. Racist stereotypes and sword-wielding Mohammeds that don't exist.

Pathetic. This whole post is pathetic, and in fact racist. Are you genuinely suggesting that not one of those cartoons featured a sword-wielding Mohammed? Are you genuinely suggesting that these pictures were not based on racist views about Muslims as suicide bombers, violent fanatics, glowering Orientals etc? Could you possibly be more obtuse?

Your characterisation of Mr Itane's article as Orientalist is perfeclty absurd. Not only does it not seek to master the oppressed, either by flattering or denigrating them, it actually criticises others for doing so.

But what is really disgusting is the fact that you take these racist representations and instead of sympathising with their victims - which you would presumably do in other circumstances (if The Sun depicted black people as rapists and muggers, for instance) - you obsess over the reaction of a handful of zealots in order to contemptuously dismiss the entire reaction as an effort to create a religious hierarchy. It would be as if one refused to condemn colonialism in Kenya and insisted that the real issue was whether one supported the brutal tactics of Jomo Kenyatta. And you lard it with this lazy, feeble, thoughtless condescension that you wouldn't dream of introducing if you were discussing the publication of anti-Semitic pictures in The Times or Le Monde.

And then the capper: the pretense that it is a "religious hierarchy of fundamentalist Islam" (where is this hierarchy, this shadowy network of Islamic clerics, I wonder?) that has used the issue to "manipulate" and "terrorise" their own. As if the racism itself was not sufficiently offensive, as if people had to be "terrorised" into finding it so. The pathetic excuse that these cartoons were published some while back is exactly of the same strength as the excuses for Kilroy when he made his racist statements about the Arabs - he'd said it a few months before, so what's the big fuss now? It doesn't occur to you that this issue has been brewing for that length of time? That the word, and the anger, has been spreading? That protests have been building?

I did also click on the 'mediawatchwatch' article linked. Nice comments. Nice confederates. I can only imagine that you think you're being a street smart secularist and so on. There must also be a supposition that to take such a preposterous stance is 'tough' and contrarian. You probably suppose that by minimising the issue (falsely claiming that Jyllands-Posten, the most widely read newspaper in Denmark, is read by nobody, pretending that the images are not racist, suggesting that the issue is four months 'stale' as if Muslims have only just alighted upon it), you are cleverly cutting yourself free of the asphyxiating corsets of political correctness. You're actually being a despicable racist prick.
# posted by  lenin @ 00:48

 

someone piss in your coffee, Len?

I've no idea why you are trying to deny that there are a bunch of very nasty Muslim headcases in the UK; I seem to remember you narrowly escaped a kicking from them yourself during the BG&B campaign. And given the amount of involvement by British intelligence in British fascism, it is hardly unreasonable to suppose that there is a similar degree of involvement in Arab fascism by Saudi intelligence.

I'm less inclined to worry about this than Jarndyce, because as always I tend to take the business school approach and ask about placard-holders whether they have a realistic plan to achieve the aim on their placard (I liked the one in Pakistan which read "Proceed Against the Rude Newspapers"). But it's no more sensible to pretend that it's racist to say that demanding beheadings is the sort of thing the police ought to take an interest in, than to pretend that placards are a different kind of speech from cartoons.
# posted by  dsquared @ 13:39

 

DD: don't get me wrong. I'm not over-worried that a few protesting nuts are on the verge of destroying society or turning us into dhimmis or whatever the screed sites are saying. That sort of "analysis" omits rather obvious issues with power. But this response to legal free expression, even free expression that I find unpleasant, offends my sense of fair play.

The rest I'll respond to as and when. Daughter duty calls.
# posted by  Jarndyce @ 21:12