Febraury 7, 2006
At
the ideological level, the racism of those by-now-notorious Danish
cartoons is clear enough. The denunciation of this racism is growing and
this is positive. However, in terms of the forces actually organizing and
mobilizing something quite dark by means of this allegedly light-hearted
caricature of a "war" among caricaturists, it is seriously incumbent on
all of us also to penetrate its political significance.
What is being
organized via Danish media, in some semi-respectable garb, is nothing less
than a pole of public opinion that is not just religiously bigoted in its
racism. This is a pole of public opinion that surpasses the Hitlerian
dimension in its effort to justify the extermination of literally billions
of other fellow human beings on this planet. As the following vignette
illustrates, this has been on the agenda of Western military forces for
some time, and even political forces long assumed to be part of the "peace
movement" have been or are being compromised into its service.
What is now
happening around these Danish cartoons was prefigured in eerily similar
incidents elsewhere, and earlier, within the NATO alliance; the NATO
aggression in Afghanistan is the linchpin. Consider the Canadian military
port city of Halifax on the Atlantic coast of the province of Nova Scotia,
where the local newspaper is an avowedly military newspaper. Thousands of
Canadian troops reside in the area. Many were dispatched to Afghanistan
under U.S. and British command on October 7, 2001.
The leading and
senior Halifax-area member of the national Parliament, Alexa McDonough,
was leader of Canada’s "Left"-ish New Democratic Party (NDP) at the time.
Far from issuing any denunciation of this utterly unjust war -- 9/11, the
justification for this aggression, had as much to do with Afghanistan as
Saddam Hussein -- the NDP leader turned out at a hastily-called peace
demonstration to have a front-page photo-op in the local newspaper, while
confining her remarks in the rally to demanding a brief bombing halt to
let in some "humanitarian aid." Otherwise -- even when a community-wide
coalition intervened to stop bullying incidents victimizing Muslim
children at a local school, in which the perpetrating children all turned
out to be from families of Canadian military service personnel -- Ms.
McDonough, the NDP and those sections of the local peace movement that it
was manipulating at the time were silent as the grave and nowhere to be
found.
On October 27, 2001,
three weeks into the Afghan aggression, the local pro-military-newspaper,
The Chronicle-Herald, published a cartoon (below) that came
literally straight out of Der Stürmer, the Nazis' official
anti-Semitic rag whose publisher, Julius Streicher, was the only
journalist to be convicted at Nuremburg for crimes against humanity and
hanged. During the 1930s, amid widespread public disquiet about the
ongoing economic and political problems occasioned by Nazi rule and its
termination of social and political rights, Der Stürmer blamed all
difficulties on "the Jews." It popularized a line of cartoons that
repeatedly portrayed hook-nosed stereotypical representations of mediaeval
Jewish moneylenders, conspiring together in a counting house and cackling
over the misfortunes befalling the German people.
By the end of
October 2001, the stories had already started about al-Qaeda sending
mysterious anthrax-filled packages through the mails. In the town of
Sydney, the province of Nova Scotia possesses the worst toxic waste dump
in all Canada comprising the tailings piled outside a disused 110-year old
steel plant and known as the Sydney tar pond. The Chronicle-Herald’s
caricaturist put the two together, drawing a Der Stürmer-looking
pair of hook-nosed but otherwise turbaned gentlemen cackling over whether
to send anthrax or material from the Sydney tar ponds to enemies in
America.
The local outlet of
the federal government's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation seemed all set
to make an issue of these racist cartoons and have a public
forum-discussion between the cartoonist and people who opposed the cartoon
-- until someone stepped in behind the scenes and uttered the magic words:
"Department of National Defense," "NATO", and "national security."
Months ago, after
their initial appearance and the initial response of Muslims throughout
Europe, the Danish cartoons seemed a minor racist tiff. In the intervening
period since, however, NATO has been called upon to expand its agenda of
annihilation in Afghanistan as part of enabling the US to exfiltrate 4,000
troops from Afghan duty to the Iraq front. There is clearly an attempt
under way in the name of "freedom of the press" to reprint and spread
the cartoons far more widely throughout the NATO countries, making use of
the insult to Muslims and their vocal response to justify this spreading
by republication.
Once again,
meanwhile, back in Canada, the NDP's silence about this remains most
remarkable. Their new leader Jack Layton says NATO needs to be "reformed."
