contexploration

SWEDISH NEUTRALITY: Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds finally resigned Tuesday over the closure of the Web site of Sverigedemokraterna, a right-wing nationalist party that published caricatures of Muhammad. The Swedish Foreign Ministry and security police contacted the Internet hosting company Levonline and urged them to close down the site in an unbelievable infringement of free speech typical of a Swedish public that too often prefers phoney consensus to healthy disparity. This mentality is perfectly expressed in Göran Rosenberg’s flawed analysis of the cartoons controversy.

Rosenberg compares the caricatures of Muhammad with the anti-Semitic caricatures in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, although the Danish Jyllands-Posten never has been a proponent of violence against - or the extermination of - Muslims, and the drawings were not in any sense racist. Rosenberg writes about the “conditions" for the existence of freedom of expression, and claims that if this freedom is used for the systematic production of non-understanding it will eventually render itself useless. The goal of the public arena, according to him, is therefore to "produce understanding". Although I’m a true admirer of the quality of the Swedish public discourse, the fact of the matter is that it too often fails to create the resolve necessary to confront forces which are not as harmonious and consensus-seeking as the sexy Swedes. The Swedish public harmony never presented any problems for Hitler, and even Osama bin Laden can easily give his approval. This explains how Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds and the security police SÄPO could act as the extended arm of the raging mob of religious fanatics by practically distrubuting death threats on their behalf.

MIGRATION: Migrants around the world send home twice the amount of money that the world spends on development, the World Bank finds. The World Bank calls migration “a powerful force for poverty reduction” with the money coming from an estimated 200 million people now living in countries where they were not born. “The World Bank Annual Global Economic Prospects Report of 2006 suggests that remittance inflows into Ghana have helped cut its poverty level by 5 per cent, Bangladesh by 6 per cent and Uganda by 11 per cent."

BLAIR SPEECH: In Prime Minister Tony Blair’s speech to the Foreign Policy Centre and Reuters, he says: “’We’ is not the West. ‘We’ are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. ‘We’ are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts. This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation.” This clarification from the Prime Minister is useful. Unfortunately he has in the past too often used the terms “we” and “our way of life” referring only to the British. In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings this was noted by the European press. Under circumstances where civilisation is confronted with an enemy which is truly globalised and imperialistic, “we” ought to be united as well. The major shortcoming of Blair’s rhetoric is the fact that his “interconnected world” is never combined with a call for supranationalism, a question which is essential to European democracy. The real test of your internationalism comes at the moment when you wholeheartedly join a union of liberal democracies where certain decisions are made by majority votes. For the rest of Europe, the actions of Tony Blair too often make his “internationalism” look more like an arrogant British “nationalism”.

IRAQ INTERVENTION ANNIVERSARY: Norman Geras writes: “That we sided with the overthrow of a regime of mass murder is not something I believe needs an apology, except if you pretend that the outcomes were certain, or all but certain, in advance.” Mohammed Fadhil writes about the military intervention with a sense of hope. A young Iraqi journalist in Baghdad has a more pessimistic assessment.

AMERICAN JUSTICE: The criminal gang that abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib and shamed the American military are now finally receiving their sentences. Last week, military jurors sentenced Sgt. Michael J. Smith, an Army dog handler, to six months behind bars for abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Charles A. Graner Jr. has been sentenced to 10 years in a military prison. Lynndie England sentenced to a three-year jail term for maltreating detainees. Former staff sergeant Ivan Frederick of Virginia was sentenced to 8 years in prison for maltreatment. Frederick helped place wires on a detainee's hands and told him he would be electrocuted if he fell while standing on a box. Jeremy Sivits was sentenced to one year in prison for taking pictures of naked Iraqi prisoners being humiliated, including some of the photographs that triggered the Abu Ghraib scandal. Former specialist Roman Krol admitted pouring water on naked detainees and forcing them to crawl on the floor. He was sentenced in February 2005 to 10 months in prison. Former specialist Armin Cruz was sentenced to eight months in prison. Former specialist Sabrina Harman was found guilty at trial in May 2005 of conspiracy, maltreating detainees and dereliction of duty. She was sentenced to six months in prison. Former sergeant Javal Davis, of New Jersey, was sentenced to six months in prison for stepping on the hands and feet of handcuffed detainees and falling with his full weight on top of them. A former Abu Ghraib guard Megan Ambuhl, was charged with failing to prevent or report maltreatment of prisoners and was discharged from the Army without prison time.

