Western Exceptionalism
By Mir Adnan Aziz
25 September, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Today, we see Washington on a rampage to realize these words from historian Gordon Wood: ‘our beliefs in liberty, equality, constitutionalism, and the well-being of ordinary people came out of the Revolutionary era; so too, did our idea that we Americans are a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty and democracy’. This fallacious sentiment, coined ‘American exceptionalism’, has become Washington’s mantra; it has wrought death and misery on billions.
‘The Innocence of Muslims’ has created an understandable furor in the Muslim world. The film describes Islam ‘as a cancer’. It is vulgar and laden with sexual innuendos against the Holy Prophet (pbuh). The work of a depraved mind, this film is extremely provocative and was designed to enrage. President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s response seems, at best, frivolous given the committed affront.
Hillary Clinton’s remark about having nothing to do with this movie were followed in the same breath by the words that ‘the US does not stop individual citizens from expressing their views no matter how distasteful they may be’. This, in itself, is the enabling ground that ensures these sacrilegious and extremely offensive ventures. Not to be left behind Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney says, ‘It’s a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values’. Newt Gingrich, former presidential candidate and speaker of the US House of Representatives, views this as a moment ‘to teach the Muslim world about freedom’. Both, Gingrich and Romney profess American exceptionalism.
On calls to remove the movie, Google said ‘this video, widely available on the Web, is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube’. However, Google had no qualms when it removed 1,710 videos and closed their affiliated accounts because, as Google put it, ‘a substantial number of those videos concerned Holocaust denial and defense of Holocaust deniers’. Google ‘closed the users’ accounts within 24 hours’ of receiving the complaint by a group that monitored anti-Semitism.
What we, in the Muslim world, fail to understand are the dual standards followed on this issue by the Washington led West. European countries too have been bitten by the Washington bug giving rise to what can be termed as Western exceptionalism. It may take a voluminous book to enumerate cases in which the misnomer of free speech has been castigated and punished in the West. Post 9/11 laws have become an enabling guise to perpetrate extreme excesses at will. The dichotomy too is brazenly blatant if one denies the Holocaust.
Tarek Mehanna, a twenty-nine year old American Muslim pharmacist, was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison. He was accused of ‘conspiring to support Al Qaeda’ by ‘taking to the Internet to try to spread the terror group’s message’. The charges were that he had ‘justified (and called for) the killing of American civilians; that he plotted to shoot people at a shopping mall and that he expressed support for Al-Qaeda, wanted to join Al-Qaeda, and was an Al-Qaeda operative’. All charges, as are evident from his messages now in public domain, were false.
Maher Arar is a 34-year-old wireless technology consultant and Syrian-born Canadian. On Sept. 26, 2002, while in transit at New York’s JFK airport, Arar was detained by US officials and interrogated about alleged links to al-Qaeda. He was also chained, shackled and tortured to make a false confession. It was four long years later in 2006 that the Canadian Commissioner of Inquiry, Justice Dennis O’Connor, cleared him of all allegations. He was ‘able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada’.
Javed Iqbal, a Pakistani-American and a 25 year resident of New York, was sentenced to 69 months in prison. His sin was to offer Hezbollah’s (a part of Lebanon’s democratic government) Al Manar television channel to customers in the US. Ahmed Faraz, a British Muslim, was sentenced in Dec. 2011 to three years in prison in London. He was convicted on charges of ‘disseminating a number of books deemed to be terrorist publications’. The publication that led to his conviction was the 1964 book, Milestones, written by the late Egyptian author Sayyed Qutb.
Azhar Ahmed, 19, of Yorkshire, was charged with sending ‘a grossly offensive communication’. His posted message, two days after six British soldiers died in an IED explosion in Afghanistan read, ‘all soldiers should die and go to hell’. The hearing judge said his comments were ‘derogatory and inflammatory’. Azhar awaits sentencing. Geert Wilders was compared to a Nazi guard in a cartoon posted by Joop.nl. It had to be removed after threats to the website. However Wider’s ‘fitna’ and his rant of the Holy Quran being ‘the Muslim Mein Kamph’ was defended as his given right to express himself. One can quote many more examples of the myth of freedom of speech in the West.
Private Bradley Manning was arrested, tortured and confined in appalling circumstances. Dubbed a ‘whistle-blower’ and treated like a war-criminal, his sin was that the atrocities asked of him in Afghanistan conflicted with his moral views. US journalist Naomi Wolf writes that ‘mafia tactics are being used to silence Julian Assange (Wikileaks) and other journalists’. Wanted by Sweden on charges of sexual assault, Assange has been granted political asylum by Ecuador. He fears that Sweden shall hand him over to the US where he shall be prosecuted for making public the famous Wiki cables. So great is the pressure that Britain threatened to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy to arrest him. Ecuador responded by saying that it would be deemed an act of war.
