Please don’t eliminate the source of my oppression
Every day for the last two weeks I have seen the Norwegian and Danish flags being burned by angry mobs in cities all over the world. There have been death threats to the satirical artists, to the editors who published the drawings, and to citizens of Denmark and Norway who happen to set foot in countries with a frantic strain of violent religion. Some of these people live under round-the-clock police protection. The embassies in Damascus and Beirut have been torched and destroyed. Crowds armed with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons attacked the base of Norwegian peacekeeping soldiers in Afghanistan.
Perhaps one might expect Norwegians and Danes to feel “offended” by the threats they have been subjected to. Perhaps one might see Norwegian and Danish demonstrators take to the streets to protest against these organized attacks and attempts of humiliation? But no, most people feel that they just can’t take this idiocy seriously.
Here in Norway the status is the following: A obscure Christian weekly called ”Magazinet” republished the Danish Muhammed cartoons in January. The publication is owned by a Scandinavian sect called Livets Ord. The Norwegian government has worked diligently trying to calm the situation, expressing regret that religious sensitivities have been offended but at the same time explaining that the cartoons are well within the laws of a liberal democracy.
On Friday [Feb. 10] the editor of Magazinet himself, Vebjørn Selbekk, issued an apology for printing the drawings at a joint press conference with Mohammad Hamdan, the leader of the most influential Islamic organisation in Norway.
Despite all this, anonymous organisers managed to issue an appeal for a protest rally the following day. All major Muslim leaders and imams in Norway urged Muslims to stay away from the demonstration. But on Saturday around 1500 people marched through the streets of Oslo chanting, “God is great!” and “Stop the insult to our Prophet!” Some of the demonstrators had masked their faces with headscarves. The women in the march were conveniently assigned a separate section at the back of the procession.
There is simply no way to accommodate these fundamentalists. They perfectly represent the very essence of religion. It’s not enough to apologize; it’s not enough to point to the fact that they themselves have every single right to satirize the secular, Scandinavian societies and torch as many flags as they wish. Their demand is that you should submit, but they will not be fully satisfied until you actually agree with their religious ideology.
To justify a need of violent response to a few drawings, one has to make use of a psychological trick to change the economy of the communication between the fundamentalist ideology and the world’s secular societies. How can making a drawing be considered "as offensive" as threateing to kill people? The rhetorics of victimization is essential. That's why, even after an official apology of the publisher, the drawings are reprinted and distributed by the victims themselves!
Then how can one 'stop the insult to the Prophet'? The purpose of the riots is part of a wider agenda. You’ve heard the claims before: There is a global Judeo-Christian conspiracy to “persecute” Muslims; Liberal democracy itself is a “fundamentalist ideology” that represses the Islamists’ right to create Sharia-based societies. So then islamists are “right” to issue death threats, attack embassies and use terrorism as a means of “self defence” or “resistance”…
The leading cleric of the theocratic dictatorship of Iran, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, held a sermon broadcasted on national radio on Friday. Khatami called on his followers to stop attacking the foreign embassies. But consider this revealing segment of his statement: “I feel that they want their embassies to be set on fire so they can say that they are innocent. Take this excuse away from them.” Is there a better example of projecting one’s own motives onto others?