This incompetent and treacherous gang of sadomasochists was nearly able to torpedo all American efforts to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis single-handedly, as well as sabotage the justification for the intervention itself. In the years to come, I fear that other tyrants will be grateful for the soliders' activities at the Abu Ghraib prison.

How many detainees have been killed in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002? Human Rights First, a human rights advocacy organization based in New York City, defines 34 deaths in U.S. custody as "homocides". In a report from February 2006 the organisation found 11 additional cases where the facts suggest death as a result of "physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention".

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HEZBOLLAH: In a recent speech in Beirut, Hezbollah's Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah gave his version of the cause of the cartoon controversy: “If a Muslim had executed the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie [who wrote the ‘Satanic Verses’] then none of those insolent people would have dared to debase Prophet Mohammed - not in Denmark, neither in Norway nor France. If we now forgive, as we did after Salman Rushdie wrote the Satanic Verses, God only knows what they will do later.”

As you may recall, the Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot on direct orders from the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini back in 1993. Nygaard survived. He was more fortunate than the Japanese publisher, Hitoshi Igarashi, who was killed. (Later, in the name of free speech, William Nygaard actually published former Ansar al-Islam leader Mulla Krekar’s auto bio Med egne ord.) If Hezbollah should dare to send death squads to Denmark or Norway we will surely bear in mind the words of Mr. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

OSLO DEMONSTRATION: More details of the cartoons demonstration in Oslo on February 11th have emerged. All major Muslim organisations in Norway urged people to stay away from the demonstration. The editor that published the cartoons had already apologised for offending religious sensitivities. The organisers of the demonstration insisted on being anonymous. A small minority of Muslims in Norway, some 1500 people, marched through the streets of Oslo chanting, “God is great!” and “Stop the insult to our Prophet!” (The Muslim women in the march were assigned a separate section at the back of the procession.) According to Aftenposten Aften, the organisers were board members of Rahma Islamic Relief Fund Norge (RIRF).

The march was welcomed by the left wing organisation Internasjonale Sosialister (IS), the Norwegian division of the Socialist Workers Party. Some rather bewildered members of IS demonstrated alongside the offended Islamists with signs saying “Stop the racism! Stop the war!”. Like the SWP in the UK – Internasjonale Sosialister claims to be anti-war, but is not pacifist. It sees the war in Iraq as an opportunity to awaken a new Left, and to awaken a new "wave of revolutions", provided that the Americans and British are defeated in Iraq. The March 2004 editorial of the IS monthly Gnisten may have exposed a Freudian slip. Read the following excerpt: “American leaders are desperate to withdraw from the war in Iraq. They can’t, because it will mean that they will show weakness. Force is the only language that the elites understand. The anti-war movement in and outside Iraq must show the Coalition that it is more dangerous for them to stay than to withdraw. The Americans have shown themselves vulnerable. The resistance should attack.” Refering to the Socialist Workers Party and Internasjonale Sosialister as part of an "anti-war movement" seems misplaced.

Finally, the Norwegian SWP repeatedly claims that the West is demonising “the Jews of our age, the Muslims”. But when the SWP demonstrates outside the Israeli embassy in London, the chants heard are: "No Israeli state!” and "Death to the Jews!"...

ANTI-AMERICANISM: The letter to the Readers’ Editor of The Guardian from Oliver Kamm et al protesting the “correction” of the Emma Brockes interview with Noam Chomsky has been posted on Kamm’s web site: “Chomsky’s reason for downplaying or questioning the scale of what happened in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 is that he wishes to deny to the US and her allies - forces that he believes to be the biggest threat to world peace and prosperity - the pretexts on which he believes they base their interventions.” Although this argument at first may seem “personal”, it is of great importance to the survivors of the Balkan wars of the Nineties, and to history. In the message (an email?) from Chomsky to Swedish supporters dated July 12th 2003, Chomsky certainly does downplay genocide in Srebrenica. Diana Johnstone denies there was even a massacre of Muslims, see the quotes from the Counterpunch website, October 12th 2005.

