Danes Finally Apologize to Muslims

Germany 2006: More than half a century after the fall of the Third Reich, the government still limits freedom of the press and thus overall freedom of expression. Whoever tries to find Nazi propaganda on web pages hosted in the Federal Republic of Germany, be it for educational purposes or for dubious intent, the search won't be successful unless the user decides to be persistent. The fruits of this kind of search would appear not worth the effort, considering the amount of information to be found on foreign web sites . According to federal law, German citizens are prohibited from showing any symbols of the Nazi empire or its propaganda in public, including the Internet. Exceptions to this law require a very complex and tedious authorization process.
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In a sense the Danish government and the editors of Jyllands Posten have already sacrificed freedom of the press in their country. Following massive protests in the Middle East and threats of a boycott of Danish products by several Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the Prime Minister of Denmark Anders Fogh Rasmussen has had to distance himself from the caricatures in Jyllands Posten. Danish flags were burned in Palestine; Arab ambassadors to Denmark were recalled by their governments; armed militias in the Gaza Strip demanded the closing of all E.U. bureaus in the area; and even in Denmark itself Muslim demonstrators expressed their anger in vociferous protests.

Carsten Juste, Jyllands Posten's editor in chief, tried to defuse the situation by releasing an official exculpation. Several sources in the Middle East, however, as well as radical Muslim preachers in Denmark, remain dissatisfied with the statement, calling for the punishment of the newspaper's editorial staff.

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http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?menu=A11100&no=272271&rel_no=1&back_url=

The jab at the Danish government and public was in reaction to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen's decision not to intervene in the affair, on the grounds of freedom of expression. An opinion poll also showed that 79 per cent of Danes thought Rasmussen should not issue an apology, and 62 per cent said the newspaper should not apologise.

Rasmussen did say, however, that his government respects Islam, and never meant to defame prophets. He also expressed hopes that the crisis would end after the newspaper apologised for the offence.

That was not likely to happen, as was clear from the reaction of disgruntled Egyptian MP Hamdi Hassan, who is also a member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. "The Danish government needs to make a more formal apology," he told Al-Ahram Weekly, "in acknowledgment that freedom of expression does not mean people are free to insult prophets."

Others slammed the EU's "double standards" for keeping silent about the cartoons ridiculing Prophet Mohamed, while insisting on enforcing economic sanctions against countries that publish anti-Semitic material. "The world would have been up in arms had a Jewish sanctuary been defamed instead," thundered Ahmed, a 36-year-old accountant. "The world has to know Muslims will defend their prophet until their last breath as well."

http://www.counterpunch.org/itani02022006.html

This week, we witnessed the power of the Islamic and Arab worlds to bring a Western nation virtually to its knees. I was amazed at that power. This is over an issue that the nation’s government had nothing to do with. All I can wonder is why the Islamic and Arab world doesn’t harness that power more effectively and change policies that directly impact our causes and our beliefs?

A newspaper in Denmark, Jyllands-Posten, published a series of cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in a derogatory and libelous manner. Few Arabs or Muslims had ever heard of the newspaper before the controversy, yet they were rightly angered.

Ironically, the cartoons were published in September2005 , more than five months ago. But this week, the issue came to a head after it surfaced in the Arab world media.

Arabs and Muslims are justified in their anger against the action of the newspaper. The publication of the cartoons may constitute a hate crime, which is considered an offense in most Western countries. They certainly should not have been brushed off as being protected under the universal right of free speech as they were initially by the Danish government.

In justified anger, Muslims and Arabs have begun boycotting not only the newspaper but also many products that are produced in Denmark. That power has caused many of Denmark’s largest corporations to reel in shock, forcing many to absorb massive profit losses and to even lay-off their employees.

That power to act was mobilized in less than two weeks, although it should have begun as soon as the offensive material was first published five months ago.

In response the newspaper offered a lukewarm apology. The government of Denmark also claimed it had no power over the newspaper. But we know that is not true.