The mere denial of the Holocaust is a crime in many Western countries. Many have borne the brunt of expressing themselves. A few who were convicted are: David Irving, a holocaust denier, was sentenced to three years imprisonment in Austria, criminally convicted in Germany and banned from entering Australia and Canada. Bishop Richard Williamson of Britain is another holocaust denier. In January 2009, ‘the Chief Rabbinate of Israel suspended contacts with the Vatican’ because of his views. The Chief Rabbi of Haifa asked Williamson to retract his statements publicly.
German author and historian, Ernst Zundel, has spent seven years of his life behind bars as a result of expressing his viewpoints and opinions about the Holocaust. Zundel’s home in Canada was burned to the ground in 1995; he received a parcel bomb that was diffused by the Toronto police. Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom of the University College, London, was fired from his fellowship in April 2008 because he denied the Holocaust. Fredrick Toben Mannheim of Germany spent 7 months in prison in 1999. A former schoolteacher, he ran an Australian based website that denied the Holocaust. He was also prosecuted in Australia
Robert Faurisson, age 83, is a French academic and a Holocaust denier. He was prosecuted, fined and, in 1991, dismissed from his academic post. French President François Hollande stripped John Galliano, a fashion designer, of the Légion d’Honneur (France’s highest public distinction). This followed his conviction on charges of, ‘public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity’. He had made anti-Semitic remarks.
Germar Rudolf, a German chemist, was hounded, arrested and convicted for presenting scientific findings that negated the Auswitz deaths. He was also expelled from the Catholic fraternity on grounds of having violated their principles by his Holocaust denial publications. Married to an American lady, he was arrested in the US and his plea for asylum was turned down. He was deported to Germany where on March 15, 2007; the Mannheim District Court sentenced him to two years and six months in prison for ‘inciting hatred, disparaging the dead and libel’. Gerd Honsik, who authored ‘33 Witnesses against the Gas Chamber Lie’, was convicted in Austria and Germany. Forced to go into exile, he now lives in Spain.
Michael Jackson’s 1995 album ‘History’ created a firestorm. A song titled ‘They don’t care about us’ had the lyrics: ‘Jew me, sue me’ and ‘Kick me, kike me’. The mere mention of these words led to protests. Charges of anti-Semitism forced Jackson to re-record the song and delete these lyrics. Actor and director Mel Gibson was branded an anti-Semite when he made ‘The Passion of Christ’. Abe Foxman, leader of ADL and many others claimed that ‘Americans would start hating and killing Jews if the movie was screened in US theatres’. Some even called for Gibson to be ‘burned at the stake’. He became a Hollywood outcast; his film was rated the most controversial ever.
Islamophobic rhetoric, blasphemous caricatures and movies pave the way for a backlash that has led to world-wide protests and the killing of Americans in Benghazi and Muslims in their home countries. It also encourages the likes of Anders Breivik who murdered 77 fellow Norwegians. His 1500 page manifesto stated. ‘About Islam, I recommend essentially everything written by Robert Spencer’. A rabid Islamophobic, Spencer was Brevik’s adopted mentor. With a chilling calm Brevik announced in his closing statement that, ‘my brothers in the Norwegian and European resistance movements are sitting and watching this case while they plan new attacks’.
‘Oh, East is east, and West is west, and never the twain shall meet’. This is a verse from Kipling’s ‘Empire’. In a decade Muslims will account for nearly 9 percent of Europe’s mainland population. Brevik’s ‘brothers’, as do many Western governments, view a burgeoning Islam amongst them as an imminent threat. German President, Joachim Gauck, made it clear when he said that ‘Muslims were more definitively a part of his country than was their religion of Islam’.
This has led to an increasingly potent group exploiting the West’s post 9/11 fears. Islamophobia has become a tool to money and instant fame. In the US alone American Muslims, accounting for less than one percent of the population, have been the target of 15 percent of religious hate crimes since the last year. Violence has forced many Sikhs, who sport a beard, to claim publicly that they are not Muslims. More than a decade after 9/11, polls show that nearly 50 percent Americans believe that Islamic values are incompatible with American ones. Secularism has become a misnomer for militant atheism. This in turn, aggravated by imposed American exceptionalism, has led to militancy in the Muslim world.
