The cartoons are not ‘just cartoons’
my view by tony murphy (http://ny.metro.us/metro/blog/my_view/entry/The_cartoons_are_not_just_cartoons/1052.html)
FEB 8
As a cartoonist I am shocked whenever I see a cartoon used for a racist purpose. In my mind, cartoons — personal or political — are meant to expose the truth. They’re certainly not for attacking people who are already oppressed. After the Denmark newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran offensive, anti-Islam cartoons — one showing Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban — and other European papers followed suit, many have expressed surprise that a seemingly harmless cartoon could provoke worldwide outrage. But if you see the cartoons as the straw that broke the camel’s back, then it’s clear that these drawings are not “just cartoons.” Rebellions outside Paris a few months ago shined a spotlight on the conditions of Northern African immigrants in France, supposedly the home of liberty, equality and fraternity. The truth is more like police harassment, unemployment and poverty.
Virtually every European country — especially those whose high standard of living came from their ability to exploit countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia — has an immigrant community comprised of people from their former colonies, whose dominant religion is Muslim, and whose lives are increasingly marked by oppression. Denmark has waged an especially vicious campaign against its immigrant population. In 2002, it passed sweeping anti-immigrant legislation that among other things makes it illegal for ethnic Danes to marry “foreigners” until age 24. And these laws were passed alongside the rise of a fascist movement led by the misnamed Danish People’s Party, whose campaign poster showed a Danish girl next to a slogan saying: “When she retires, Denmark will have a Muslim majority.”
With this backdrop, the cartoons are not simple displays of a newspaper’s “freedom of expression,” as its editors claim, but a provocation in the midst of growing attacks on Europe’s immigrants. Monday’s Guardian reported that a similar set of cartoons spoofing Jesus was rejected by the same Denmark paper in April 2003, with this e-mail from the paper’s editor: “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry.” And now, of course, it’s a worldwide struggle. Demonstrations have taken place in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Indonesia, India and Yemen. And some of the fiercest have occurred where large populations of Muslim people are under the gun. Huge demonstrations have erupted in Iran, which the United States and Israel are threatening to attack; in Iraq, the home of Fallujah, where the U.S. military shot families on site and rolled tanks over bodies in the street; at the Bagram Air Force Base, known as Afghanistan’s Abu Ghraib; and in Gaza, where the European Union threatened to stop aid to the Palestinian Authority.
While religion obviously plays a role as an organizing force for resistance, the fuel for that resistance is not religion. It’s the police demanding ID cards of African immigrants in France, the violence of the U.S. occupiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the humiliating checkpoints and lack of drinking water in the the West Bank and Gaza. The U.S. media and European editors have the same goal: To equate resistance with fanaticism. If we accept their line that the demonstrations are by “extremists” mad about “cartoons,” they might succeed.
my view by tony murphy (http://ny.metro.us/metro/blog/my_view/entry/The_cartoons_are_not_just_cartoons/1052.html)
FEB 8
As a cartoonist I am shocked whenever I see a cartoon used for a racist purpose. In my mind, cartoons — personal or political — are meant to expose the truth. They’re certainly not for attacking people who are already oppressed. After the Denmark newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran offensive, anti-Islam cartoons — one showing Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban — and other European papers followed suit, many have expressed surprise that a seemingly harmless cartoon could provoke worldwide outrage. But if you see the cartoons as the straw that broke the camel’s back, then it’s clear that these drawings are not “just cartoons.” Rebellions outside Paris a few months ago shined a spotlight on the conditions of Northern African immigrants in France, supposedly the home of liberty, equality and fraternity. The truth is more like police harassment, unemployment and poverty.
Virtually every European country — especially those whose high standard of living came from their ability to exploit countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia — has an immigrant community comprised of people from their former colonies, whose dominant religion is Muslim, and whose lives are increasingly marked by oppression. Denmark has waged an especially vicious campaign against its immigrant population. In 2002, it passed sweeping anti-immigrant legislation that among other things makes it illegal for ethnic Danes to marry “foreigners” until age 24. And these laws were passed alongside the rise of a fascist movement led by the misnamed Danish People’s Party, whose campaign poster showed a Danish girl next to a slogan saying: “When she retires, Denmark will have a Muslim majority.”
With this backdrop, the cartoons are not simple displays of a newspaper’s “freedom of expression,” as its editors claim, but a provocation in the midst of growing attacks on Europe’s immigrants. Monday’s Guardian reported that a similar set of cartoons spoofing Jesus was rejected by the same Denmark paper in April 2003, with this e-mail from the paper’s editor: “I don’t think Jyllands-Posten’s readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry.” And now, of course, it’s a worldwide struggle. Demonstrations have taken place in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Indonesia, India and Yemen. And some of the fiercest have occurred where large populations of Muslim people are under the gun. Huge demonstrations have erupted in Iran, which the United States and Israel are threatening to attack; in Iraq, the home of Fallujah, where the U.S. military shot families on site and rolled tanks over bodies in the street; at the Bagram Air Force Base, known as Afghanistan’s Abu Ghraib; and in Gaza, where the European Union threatened to stop aid to the Palestinian Authority.
While religion obviously plays a role as an organizing force for resistance, the fuel for that resistance is not religion. It’s the police demanding ID cards of African immigrants in France, the violence of the U.S. occupiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the humiliating checkpoints and lack of drinking water in the the West Bank and Gaza. The U.S. media and European editors have the same goal: To equate resistance with fanaticism. If we accept their line that the demonstrations are by “extremists” mad about “cartoons,” they might succeed.