Angry Muslims have torched the Danish & Norweigan embassies in Syria, in response to the controversial cartoon image of the Prophet Mohammed published in those nations' newspapers. European leaders, having offered luke-warm criticism of the cartoons (and in French Prime Minister Sarkovsky's case, outright support), are now swiftly condemning the violence.

Am I the only one for whom this has the predictability of a Gulf War? Denmark and Norway are already a hotbed of Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and neo-Nazism. That some enterprising editor should stir this up, whether from ideological conceit or from a desire to sell papers, is foregone. That desperately poor people, without any recourse to power, should take this as another kick in the head, is also a given. And that the racists in the West can now pontificate about the need for 'restraint' - including, regrettably, British Muslim leaders - is the proverbial cherry on the sundae. Forgive the mixed metaphors.

I'm getting the feeling they don't like me - Ali, in Ali Fear Eats The Soul

How about the newspaper editors showing 'restraint' in what amounts to an act of xenophobia? Yes yes, we're all familiar with freedom of the press. But abstract principles don't count for much in lands where mosques are firebombed and immigrants are attacked in the streets. Here's what got reported in Denmark in the aftermath of 9-11:

- death threats against a local television station in Copenhagen during a programme in which the attacks on the U.S. were are debated;
- posters with the text "Holy war against Islam" that were found at a Red Cross Centre;
- a Danish woman who tried to set her Turkish neighbour's apartment on fire;
- a Danish imam who received a death threat;
- a drunken young man who was caught outside a mosque ready to throw homemade Molotov cocktails;
- a concert in Tivoli with the group Outlandish (two members of which are Muslim) that was cancelled due to bomb threats;
- a Kurdish-owned pizza place that was attacked by a group of thugs with baseball bats;
- a man who attacked an Iraqi immigrant with his German shepherd dog;
- a firebomb that was thrown in an immigrant neighbourhood of Aabenrå, where racist language was found;
- another pizza place, owned by two Afghans, that was attacked in a rural area by someone throwing bottles filled with gasoline through the windows.

Not to mention the rise of the far right, whose "speakers consistently launched verbal attacks on Muslims, who were portrayed as "our enemy".

This is the context of those cartoons. Not simple freedom of speech, but part of an ongoing campaign of vilification of Muslims. This is directly related to the physical, economic and cultural assault on the middle east.

The frustration and despair felt by Muslims can be mobilized by astute leaders of political Islam to their own ends. No doubt the fundamentalist anger of the demonstrators is heart-felt; and spitting on their religion is only going to make it more heartfelt. Those so-called liberals in Denmark who claim to be protecting their democratic society are just laying bare its real roots: xenophobia and cheap immigrant labour.

If they really wanted to combat fundamentalism, they'd denounce the latest imperialist incursion into the middle east. But I'm sure imperialism and Islamophobia suits their political agenda just fine, thank you very much.

A Further Note

Honestly, sometimes I don't know why I bother being a Marxist, when Lenin's Tomb says everything so eloquently. Check out his series of reasoned posts for an antidote to the liberal racism prevailing in shocked Eurocentric circles. I'm going to steal a whole chunk of an article, for two reasons:

1) to illustrate the context of the Mohammed cartoons:

this... is not about debate, free speech and so forth. This is about demonisation. There are thousands of images of Muhammed available on a quick Google search, but none of them have precipitated this outrage. It is because the images suggest that Muslims are either terrorists or followers of a terrorist or likely to take a sword to you for glancing at a woman and so on. In the present geopolitical situation, Muslims are being persecuted all over the world. The outrage has not emerged because Muslims are dogged reactionaries incapable of understanding 'Western' notions of liberalism and free speech. ... what has happened is that a major European newspaper launched a provocative attack on Muslims, and most Muslims have responded with considerable restraint (unless you really believe that small sample of images you have seen recycled on television and in newspapers is representative of 1.2bn people).

And as a self-critique, to suggest Muslims are being manipulated by unscrupulous religious leaders. While the Muslim world has its fair share of those leaders, and they do their damndest to manipulate like any others, the issue here is not leadership but racism:

There is always, at the last scrape of the barrel, the suggestion available that Muslims are merely being manipulated and stirred up by a would-be religious hierarchy, an oppressive caste of clerics and so forth. This unimpressive and child-like perception of the situation, for from positing a postcolonial hybridisation of Islam, involves reducing Muslims to no more than a passive substrate on which Evil Doers can operate... it totally neglects (or more accurately represses knowledge of) the fact that we are dealing with 100% proof racism, and the response to it.

Fair point. I take it back.