Journalists are the symbols of free speech. It is through their eyes and words that we shape our opinions as news from the remotest part of the globe is beamed to our homes. Covering wars can be as dangerous as fighting one. Nowhere has this maxim been more tragically true than for the reporters who report Washington’s wars. In a report (http://cpj.org/reports/2006/01/js-killed-by-us-13sept05.php), the Committee to protect Journalists lists the names and circumstances of reporters murdered by US forces in Iraq. It is titled: 13 confirmed cases of journalists killed in Iraq by U.S. Forces (March 2003-August 2005). What a ‘tribute’ to freedom of speech!
Joseph McCarthy was a Senator (1947-57) from Wisconsin. His short-cut to political fame was an adopted obsession with Communism. His hysterical campaign was fully supported by the US print and electronic media for almost a decade. His professed McCarthyism forced church governing members, teachers, unions and all members of State and society to take loyalty oaths, stating they were not Communists. Finally after years of witch-hunts, the American media and people realized that McCarthy was ‘evil and unmatched in malice’, but not till the lives of thousands of Americans had been ruined. Today Islam is the enemy as was the Communism of yester years. Today, MaCarthyism symbolizes demagogic practices. Islamophobia too shall be deemed such one day but only after another unfortunate ‘enemy’ has been found to satiate the never-ending lust of American exceptionalism.
Charlie Chaplin with his cane, bowler hat and baggy pants is someone who brought comic relief to a multitude in extremely turbulent times. In 1943, Chaplin was invited by the ‘Russian War Relief’ to give a speech at an ‘Arts for Russia’ dinner. There, Chaplin praised the Russian soldiers for their bravery and said that ‘Communists were just as human as anyone else’. This remark led to the boycott of his films in the US. Distributors were forced to remove all Chaplin films from theatres immediately; everyone complied. As Chaplin set sail for England in 1952, United States Attorney General, Judge McGranery revoked Chaplin’s re-entry permit. So much for freedom of speech!
‘Imagine’ a John Lennon song has the lyrics: ‘Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do; Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace’. When asked about his band’s popularity Lennon answered the ‘Beatles have become more popular than Jesus’. The remark caused a severe backlash in the US with the Ku Klux Klan picketing his concerts. Lennon held two press-conferences in the US expressing his regret at the offence caused by his words that had been ‘taken out of context’. On 8 December 1980, as he and his wife Yoko Ono were about to enter their New York apartment, Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman; a murder many attribute to Lennon’s spoken words.
Washington should spare us the freedom spiel. History is a testament to the ‘freedom’ that was wrought upon the indigenous natives of the US and the Western hemisphere. In a genocidal purge, millions of natives were brutally freed of their homes, land and the face of this earth. Millions in Iraq and Afghanistan are the latest victims of this ‘freedom’; Pakistan and Iran are in the cross-hairs. Never have morals and justice seen such a lopsided equation; never did freedom invoke such nightmarish reality.
However, in Pakistan, our violent response to the despicable film led to the death of 23 of our own with more than 200 wounded and public property worth billions gutted. In doing so, we only strengthen the demented Nakoulas’ and Terry Jones’ of this world. Nothing could be more sacrilegious for us than the likes of this film; however we should channelize our strength and resources to force Western governments to rectify their biased and lopsided stance on this issue by peaceful means. This can prove to be a far more effective way than adopting the violent course.
With the looming US elections, the Muslim lobby within should create a united stand that makes it clear that their vote is tied to the imperative condition of ensuring that blasphemy is seen as a crime. Muslims in European countries should do the same. How can the makers of this film deny culpability in the death of Ambassador Stevens and other Americans in Benghazi? The same goes for Washington too. They fully knew the backlash such blasphemous acts produced, yet wedded to the dichotomous freedom of speech, they did nothing to stop the same.
The OIC has to take a more pro-active role and get out of its slumber mode. The government should initiate a mass opinion-molding campaign on the social media, intellectuals should write and businessmen should voice their concerns to their Western counterparts. The effort should be sustained and unflinching to the end that this sort of despicable act is not repeated again.
Our diplomatic missions in the West should take an unambiguous and forceful stand. By announcing a holiday and performing their usual disappearance act, the government shares responsibility for the death and destruction. Musharraf played the ‘Taliban near Islamabad’ card to prove his relevance to Washington; Islamabad’s Lal Masjid became the beginning of his end. The mysterious presence of masked men bearing the Al-Qaeda standard in the Friday protests was something that eluded even Musharraf’s ‘relevance game’. Playing unholy politics in the name of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) is in itself a sacrilege. It may yet be the undoing of this dispensation too.
Mir Adnan Aziz is a freelance contributor based in Islamabad. Email [email protected]
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