European media publish anti-Muslim cartoons: An ugly and calculated
provocation

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/feb2006/cart-f04.shtml

By the Editorial Board

4 February 2006

The *World Socialist Web Site *unequivocally condemns the publication by a
series of European newspapers of defamatory cartoons depicting the Prophet
Muhammad as a terrorist and killer. These crude caricatures, intended to
insult and incite Muslim sensibilities, are a political provocation. Their
publication, initially by a right-wing Danish newspaper with historical ties
to German and Italian fascism, was calculated to fuel anti-Muslim and
anti-immigrant sentiment.

The decision of the right-wing Danish government to defend the newspaper
that initially published the cartoons, and of newspapers in Norway, France,
Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Iceland and
Hungary, both conservative and liberal, to reprint them has nothing to do
with freedom of the press or the defense of secularism. Such claims make a
mockery of these democratic principles.

The promulgation of such bigoted filth is, rather, bound up with a shift by
the European ruling elites to line up more squarely behind the neo-colonial
interventions of US imperialism in the Middle East and Central Asia. It is
no accident that it occurs in the midst of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq,
new threats against the Palestinian masses, and the preparations to launch
sanctions, and eventual military aggression, against Iran.

It is, moreover, a continuation and escalation of a deliberate policy in
Europe, spearheaded by the political right and aided and abetted by the
nominal "left" parties, to demonize the growing Muslim population, isolate
it, and use it as a scapegoat for the growing social misery affecting broad
layers of the working class.

In the name of the fight against terrorism, governments throughout Europe
are implementing repressive measures that target, in the first instance,
Muslim and other immigrant populations, while preparing the ground for the
destruction of the democratic rights of the working class as a whole. These
police state preparations go hand in hand with an offensive against the
jobs, wages and living standards of working people and an ever-greater
concentration of wealth in the coffers of a wealthy and privileged minority
at the top.

One does not have to uphold Islam, or any other religion, to sympathize with
the indignation of Muslims around the world who have expressed their outrage
at the racist drawings flung in their face by media outlets that claim to be
defending Western secularist values against the dark hordes from the East.

On Friday, protests against the publication of the cartoons spread across
the Middle East, northern Africa and Asia, with thousands demonstrating in
Iraq, tens of thousands in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and some 50,000
filling a square in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Muslims also protested
in Britain and Turkey.

The events that have led up to the present confrontation make it clear that
the publication of the cartoons was a political provocation. The Danish
daily *Jyllands-Posten*, which first published twelve caricatures of
Mohammad on September 30, supports the right-wing government headed by Prime
Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen—a government that includes in its coalition a
rabidly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim party.

In the 1920s and 1930s, *Jyllands-Posten *was infamous for its affinity for
Italian fascism and the German Nazi dictatorship. In 1933, it argued for the
introduction of a dictatorship in Denmark.

Last September, the newspaper asked forty cartoonists to draw images of the
Prophet Muhammad, something that is proscribed by Islamic law as
blasphemous. Spelling out the provocative and inflammatory aim of this
exercise, the chief editor said its purpose was "to examine whether people
would succumb to self-censorship, as we have seen in other cases when it
comes to Muslim issues."

The newspaper proceeded to publish twelve drawings. These included a cartoon
showing the Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a smoking
bomb, another with Muhammad on a cloud in heaven telling an approaching line
of suicide bombers that he had run out of virgins with which to reward them,
and a third depicting the prophet grinning wildly, with a knife in his hand
and flanked by heavily-veiled women.

In October, Prime Minister Rasmussen refused to meet with the ambassadors of
eleven predominantly Muslim countries who had requested a meeting to discuss
their objections to the cartoons. Setting the tone for the ensuing
developments, Rasmussen declared that the cartoons were a legitimate
exercise in press freedom, and implied that there was nothing to discuss.

The affront was stepped up when a Norwegian magazine published the drawings
in January. Denmark continued to ignore protests by Danish Muslim groups and
other Muslim organizations until the end of January, when Saudi Arabia and
Syria recalled their ambassadors from Denmark and the Saudi regime initiated
a consumer boycott of Danish goods.

Only when the boycott spread and the Danish company Arla Foods, the second
largest dairy producer in Europe, announced that its Middle Eastern sales
had completely dried up, did the Danish government and *Jyllands-Posten *issue
statements of regret, while defending the decision to publish the cartoons.

This week the simmering controversy exploded when the French newspaper *France
Soir *republished the cartoons. Defending its printing of the drawings in an
editorial on Thursday, the newspaper's editor wrote: "Enough lessons from
these reactionary bigots."