LULA: “We don’t govern for those who went before; we govern for those who come after.” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva talks about UN reform, the World Trade Organisation and the Doha Round in this interview [PDF] with The Economist. The president also mentions what in my view has been the most serious foreign policy failure of the Bush Administration so far: US support - through NED and Otto Reich at the American embassy in Caracas - for the 2002 coup attempt against President Chávez in Venezuela [video]. Talking about Bolivia and the American war on drugs, Lula says: “I often imagine this possibility: what if the US decided to buy all the coca produced in Bolivia and disappeared with it, paying a higher price than the drug traders? Wouldn’t that be a better solution? If the richer countries decided to purchase Bolivia’s entire coca production, leaving only the volume required to produce the indigenous coca tea, and then vanish with the coca production, wouldn’t this be more efficient than using the army?”

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DEMOCRACY: Jürgen Habermas wants the European Union to move away from the principle of unanimity that defines the structure and restricts the type of decisions made by majority votes. In this speech [in German] published in Der Standard, he suggests that the European countries in favour of more supranationality ought to hold referendums to decide if their peoples want to move forward and establish a more democratic and “core” union with pan-European presidential elections and a European Foreign Minister.

In Part I of Habermas' speech he mostly deals with the state of the public, digital sphere. What is "relevant" and "trustworthy" information on the Net? These questions are part of an essential discussion on Europe's future that is now starting to take place. See also this speech by Rowan Williams that was linked to last week. “[The Internet] provides an environment in which enraged people can gather at cause-centered Web sites and make themselves even angrier” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post a while back.

RELIGION: An article from the Washington Post gives an update on the Church-State situation in Spain. Shortly after Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s election in 2004, he ended a quarter-century of church relations by blocking mandatory religious classes in public schools.

"INEQUALITY: is as Brazilian as the weather and the beaches”. A realistic assessment on the economic inequalities of Brazil, written by PDT senator Cristovam Buarque: “In 2006 we will have another presidential election and will probably watch the same old debate: we will hear promises and proposals about how to grow, create more jobs, construct more highways, factories, hydroelectric projects. But quite possibly we will not have a serious debate about how to integrate Brazilian society.”

CARTOONS: The American Free Inquiry, journal of humanist thought and opinion, will reprint controversial Muhammad-cartoons in the journal’s April-May issue. Editor Paul Kurtz says: “Freedom of expression is a precious liberty basic to our democracy, the protection of which, we believe, far outweighs the possible consequences from those who might be offended.”

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CARTOONS: Monday there was an InterCity debate at Kafé Stenersen about the Norwegian Government’s handling of the cartoons controversy. In the panel was Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Carl I. Hagen, the leader of Fremskrittspartiet (the right wing Populist Party), Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, the leader of the youth organization of the Conservatives and Olav Dag Hauge, the head of the inter-religious delegation sent by the Norwegian Government to meet the cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Quatar after the controversy broke out. Present in the audience was also Vebjørn Selbekk, the editor of the small Christian weekly Magazinet that printed the cartoons in Norway in the first place.

The last few years I have written extensively about the challenges posed by populism, religion and nationalism to European liberal democracies. Here, in this debate, some key players came together (a main protagonist was absent, of course, the Islamic fundamentalist himself). The complexities of these issues, and the enormous pace that the public discussion has taken the last few years astonish me.

A series of events has shaken this society: In 1993 the Norwegian publisher of the Satanic Verses, William Nygaard was shot by Iranian agents in Oslo (he survived), the teenager Benjamin Hermansen was stabbed to death by Neo-Nazis in January 2001 because of the colour of his skin, the aftermath of 11th of September 2001 led Norwegian troops to reconstruction and peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. After the Madrid bombings in 2004 the troops were withdrawn from Iraq. Confrontations with Islamists sparked by comedian Shabana Rehman and editor of Magazinet Vebjørn Selbekk have resulted in death threats. In a cowardly warning, the Rehman family’s restaurant in Oslo was sprayed with bullets under cover of night. Cartoon riots led to the torching and destruction of the Norwegian embassies in Beirut and Damaskus.

