
The Danish cartoons only sparked some mild complaints when they first appeared last September.
The present wave of intense protests was sparked when half a dozen other newspapers throughout Europe provocatively reprinted the cartoons last month.
This was coupled with European political and press leaders telling the Islamic world that Western freedom of the press was a higher moral value and a greater political priority than Muslims' concern that their leading prophet not be subjected to blasphemy and insult.
Clearly, some troublemakers in Europe and the Islamic world stirred up Muslims' anger and provoked some of the destructive protests, especially burning embassies and offices in Damascus and Beirut. This is the political equivalent of football hooliganism in Europe - a small minority of unruly criminal thugs that preys on the legitimate sentiments of otherwise peaceful crowds that take to the streets in orderly, if lively, protests.
It would be a huge mistake to focus mainly on the few violent political skinheads, and to ignore the meaning of the vast majority of hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched in earnest and in an orderly way.
This occurs at a time when Islamist political movements throughout the region are winning election after election. Islamist identity repeatedly triumphs in cases in which traditional ruling elites have had to open up and make space for others to contest political power democratically and peacefully, including in Arab states, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere. The most consistent source of Arab-Islamic angst in the past two centuries, Western colonialism, has now run up against the resistance of the single most consistent form of indigenous identity and anti-imperial opposition: cultural and political Islamism.
It is too simplistic and easy to categorise this as a clash of civilisations, a very Western perspective that explains political tensions primarily through the lens of cultural and values differences.
Most Muslims (and non-Muslim Middle Easterners such as several million Christian Arabs) probably see the tensions as a political battle, not a cultural one. This is not primarily an argument about freedom of the press in Europe, much as our dashing European friends would like to believe it is.
It is about Arab-Islamic societies' desire to enjoy freedom from Western and Israeli subjugation, diplomatic double standards and predatory neo-colonial policies.
This is no mere clash of cultures. It is a new form of the colonial struggle that defined European-Arab/Asian relations in the 19th century. The difference this time is that the natives in the south are not helpless and quiescent in the face of the West's large guns, disdainful rhetoric, or insulting cartoons. Muslims, Arabs, Asians and others today are much more aware of the policies of Western states, concerned about their goals, angry about Western double standards, able to resist through the use of mass media, political, and other channels, and willing to stand up, fight back, and assert their right to live in freedom and dignity. The message from the Arab-Islamic heartland is that the 19th century has officially ended.
Muslims have been deeply insulted by much of Europe's behaviour regarding the Danish cartoons, but not only regarding the cartoons, because our concerns and fears are much wider and deeper than that. Many ordinary citizens in the Arab-Asian region see the European position on Iran's nuclear industry and the victorious Hamas party in Palestine as moving closer to American-Israeli positions that grossly discriminate against Arabs or Muslims.
Coming after the American-led assault on Iraq, this explains why large majorities of people polled in Arab countries just three months ago believe that the main motives of American policies in the Middle East are "oil, protecting Israel, dominating the region and weakening the Muslim world".
Editorial cartoons by nature send a message by symbolising much larger political and social issues.
Similarly, the protests by many Muslims should be understood as reflecting much deeper concerns than those surrounding only the insulting, blasphemous cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper
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