While I was not able to attend the Mohamed caricature-related discussion to which you refer, I nonetheless feel compelled to respond to your Wespeak. I must first of all confess that I was shocked by the prejudicial and reductionist generalizations in your argument. You talk of “quiet, blond-haired, mild-mannered Scandinavians,” on the one hand, and “primitive savages” and “barbarians” on the other. Are we really in 2006 here? The issue, for me, is not even offensiveness or political (in)correctness; it is utter ignorance.
You write of the Mohamed caricature controversy, “Do not dare say that this violent bloody reaction is an isolated incident in the Muslim world.” And I won’t – because it isn’t. But you are taking this violence at face value without trying to see where it comes from. For, the events that followed the publication of the caricatures have, in many ways, much less to do with the caricatures or with Islam itself than with myriad other problems, such as repressive governments (and I don’t mean Western governments), social and economic instability, and intense – and at times arbitrary – Western military intervention in the Muslim world, to offer only some examples, all underpinned by the complex web of power-relations.
And you must admit that destructive acts of violence are far from being restricted to the Muslim world. Think of Latin America and Southeast Asia, and other examples are too numerous to list. Think, even, of the 5,000-strong “mild-mannered” Scandinavian-types who, a few months back, went on a violent and alcohol-driven rampage to (re)claim their white Australian beaches, which they wanted to purge from what they perceived to be a foreign, Middle-Eastern “invasion.” Regardless of whether it results in positive outcomes, violence is one way that the powerless – whether or not they actually are powerless or merely perceive themselves to be, as is clear, to me, in the case of the Australian “race riots” – make their voices heard. And did you call “barbarian” the violent tactics used by WTO protesters (and the response of the police) in places like Seattle or Hong Kong?
We should, therefore, question whether this particular instance of violence is in some way “inherent” to the religion of Islam or rather representative of the socio-political situations in which many parts of the Islamic world are in today. Now, I am not trying to excuse the danger of the said violence, for I, too, find it disturbing; I am trying to contextualize it in proposing that what has happened is immensely more complex than the way in which you present it in your Wespeak.
Sadly, so many – thanks partly, but not entirely, to the media – focus on violence in the Muslim world as a singular phenomenon, for does it not fit neatly into the already well-embedded and cushy stereotypes regarding, as you say, “the utter barbarism that is practiced” in those parts of the world?
In 1904, Constantine Cavafy asked in one of his poems, “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.” The context here is an assembly of politicians waiting for “barbarians” who, after all, never arrive. But barbarians are a kind of solution because it allows an us – or, as you write, “[t]hose of us who are dedicated to seeking truth and defending morality” – to stand against an evil them. And doesn’t that sound familiar? It reduces a complex situation into a game of opposites, pitting one extreme position against another.
The question for you, then, is whether or not you will allow “thousands upon thousands” of violent protesters to dictate the way in which you address the problems of the world, and in so doing casting billions upon billions of other human beings into the abyss of silenced misrepresentation. But if you really intend to “question the hell out of Islam,” I sincerely hope that you reconsider what it is that you call Islam and look deeper than the pages of the Argus.
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