Today, for the first time in history, an opinion poll show that the Populist Party is Norway’s largest with 32 percent. Carl I. Hagen and the Populists have surfed The Fear of the Unknown for years, talking about “Norwegian values”, making a fetish of the “Norwegian family”, mocking multiculturalism and trying to curb immigration. In the 1980s the party was a frequent critic of single mothers, welfare recipients and others in society that they considered “lazy” or “unproductive”. Political interest or social knowledge doesn’t seem to be a requirement for joining the party. It has always attracted the used-car salesmen and petty criminals of Norwegian society. If you think taxes are too high, that alcohol is too expensive, or that there are too many “foreigners” in the streets, this is the party for you.

In the hunt for cheap political points the Populist Party has tried everything. There doesn’t seem to be problematic for its leaders to address the wallets of consumers of alcohol, gasoline, pornography, Norwegian property-holders in Spain, while at the same time attempting to reach out to the “moral values” of fundamentalist Christians and nationalists. There is abolutely no core in its politics. The Populist Party sides with the egocentric majority in every case. (That’s also why it has neither been a vocal proponent nor an adversary of Norwegian membership in the European Union, a question that cleanly divides the electorate in half. It would, of course, try to appeal to both sides, if it were possible.)

After the Salman Rushdie fatwa the Populist Party unsuccessfully tried to remove the (inactive) blasphemy clause in the penal law (strl § 142). A few years later it observed the success of George W. Bush’s alliances with Christian organisations and his emphasis on “moral values” in his re-election campaign: The Populist Party then shifted its stance in the Parliament and voted to maintain the blasphemy clause. But now, after the cartoon controversy, it again wants to remove it, because opinion polls show an extreme hostility among Norwegians of any religion. Only 29 percent say they believe in God, and this number is shrinking fast.

Not to say that the Populist Party is totally hopeless. To its credit, it has behaved rather civilised in the heat of the cartoon controversy, and Siv Jensen actually did a fairly good job siding with secularism and “law abiding” immigrants in a televised debate with Per Fugelli. If it could abandon its appalling practice of populism all together and seek alliances with Norwegian-Muslim democrats and democratic forces in Non-Western countries, it could perhaps transform itself into a political force different from the Klan of European Xenophobes to which it currently belongs.

At the Kafé Stenersen debate, I was reminded of all these events and also, for the first time in years, I was present in a room full of ambitious politicians (and a couple of celebrities as well). During my years as a youth politician I developed a revulsion towards organised politics. The horrors of spending my evenings going to meetings, standing up to sing morbid socialist songs, participating in endless debates on how to efficiently “change people’s attitudes” and then, late at night, conspiring to gain a peripheral position in an hierarchy of some of the most uncharismatic young people imaginable… finally it made me shun party politics all together. I scrapped my memberships and exorcised my political ambitions.

Being in the same room as these future political leaders was almost unbearable. The rhetoric is well rehearsed and unoriginal. The standardised “humorous” remarks are cruel and personal. To watch these passionless professional enthusiasts is at first embarrassing, then discouraging.

A Pakistani-Norwegian woman in the audience took the microphone and in a moving plea she told of Muslims’ fear of reprisals after the destruction of the embassies. She was of the opinion that the Government had done a good job calming the situation, and she voiced hope for the future. But afterwards, as the panelists drifted back into a discussion of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” as if it were a natural phenomenon, I saw her becoming more and more dispirited. The heated verbal attacks on the Foreign Minister by the well dressed young Populists fresh from blogosphere anonymity didn’t help much either.

The whole debate and the atmosphere of the event made me realize that the last two months have quietly traumatized a large segment of this society. The safe harbours of “religion” and “nation” appear more unattractive than ever. (This disillusion has physically been symbolized by the artistic mocking of the so called Prophet and the burning of the Norwegian flag.) But at the same time, our alternative - secular society - is perceived as cold, transparent and rational. This is the moment of truth. Globalisation is here and now.