However, neither he nor Ms. McDonough said a word against the government
committing 2000 Canadian troops in Afghanistan to let the U.S. bolster its
unjust and illegal aggression in Iraq. She was re-elected in the 23
January 2006 election, but not before the people of Halifax put forward,
for the first time, an explicitly anti-war candidate. [1]
His message, and especially its sharp and extensive exposure of the NDP
incumbent's public alignment with the State of Israel's oppression of
Palestinians, resonated with -- among others -- Palestinian and Arab
students in Halifax. [2] Inside so-called "all-candidate
meetings" to which all but one of the other parties conspired not to
invite the anti-war candidate, and taking a bold step forward in defense
of the rights of all, they demanded these views be heard and not censored
from public discourse. This reduced Ms McDonough to an incoherent, raging
public hissy fit against people who she claimed were "misrepresenting my
positions."
However, since -- in
a letter to the Canadian then-Minister of Foreign Affairs Bill Graham on
12 February 2004, she has publicly defended the right of the State of
Israel to build the annexation wall in Palestine, and had declared in
radio interviews that "the Occupation [of the West Bank and Gaza Strip]
must be humanized" and not eliminated, it was difficult to figure what she
could possibly have left to anyone's imagination to "misrepresent":
Muslims, Palestinian Arabs, Iraqis -- to Ms. McDonough, it seemed to be
all the same.
This matter is
actually a major question both for supporters of Palestinian rights and
for the anti-war movement. NATO and the U.S. empire are the source and
basis of this hysteria and the most deserving target of people's outrage.
There is nothing to be defensive about. In order to defend the social and
political rights of all, "freedom of speech" either for Zionists to
exterminate Palestinians or for genocidally minded militaries of NATO to
exterminate the Muslim world must be exposed, and denounced.
Gary
Zatzman
is co-editor
of
Dossier on Palestine.
He can be reached at:
noidrocca@yahoo.com.
NOTES
1. The anti-war
candidate was Tony Seed, editor and publisher of
Shunpiking Discovery Magazine
and the
Dossier on Palestine.
2. Inside so-called "all-candidate meetings" to which all but one of the
other parties conspired not to invite the anti-war candidate, and taking a
bold step forward in defense of the rights of all, they demanded these
views be heard and not censored from public discourse. According to
eyewitnesses, this reduced Ms McDonough to an incoherent raging in public
against unnamed but apparently sinister forces she believed were
"misrepresenting my positions." However, it was difficult to figure what
she could possibly have left to anyone's imagination to "misrepresent": in
a letter to the Canadian then-Minister of Foreign Affairs Bill Graham on
12 February 2004, she had publicly defended the right of the State of
Israel to build the annexation wall in Palestine, and on returning from a
"fact finding" trip to the State of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, she had declared in radio interviews that "the Occupation [of
the West Bank and Gaza Strip] must be humanized" and not eliminated.
Muslims, Palestinian Arabs, Iraqis -- to Ms McDonough, it seemed to be
all the same.
POSTSCRIPT
Halifax being the site of a Danish government consulate, a large
contingent from the local Muslim community demonstrated on the afternoon
of Saturday, 4 February, outside its offices on the city's busiest
downtown thoroughfare. The additional material in the Appendix below lifts
some of the veil on how disinformation has been launched and sustained, in
and through corporate monopoly media, surrounding the larger significances
of the Danish cartoon controversy. What is of particular importance here
about "disinformation" is its anti-people intention. This becomes
discernible mainly -- sometimes only -- in its effects and impacts, which
notably include the infliction and spread of a certain paralysis, either
temporary or longer-term, amid the very forces that need to mobilize
against the unleashing of yet another heinous act of imperialist
aggression.
Although, as already
discussed, the Danish cartoon began life as just one of possibly thousands
of similar, everyday, garden-variety, Eurocentric racist acts of
degradation of Islamic conscience, evidence continues to mount that, as
opposition to it mounted from Arab states, as well as from Muslim
organizations within Europe, the NATO establishment was also taking note.
The inner meaning of the IAEA reference this weekend of the Iranian
dossier to the Security Council can only be that an entire military,
diplomatic and economic intervention against Iran has been in preparation
for some time, with the EU-3 playing a crucial delaying role.
Proceeding further
and stepwise along the chain of logic and reasoning opened by such
considerations, there must have been decisions taken at a very high level
regarding the reprinting of the cartoon throughout various parts of the
EU. The reprintings went ahead in those European countries where it has
become an urgent matter of the highest priority, as part of planning a
further military strike in central Asia, to disable and isolate
Muslim opinion at home and thereby pre-empt the emergence of any massive
_expression of anti-war feeling in their own countries. (One possibility
that springs to mind as soon as one looks at a map is to set up a
NATO-protected corridor on the Afghan side of the Iranian border to
prepare a US-led invasion of the Islamic Republic.)
