Weekly roundup, March 20th 2006
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?”