Sadly, many innocent companies and people who might otherwise support the just causes of the Muslim and Arab worlds have also been punished. And that is unfair. And against the spirit of Islam. The Arab and Muslim worlds, despite being the target of a constant and unyielding campaign of hatred in the Western media, should stand as examples of how right and wrong can be addressed.

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http://arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=77236&d=3&m=2&y=2006

Context matters very much in the case of the cartoons of Muhammad too. It is one thing to assert the right to publish an image of the prophet. As long as that is not illegal - and not even the government's amended religious hatred bill makes it so - then that right undoubtedly exists. But it is another thing to put that right to the test, especially when to do so inevitably causes offence to many Muslims and, even more so, when there is currently such a powerful need to craft a more inclusive public culture which can embrace them and their faith. That is why the defiant republication of the cartoons in some parts of Europe (some of them with far less good histories of intercommunal relations than this country) is more questionable than it may appear at first sight. That is also why the restraint of most of the British press may be the wiser course - at least for now. There has to be a very good reason for giving gratuitous offence of this kind. Yesterday's acquittal of two British National party officials on race hatred charges for attacking Islam - and the triumphalist scenes as the two freed men emerged from court - are part of the context that must be weighed in asserting any right to publish cartoons that offend Muslims. So too is the political situation in Denmark itself, where the cartoons were first published, and where a large and strongly anti-immigrant party provides part of the parliamentary coalition supporting Denmark's centre-right government. What is the message that is being sent, both in the BNP acquittal context and in the Danish context, by insisting on publishing such images? Those questions cannot be ducked - and nor can the answers.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1701092,00.html

"In none of these countries are there similar laws that threaten people with loss of freedom and wealth for denying that large percentages of gypsies, gays, mentally retarded, and other miscellaneous "debris of humanity" were also eliminated by the Jew-slaughtering Nazis."

No, there isn't. But in MOST situations there is a lack of laws making illegal things that nobody appears to do. Is the claim being made that IF there appeared on the scene "Roma holocaust deniers" or "gay holocaust deniers" or "mentally retarded holocaust" deniers appropriate laws would not come into being?

I would argue that there are laws forbidding "Jew holocaust deniers" not because of some special priveledges being accorded to the Jews because of what the German Nazis did to them (along with help from many others) but because we do not seem to have the other sorts of deniers -- and hence the matter is moot with regard to Roma, gays, etc. Notice that this is in spite of the fact that these other groups are subject to hatred. Apparently in THEIR cases the hatred doesn't go to the extent of denying historical reality.

It's also worth pointing out that, of all the countries that consider Holocaust denial to fit under their laws against hate speech, all but two -- Switzerland and Israel -- were countries that had been part of the Reich and therefore knew about the Nazi crimes firsthand. I don't think laws making Holocaust denial illegal are a good idea, but the countries that have them are democracies, and if the majority were actually opposed to them, the laws would be changed.

British Parliament, for example, just voted down a bill that would have expanded its hate speech laws pretty dramatically -- although not to the point of making Holocaust denial illegal.

@%<

I stopped in at the pharmacy last Thursday to get a prescription filled, and as the pharmacist brought over the medicine, he quietly pointed out that one of them was Danish. With hardly a second thought I asked him if there was a compatible substitute available, which he quickly produced. Thanking him, I took the medicine and was off.

As I drove, I wondered what prompted me so quickly to reject the Danish brand. I had been to Denmark and found that the people I encountered there were warm and friendly. And on a couple of occasions their hospitality matched our own. In my travels through the Nordic countries, there really was nothing that would have left a bitter aftertaste. So why this sudden and abrupt rejection of anything Danish?

I expect the malicious portrayal of our Prophet (peace be upon him) in one of their newspapers had everything to do with it. For while I strongly believe in freedom of the press, I also know that the press be it anywhere carries with it a weight of responsibility. Portraying our Prophet with a bomb ready to go off says a lot about the intent of the author who drew up this atrocious caricature. It is blasphemous and disrespectful, and prone to provoke and inflame negative feelings. And for a newspaper to publish such an offensive piece perhaps says more.

