On the caricatures

The New York Times, in its usual wimpy fake-liberal ways, has this to say today about the caricatures, in a article penned by Michael Kimmelman in the Arts section:

Educated secular Westerners reared on modernism, with its inclination toward abstraction, its gamesmanship and its knee-jerk baiting of traditional authority, can miss the real force behind certain visual images, particularly religious ones. Trained to see pictures formally, as designs or concepts, we can often overlook the way images may not just symbolize but actually “partake of what they represent,” as the art historian David Freedberg has put it.

That’s certainly how many aggrieved Muslims perceived the cartoons. Circulating the pictures, they prompted Arab governments like those of Saudi Arabia and Syria, not otherwise champions of religious freedom, to support boycotts of Danish goods and to withdraw their ambassadors from Copenhagen. That in turn led European papers to republish the cartoons in solidarity with Jyllands-Posten and in defense of free speech.

But what prompted said Arab governments to exacerbate (or did they in fact create it?) and misuse those Danish caricatures, had in fact very little to do with a percieved grievance brought to them by their citizens. To the contrary: it was the conservative Arab governments, Saudi Arabia, that great US-friend foremost, who created the situation in the first place, months after the cartoons were published and in the main forgotten. The Palestinian author Hassan Khader, editor of the Palestinian literary review Al Karmel, sees the purportedly spontaneous demonstrations as pure manipulation:

Essentially this is all about how the Arab leaders can reduce their subjects’ lives to religion – in an attempt to save their own regimes. But this is to treat the people as if they had no identity beyond religion, as if the rich traditions of Arab culture counted for nothing. That is why despite all its religious zeal, the current campaign seems so banal and profane.

It certainly is intriguing that the Saudi papers pushed the problem hysterically exactly when — as happens nearly annually — the usual tragedies of people dying en masse at the moment of the pilmigrage risked causing trouble or at least bad p.r. among the Muslim masses for the government. For a hilariously sarcastic but sharply informative view on this, read the 1 February entry on the Religious Policeman blog. The anonymous (of necessity) Saudi man who created this blog has dedicated it to the

“Memory of the lives of 15 Makkah Schoolgirls, lost when their school burnt down on Monday, 11th March, 2002. The Religious Police would not allow them to leave the building, nor allow the Firemen to enter,”

because their dress code was not up to Wahabite rules. Unhappily little of this (political) analysis can be found in the Western papers, most of which piously bemoan the mocking of religions and other peoples’ believes, or gesture toward the sacro-saint democratic principle of freedom of the press. The latter is of course what the more reactionary newspapers do — which also happen to be those that most gleefully reproduced the cartoons , supposedly in order to show their support for a “free press.” One wonders. As Daniel Cohn-Bendit says in an interview today, concerning one of those right-wing papers, Die Zeit:

If it had been caricatures insulting the Christian or Jewish faiths, the paper would never have printed them. A newspaper like Charlie Hebdo, which, in the context of an Anti-Aids-Campaign lets Christ on the cross with a hardon and a condom say ‘I never fuck without a condom,’ would have the right to print Mohammed caricatures. There’s a strong stink of hypocrisy coming from all those papers’ appeals to ‘freedom of opinion.’