Other newspapers in France, including the liberal *Libération*, followed
suit, printing some or all of the ugly cartoons. *Le Monde*, for its part,
ran a sketch of a man, presumably Mohammad, made up of sentences reading, "I
must not draw Muhammad."

The German newspapers *Die Welt*, *Die Tageszeitung*, *Tagesspiegel
*and *Berliner
Zeitung, *the Dutch papers *Volksrant*, *NRC Handelsblad *and *Elsevier*,
Italy's *La Stampa* and *Corriere della Sera*,* *Spain's *El Periodico* and
two Dutch-language newspapers in Belgium were among those that published
some or all of the cartoons over the past several days.

In Britain, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all showed some of the cartoons on
television news broadcasts.

An indication of the political forces and motives behind the deluge of
racist caricatures was the decision of Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch
parliament who has proposed a law that would ban women from wearing burqas,
to post the cartoons on his web site "as a token of support to the Danish
cartoonists and to stand up for free speech."

Among those European politicians and government officials who have sprung to
the defense of the Danish government and the media outlets that published
the images is French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. With quintessential
cynicism, the man who helped incite last year's anti-police riots in the
largely Muslim immigrant suburbs of France by referring to their inhabitants
as "scum" and "gangrene" has now adopted the mantle of press freedom to
support yet another attack on Muslims.

The absurd attempt to give this anti-democratic assault a democratic veneer
is exemplified by Sarkozy, who authored the current state of emergency that
has gutted civil liberties in France. The French government of Sarkozy and
President Jacques Chirac set the precedent for such anti-Muslim attacks by
imposing—with the support of the Socialist and Communist parties and the
"far left" Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle)—a ban on Muslim girls wearing
head scarves in the public schools. This overt attack on religious freedom
in general and the rights of Muslims in particular was likewise passed off
as a defense of secularism and the "enlightened" values of the French
Republic.

The real content of the supposed crusade for secularism and press freedom
was shown in the first wave of mass deportations of French Muslims under a
law championed by Sarkozy in the aftermath of last year's riots. The law
provides for the summary deportation of all foreigners who are indicted—not
convicted—of crimes. Hundreds of youth were arrested by Sarkozy's riot
police during the disturbances, and these are now threatened with being
shipped out of the country.

The new Grand Coalition government headed by Angela Merkel has likewise
called for stronger measures to evict foreigners from German soil.

The foreign policy interests behind the anti-Muslim attack were indicated by
the Netherlands' announcement of plans to send additional troops to help
police Afghanistan for US imperialism.

On Friday, the US State Department issued a statement opposing the
publication of the cartoons. "These cartoons are indeed offensive to the
belief of Muslims," said a department spokesman, adding, "We fully recognize
and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with
press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is
not acceptable."

This intervention is entirely hypocritical, coming from a government that
has sought repeatedly to muzzle the American press and has waged a brutal
attack on Muslims within the US. The Bush administration has, in the
aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, spearheaded the assault on Muslims
around the world, using the so-called "war on terrorism" as the pretext.

Washington's "respect" for the beliefs of Muslims was exposed before the
eyes of the world in the pictures of sadistic abuse of prisoners at the Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq, where military and intelligence officials employed
tactics designed to exploit Muslim beliefs and sensibilities.

The official US response to the publication of the cartoons is largely
motivated by immediate concerns over the impact the provocation could have
on Washington's imperialist operations in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere.

Some who defend the publication of the cartoons claim they are examples of
satire—as though crude appeals to the basest and most bigoted impulses can
be equated with genuine social or cultural criticism. In fact, the images
plastered on the pages of European newspapers and broadcast on television
news programs have far more in common with the type of anti-Semitic
caricatures made infamous by the Nazis than they do with satire.

That such outpourings can have anything to do with a struggle for secularism
in opposition to religious belief is absurd. A genuine critique of religion
can be conducted only on the highest intellectual level, appealing to
science and reason—not ignorance and fear.

The current episode reveals the enormous dangers facing the working class
from the visible decomposition of democracy in all of the capitalist
countries. The promotion of anti-Muslim chauvinism, and all forms of
communalist and nationalist poison, is the expression of a social system
that is mired in insoluble crisis and incapable of meeting the most basic
needs of the broad masses of the people.

The only antidote to such backward and reactionary politics is the
development of a united movement of workers of all countries, religions and
nationalities in opposition to war and in defense of democratic rights
against the capitalist ruling elites and the system they uphold. The program
upon which such a struggle must be based is socialist internationalism.