a frage? (forgive the poor transliteration of a yiddish expression from my mother’s lexicon, which rendered into english is “a question?”, which is to say, yeah, it spiraled out of control about a week and a half ago.(vide, elsewhere, my comparison to the incident at sarajevo that led to wwI)
bottom line:we have no appropriate response on the menu. Virtually anything we do from our position of abject weakness (secondary to the network of contradictory policy and economic interests that permeate our utterly non-introspective society) will likely make things worse.
The most salutary step we could take would be to extirpate the hypocrisy that underlies our posture vis-a-vis the muslim world (starting, perhaps, with our professed horror that the Iranian mullahs bless THEIR bomb when we bless Israel’s bomb, and remain the sole nation guilty of it’s use.)
Well, it wasn’t clear to me that it was something that would keep growing bigger and bigger, or whether it was just a flare of anger that would die down. But it’s still growing in scope and violence…
I don’t know. It’s certainly a difficult problem. I think we could start by asserting our own values instead of appeasing this nonsense, which is what we’ve done so far.
Saying it’s okay for Israel to have the bomb and not Iran is no more hypocritical than saying it’s okay for a good citizen to own a gun and not okay for a fanatic with a history of violence to own one.
Israel threatens no one who doesn’t threaten them. The same cannnot be said of Iran. There’s also the little matter that Israel got their bomb a long time ago, and didn’t ask anyone’s permission. That does not make it okay to repeat the same mistake.
I’m pretty sure that we are threatening Iran on a daily basis, and have been ever since we murdered their elected prime minister to install our stooge in 1953.
I know it’s a different culture and all, but I have to wonder how much of this is really about the cartoons. These folks weren’t overly fond of the west before the cartoons, I imagine, and maybe this just gave them a flash point. Why this and not, say, Abu Ghraib, I dunno.
Or maybe it really is primarily about the cartoons. That’s hard for me to understand, I could see a cartoon of my mother fellating a walrus and I’d only think the cartoonist was an idiot. Or knows something about my Mom I don’t know. But people can be trained to take offense at any trivial thing.
As to what our response should be, well, whatever caused the violence is irrelevant. If our embassies or allies are in danger, we do what we can to protect them. Whether it’s violence stemming from intractable political differences, or from a ‘Peanuts’ where Mohammad goes flying because Lucy pulled the football away from him seems irrelevant to me.
it’s this, AND Abu Ghraib, AND the 15,000 swept up and imprisoned right now, AND gitmo, AND Palestine, AND W’s clever use the “crusade” first pop out of the box,AND maybe most of all, “if you’re not with us you’re against us” (I could go on but you get the idea).
I agree with you as do most Americans, Canadians, British, French and Germans, I’m sure . It isn’t* us* that we need to enlighten on this point, and I’m afraid that many muslims feel that the mere existence of Israel does threaten them. After all, look what happened to the Palistinians when Israel was created. The fact that the creation of Israel wasn’t the real reason for the Palistinians lack of a homeland is irrelevant, they think it was. MId east Arabs and others (maybe they should be called Caananites) seem to resent that a new nation was shoehorned into territory that they considered theirs.
Those are the people to whom it must be demonstrated that, while their view of free-speech, Israel, newspaper cartoons and so on is OK for them they shouldn’t try to enforce it on us.
And I don’t see any way to do that in under, say, 500 years. That’s about how long it took Christianity to get over witch burning and that sort of stuff. I think that for many of its adherents, Islaam is about where Christianity was in 12-1300 AD.
I don’t think we have 500 days. This is going to feed on itself until some group somewhere steps over the line and a Western government is forced to respond. Then you can kiss Peace on Earth goodbye for the foreseeable future. There is absolutely no middle ground with these zealots in their countries. Quarntine them as much as possible and let them go to hell their own way. Muslims in the West can lead the lives they want, without being subjected to the abuses of their ignorant kin. Pull out our embassies, place the offending country on a “No Visit” list, cut all aid from the West, and let them rot. If their governments can’t control them, then why should we be bothered?
quite true, given which, we might be well advised to adopt, ad hoc" the code of the joint"
(not the pot joint, the big house joint) which is to day, be especially careful not to dis (respect) your fellow inmates, even on points that seem preposterously picayune.
