The Danish cartoon scandal is a shameful manufactured controversy. A petty racist publicity stunt was hijacked by successively larger and more influential opportunists until it became an international incident.
It all started on September 30, 2005 when Denmark's second-largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The paper didn't just happen to publish some cartoons of Mohammed because they were good or topical. The cartoons were a self-conscious attempt to provoke controversy.
"[W]e wanted to show how deeply entrenched self-censorship has already become," a J-P spokesman told Der Spigel.
In other words, The J-P decided to conduct a little experiment. Can we get a rise out of the Islamic fundamentalists? A drastically disproportionate reaction, perhaps? Suppose we tip the scales by lacing the blasphemy with racism and inflammatory politics? If the excruciatingly predictable happens, we'll have "Proof Islam Hates Our Freedom." If the cartoons go unnoticed, we'll drop the whole thing--the headline certainly won't be "Islam is Cool After All."
Of course the J-P wasn't the only faction with an agenda. The cartoons were published in September, but the massive outcry didn't ensue until a group of Danish Muslim fundamentalists went to plead their case to the governments of various Middle Eastern countries including Saudi Arabia. The delegation upped the outrage factor by presenting fraudulent cartoons alongside the original J-P twelve.
The fundamentalist envoy came at an opportune moment for the Saudi government. According to SoJ's widely-cited diary at Kos, the Saudi state was looking for an opportunity to divert world attention from yet another mass fatality during the Hajj:
And while the deaths of these pilgrims was a mere blip on the traditional western media's radar, it was a huge story in the Muslim world. Most of the pilgrims who were killed came from poorer countries such as Pakistan, where the Hajj is a very big story. Even the most objective news stories were suddenly casting Saudi Arabia in a very bad light and they decided to do something about it.
Their plan was to go on a major offensive against the Danish cartoons. The 350 pilgrims were killed on January 12 and soon after, Saudi newspapers (which are all controlled by the state) began running up to 4 articles per day condemning the Danish cartoons. The Saudi government asked for a formal apology from Denmark. When that was not forthcoming, they began calling for world-wide protests. After two weeks of this, the Libyans decided to close their embassy in Denmark. Then there was an attack on the Danish embassy in Indonesia. And that was followed by attacks on the embassies in Syria and then Lebanon. [Emphasis added.]
Predictably, the Bush administration is now blaming Iran and Syria for inflaming the situation (which they are) but remaining notably silent on the Saudis' role in all this. True to form, Iran blames an Israeli conspiracy.
All over the world, self-righteous pundits and politicians are seizing on the chaos to echo the same xenophobic generalizations that the J-P was trying to hammer home: These people aren't like us. They are violent and crazy. They abhor free speech. We can't coexist with them.
Some commentators say that cartoon riots prove that Westerners can't even understand Islam. Abbas of 3Quarks debunks the fake mysterianism. The reaction, while reprehensible, is not completely incomprehensible.
Far from revealing an unbreachable divide between Islam and the West, the cartoon controversy shows exactly how much we have in common. Both sides have way too many xenophobic opportunists.
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source: Majikthise
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