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THE MEDIA: I want to draw attention to the assessments of Rowan Williams in his speech delivered at Lambeth Palace this fall. Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury. The speech demonstrates that it is possible even for spiritual leaders to present a coherent media critique.

There is a need for defining the “level of subjectivity” of web-based sources, and making an effort to present news material in its proper context: “This means incorporating into what is communicated some of the material you might need to judge its reliability: 'showing your workings', distinguishing more sharply between report and comment, allowing some ways of evaluating reported reactions to something (is this from a person or body who represents anything serious? Is this comment there simply because it is obligatory to have at least one really hostile voice, never mind its credibility?).” In my view, this is an essential mission for web developers and Internet journalists alike.

IRAQ: Read Mohammed Fadhil’s account of the situation in Baghdad after the attack on the Samarra shrine. The radical Shia clerics use the attack as a pretext for advancing their own agendas. Fadhil writes: “So those radical parties were looking for a justification for a planned crisis to bring back to attention the centuries-long suffering of the Shia and they wanted to gain more support for what they consider legitimate political demands from giving the impression that they are the only targets for terrorism.”

MULTICULTURALISM: In an article by Amartya Sen in The New Republic he writes: "The vocal defense of multiculturalism that we frequently hear these days is very often nothing more than a plea for plural monoculturalism. If a young girl in a conservative immigrant family wants to go out on a date with an English boy, that would certainly be a multicultural initiative. In contrast, the attempt by her guardians to stop her from doing this (a common enough occurrence) is hardly a multicultural move, since it seeks to keep the cultures separate. And yet it is the parents' prohibition, which contributes to plural monoculturalism, that seems to garner the loudest and most vocal defense from alleged multiculturalists, on the ground of the importance of honoring traditional cultures - as if the cultural freedom of the young woman were of no relevance whatever, and as if the distinct cultures must somehow remain in secluded boxes."

IDEOLOGY AND RELIGION IN AMERICAN LAW: Last week U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia defended his weird, Originalist views on constitutional interpretation in his speech at the American Enterprise Institute (conservative). The speech is available from C-SPAN in both audio- and video-files. If you use Internet Explorer as your browser, you can open the Real Player clip directly by clicking this link. Today, the judiciary’s obsession with common law has been replaced with a metaphysical obsession with human rights, Scalia said. Scalia is a Catholic, and recently, in an "Original" twist, he also applied his own methodology to the Church itself. In a speech in January at a conference on religion and the death penalty, he argued that the "framers" of the Catholic Church (St. Paul) endorsed capital punishment. ( Pope Benedict XVI strongly opposes it.) Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.com commented: "Arguing that the founders of the church completely supported the death penalty, Scalia effectively charged the pope with doing to church dogma what his intellectual enemies have done to the Constitution: loading it up with contemporary values and mores at the expense of the original intent."

MULTI-RELIGIOUS BRAZIL: Janer Cristaldo writes about Article 19 of the Brazilian Federal Constitution that forbids subordination relations between the State and religious institutions. Judge Roberto Arriada Lorea of Porto Alegre recently urged the removal of crucifixes from court rooms in the forums and in the Rio Grande do Sul's Supreme Court: "The presence of religious symbols - basically crucifixes - puts the forums and the court under suspicion," explained the judge. Cristaldo writes: "To this day, I haven't been able to understand the success of the cross as a logotype. More than a death instrument, it is a torture instrument. If to the Romans it was a utensil for executing sentences, to Christians it became a slaughter-heralding banner as soon as they took over power."

SOCIALISM: The PBS-series “Heaven on Earth” is well produced and good entertainment, but it is biased. You can order the DVD here. The European social democratic movements that combine competitive market economies with social justice is left out of the equation. That’s conveniant in order to pronounce the ”death” of Socialism, but the idea of a social capitalism is very much alive in today’s Europe, especially in Scandinavian countries. Joshua Muravchik at the American Enterprise Institute represses democratic socialism. The remarkable background interviews available on the PSB web site with Sheri Berman, Christopher Hitchens and Tony Wright rarely feature in the documentary series itself, which is a shame.

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