It is particularly troubling to see tensions rise in Pakistan due to the fact that they already have nuclear weapons. Musharraf’s support for the west has put him in a very precarious position and now he faces a huge dilemma in whther to allow the protests to continue and not be confrontational (in the hopes that it will allow the steam to release) or confront them by outlawing gatherings. When the Shah did that in Iran, it led directly to more protests and ultimately the Islamic revolution itself.
So as to your question…
As much I fully support the right to free speech and think it should never be curtailed no matter how “offensive” a subject might be to a group of people, I think now is a bad time to show one’s committment to free speech, at least in this way. As alaric mentioned, it’s not just about the cartoons. It’s about Guantanamo and the guards there urinating on the Koran, the recent revelation of abuse of Iraqis by British soldiers followed promptly by a reminder of what the Americans did at Abu Ghraib, and so on. And if you push any harder now, it may have the opposite effect. It won’t passify or subdue, it’ll exacerbate and inflame.
If America instituted a crash program to become energy independent, we could truly be free of them.
We sent a man to the fucking moon by the end of the 60s. We can become energy independent if we had national initiatives to do so. If the pursuit of alternative energy was given top priority, tax incentives given to those who used alternative fuels, financial benefits given to auto makers to make them workable, we could do it, I really think we could.
And don’t forget, not all of our oil comes from the Arabs anyway. Plenty of it comes from elsewhere, including domestically.
Disengagement with the Muslim world is not an option. And a complicating factor is that these aren’t governments doing this. It’s a revolt by the citizenry.
I think the appropriate response is not so much retaliation or disengagement, but a defense of our own values. This is why it’s so disheartening that the initial reaction by the west was such a weak, defensive posture. Rather than strenuously defend the value of free speech, we castigated the publishers and begged forgiveness. That was inexcusable. The Bush administration screwed up big time on that, as did most other western governments.
So it’s time to take the offensive in the propaganda war, to stand up and tell the Muslim world what we will and won’t tolerate, and that we have our own values and won’t be intimidated. And in the cases where we can find governments fanning the flames (i.e. Iran and Syria), crack down on them hard with sanctions or whatever other tools we can use.
Frankly, I think one of things that is causing this to spiral out of control is that our initial reaction was so weak and apologetic that it gave the rioters a sense of victory - a sense that they were reshaping the world and that they could push us around. When newspapers refused to publish the cartoons for fear of violence, it gave the rioters a very real victory. So who should be surprised that we’re getting more of it?
Actually, it is. Agreed that it may not be an ideal solution. You don’t have to sever all ties, but some disengagement is definitely in order.
Agree completely, but not like this.
Only if by “the west” you mean the U.S. Other European newspapers started reprinting the images in a show of solidarity and a re-affirmation to their belief in free (even if offensive) speech. How well has that played out? And now you’re suggesting even more?
Look, your boys are literally on the front lines over there. I don’t blame the U.S. one bit for not adding any more fuel to this fire. There are 150,000 or so troops from the west right in the fire of the venegence these cartoons are inspiring. Are you sure you think you need a more firm hand?
And incidentally, I don’t recall you ever supporting a back-off approach to anything. When do you think it would be a right time to back off? Only when it’s the other guy that’s doing the backing up?
Okay, but remember, they believe in their values just as fervently as you believe in yours. And the two may not exactly mesh well.
Never since the fall of communism has the world faced such a polarization that is enveloping the globe today. When did it start? In the seventh century or a couple of decades ago? Up till the second half of the 20th century, Islamic strife was largely confined to it geographic borders but the interface of Islamic/non-Islamic intercouse takes place everywhere all over the globe. The littlest provocation occuring in an obscure northern peninsula can set nations ablaze.
Utopia for a muslim is total submission to Allah across the globe.
Utopia for a western citizen is a free world.
Perhaps I’m wrong.
In any case we need to be informed and ready. Short term responses need to be decided on in light of the overall strategy. Is the strategy to defeat Islam or control it? How about exit strategy?
This isn’t just about terrorist cells. This is about a bunch of mullahs communicating through a global network leading the sheep, and raising funds and suicide bombers for the military units on the front.
