MikeLigalig.com

The provocateurs know politics and religion don't mix

It only takes a couple of loonies a few seconds to kick off a miniature war in the Muslim world

Robert Fisk
Thursday 13 September 2012

So another internet clever-clogs sets the Middle East on fire: Prophet cartoons, then Koranic book-burning, now a video of robed ‘terrorists’ and a fake desert.  The Western-Christian version of al-Qaeda then goes into hiding (an essential requisite for publicity) while the innocent are asphyxiated, beheaded and otherwise done to death - outrageous Muslim revenge thus ‘proving’ the racist claims of the trash-peddlers that Islam is a violent religion.


AFP

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=54641.0

When a Danish cartoon in a hitherto unknown newspaper drew a picture of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb in his turban, the Danish embassy in Beirut went up in flames.  When a Texas pastor decided to ‘sentence the Koran to death’, the knives came out in Afghanistan – we are leaving aside the little matter of the ‘accidental’ burning of Koranic pages by US personnel in Bagram.  And now a deliberately abusive film provokes the murder of one of the State Department’s fairest diplomats.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=54641.0

With the help of our wonderful new technology, however, it only needs a couple of loonies to kick off a miniature war in the Muslim world within seconds.  I doubt if poor Christopher Stevens – a man who really understood the Arabs as many of his colleagues do not – had ever heard of the ‘film’ that unleashed the storming of the US consulate in Benghazi and his own death.  It’s one thing to witlessly claim that the US would go on a “crusade” against al-Qaeda – thank you, George W. Bush – but another to insult, quite deliberately, an entire people.  Racism of this kind stirs many a crazed heart.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=54641.0

Ironically, there is room for a serious discussion among Muslims about, for example, a re-interpretation of the Koran; but Western provocation – and western, alas, it is – closes down such a narrative.  Meanwhile, we beat our chests in favour of a ‘free press’.  A New Zealand editor once proudly told me how his own newspaper had re-published the cartoon of the Prophet with a bomb-filled turban.  But when I asked him if he planned to publish a cartoon of a Rabbi with a bomb on his head next time Israel invaded Lebanon, he hastily agreed with me that this would be anti-Semitic.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=54641.0