And for them to take four months before understanding the fury they had caused in Muslims everywhere speaks volumes of the disregard the press has against the religion of Islam. Blame the Muslims for some misdeeds, but blasphemy would not be one of them. Neither Moses nor Jesus or any of the other prophets would ever be an object of a malicious drawing or cartoon. For we, like the Jews and the Christians believe in them and their messages as well.

For the Danish and Norwegian governments to assume a “hands-off” policy in the name of freedom of the press rings hypocritically hollow. How swiftly would they have reacted had the piece in that newspaper been one questioning the validity of the number of Jews killed in World War II? Was it really six million?

In Canada, the United States and in Great Britain those who had previously brought this matter up were mercilessly hounded into silence. Jobs were lost and professions terminated. Laws were quickly drafted to punish anyone daring to question such claims. Had the Danish government assumed a similar posture on the doubters, they would have undoubtedly been booted out of office.

But to satire an individual, who passed on the message of Islam over1400 years ago, in such a disrespectful manner, no editorial restraint was exercised. Neither was there a swift retraction nor rebuke from the Danish or Norwegian authorities. Only when business and commerce appeared to be threatened was there some kind of action.

I hold no resentment against the Danish or Norwegian people. They have caused me no harm. The actions of a few do not paint a fair picture of their societies. Many have been just as revolted by their own newspaper. But for the moment I am offended. Disappointed at the action and the hypocrisy of those running the machinery of the written word in the so-called “free press” countries who proudly claim to uphold the freedom of the press and yet do it very selectively.

My rejection today of anything Danish or Norwegian may subside over time, as reason takes hold of emotions. But for now, please grant me the right to express my anger privately and nonviolently.

http://arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=77279&d=4&m=2&y=2006

"The Muslim Fury," one newspaper headline screamed. "The Rage of Islam
Sweeps Europe," said another. "The clash of civilizations is coming," warned
one commentator. All this refers to the row provoked by the publication of
cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper four months ago.
Since then a number of demonstrations have been held, mostly--though not
exclusively--in the West, and Scandinavian embassies and consulates have
been besieged.

But how representative of Islam are all those demonstrators? The "rage
machine" was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood--a political, not a
religious, organization--called on sympathizers in the Middle East and
Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a
Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera. Not to be left
behind, the Brotherhood's rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic
Liberation Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray.
Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian
Baathist leaders abandoned their party's 60-year-old secular pretensions and
organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and
Beirut.

The Muslim Brotherhood's position, put by one of its younger militants,
Tariq Ramadan--who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British home
secretary--can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic principles to
represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and
the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however,
are false.

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone
else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version
of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim
theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued
"fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further
buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten
Commandments--which include a ban on depicting God--as part of its heritage.
The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a
ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam
has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other
absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk,
i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an
absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of
Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim
rulers. There is no space here to provide an exhaustive list, but these are
some of the most famous:

A miniature by Sultan Muhammad-Nur Bokharai, showing Muhammad riding Buraq,
a horse with the face of a beautiful woman, on his way to Jerusalem for his
M'eraj or nocturnal journey to Heavens (16th century); a painting showing
Archangel Gabriel guiding Muhammad into Medina, the prophet's capital after
he fled from Mecca (16th century); a portrait of Muhammad, his face covered
with a mask, on a pulpit in Medina (16th century); an Isfahan miniature
depicting the prophet with his favorite kitten, Hurairah (17th century);
Kamaleddin Behzad's miniature showing Muhammad contemplating a rose produced
by a drop of sweat that fell from his face (19th century); a painting,
"Massacre of the Family of the Prophet," showing Muhammad watching as his
grandson Hussain is put to death by the Umayyads in Karbala (19th century);
a painting showing Muhammad and seven of his first followers (18th century);
and Kamal ul-Mulk's portrait of Muhammad showing the prophet holding the
Quran in one hand while with the index finger of the other hand he points to
the Oneness of God (19th century).

Some of these can be seen in museums within the Muslim world, including the
Topkapi in Istanbul, and in Bokhara and Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and
Haroun-Walat, Iran (a suburb of Isfahan).

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 [at] telefonica.net

http://counterpunch.org/robideau02092006.html

get rid of racist hate speech