The re-printing of
the cartoon was intended to provoke European Muslims' rage in a manner
that would serve to isolate them from the rest of the societies where they
are living and working. That is part of a general and ongoing strategy of
pre-emptive attack on the antiwar movement. As noted in the
summer 2005 edition
of Shunpiking
magazine: manipulating sections of the peace movement in these ways has
become an essential component of NATO strategic planning of all its
interventions, from Haiti to Afghanistan. ("'Ooh-la-la!' or the gunboat
policy à la Haiti? On the occasion of the 'visit' of the French NATO fleet
to Halifax in mid-June, Tony Seed dissects the spurious methods and aim of
an exercise in 'information operations.'"
The other huge piece
of the current context is the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian
legislative elections. It is precisely in Palestine that the world
imperialist system has been jolted. On 25 January, they were utterly
convinced as to what was absolutely and unconditionally their strongest
link, namely, the "Jewish state" reportedly armed with 200+ nuclear
warheads, highly-organized and ever-ready state terrorist squads, formal
and informal ("settlers"), prepared to kill anywhere among a captive Arab
civilian population living on occupied territory. The next day on 26
January 2006 their indisputably strongest link was converted completely
unexpectedly, by a certifiably free and fair democratic election devised
in fullest possible conformity to the "National Endowment for Democracy"
standard of the present-day American Empire, into one of their weakest
links. Even though the revolutionary flow of the 1970s is now in retreat
and the present political landscape is pockmarked with many signs of
darkest reaction, we are nevertheless approaching an historic turning
point, eerily akin -- in an increasing number of ways -- to the moment the
people of Iran turfed out the Shah back in 1979.
APPENDIX
-- Introduction –
On Sunday, 5
February 2006, in light of the coverage given nationwide by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation to the Halifax Muslims' rally, the author sent
the submission below to a number of listserves under the heading
"State-terrorist slaughter of Muslim civilians is a laugh-riot at the CBC."
The
Chronicle-Herald also covered the Muslim community's downtown Saturday
rally in an article headlining its peaceful character. This was, however,
tucked away in the lower right-hand corner of a page otherwise taken up
with the international wire services' story of the demonstration in
Damascus, Syria. Highlighting this larger article was a large-sized
reproduction of the photo of the Nordic embassy building ablaze there. On
the editorial page of this edition, Bruce McKinnon, the same
Chronicle-Herald cartoonist who had produced the October 2001 tar
ponds-anthrax caricature of a Der Stürmer cartoon discussed above,
published an image that indicated just how much further the crimes of the
Bush administration and other revelations since 9-11 had served to
enlighten him. His latest piece depicts a cartoonist, impaled on the sword
of a kaffiyehed gentleman whose sword-wielding arm is tattooed with the
word "Extremists." The cartoonist stares at his drawing pen with its tip
broken, remarking: "Well, there goes that theory..."
-- The Letter to the CBC --
The following letter
was sent to the
Canadian Broadcasting Corp. website
in response to their
coverage of Muslim community response in Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada) to
the rash of racist cartoons recently reproduced in
European news media
deliberately directed against Muslims:
Your online report
of the Halifax rally-demonstration on Birmingham Street on Saturday 4 Feb
2006 contains the following passage:
"The satirical
depictions of the Prophet have spurred days of demonstrations throughout
the Middle East and elsewhere by Muslims, who were offended because
Islamic law forbids any depictions of Muhammad in order to prevent
idolatry." (from: "Muslims
rally in Halifax over Muhammad caricatures,"
as last updated Sun, 05 Feb 2006 00:42:14 EST)
Clearly these
"depictions" were not received in the "satirical" spirit your report
implicitly ascribes to their author(s). This raises the question: by what
logic, then, can you call them 'satirical'?
These cartoons are
offensive NOT because of anything "Islamic law forbids," as your report
ludicrously suggests, but because they smear the conscience of 1.2 billion
Muslim believers. They are also deeply racist. Moreover, they were
re-published at a critical and very revealing moment: NATO troops,
including 2000 Canadians, are stepping up their infliction of "collateral
damage," i.e., slaughter, on Afghani civilians in the name of "rooting out
scumbags," as Canadian Chief of Defense Staff Rick Hillier so felicitously
put it some months back.
These cartoons, and
especially the diversionary controversy whipped up around them, prepare an
atmosphere in which further such genocidal assaults throughout the Muslim
world by the US and NATO can be rationalized.
How "satirical"
indeed, as we all convulse in hilarity at the onset of World War Three.