Radical Islamic Fundamentalism;
Radical Christian Fundamentalism;
Two Different Versions of HateBy Leigh Saavedra
08 February 2006
Countercurrents.orgAll day yesterday my 14-year old son hopped about the house wearing a tee-shirt that proclaimed: "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." Thousands of miles away, people of nearly identical DNA were throwing rocks through embassy windows and screaming for blood, while the citizens represented by those embassies were touting free speech by republishing cartoons considered blasphemous to the stone throwers, thus increasing exponentially the anger of those already insulted.
And as I looked at the savvy tee-shirt in my quiet home, thinking of what was escalating on the other side of the globe, I hallucinated. Surely it read, "Never underestimate the power of religious fanaticism in large groups."
It's no light matter. Embassies are being burned down this time, protesters are marching in London with placards calling for beheadings, westerners are turning to their pacifist friends and wagging their "I-told-you-so" tongues. If hate begets hate, surely one step up the food chain for either side begets a separate but equal portion of hate. Far smaller things have led to real-life wars, those that leave irreparably dead bodies and wasted land and a legacy of hate in their wake.
First thought was to thank God that it was the Danes who started it this time, not the U.S., who -- wrong as it is in most recent actions -- does need a breather.
As we all probably know by now, a small, right-of-center Danish Daily commissioned cartoonists to come up with what it considered proper lambasting of Islamic intolerance (read "fundamentalism") last fall. Ostensibly, the cartoons were to show the fear western writers and artists feel in dealing with Islam. In so doing, the cartoonists depicted the Prophet Mohammed. Islam strictly forbids any visual depictions of the prophets, considering it blasphemy.
But this was THREE MONTHS AGO. A minor battle between Danish Muslims ensued with an embargo on Danish goods to Islamic countries, then leaking out thinly to the mideast before its current explosion. We would assume it would have died a natural death by now, but instead, western-style (Christian?) newspapers across the globe have decided to defend free speech by republishing the offending cartoons. As of this date, the caricatures have been printed in Denmark, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, the United States, Japan, Norway, Malaysia, Australia, and Ukraine.
Now, at the same time that many are seeing Iran as a powder keg sitting a few inches from a lit candle, Iran has joined the fray. Instead of worrying about the burning of Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus, the death of a man who leaped from the burning Danish consulate in Lebanon, as if those events were not tragedy enough, we now have to deal with the growing boycott of European goods, the death of a protester in Afghanistan, the arrest of a newspaper editor in Yemen for printing the cartoons, the firing of a French editor of FRANCE-SOIR, and possibly most dangerous of all, the extreme reaction in Iran, who has now withdrawn its ambassador and cut all trade ties with Denmark. Such cut involves $280 million worth of goods Iran buys from Denmark each year. The Iranian boycott is a smaller version of the big one, twenty Muslim nations boycotting European countries for the billion dollars a year they would normally spend.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has asked for an emergency meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference to discuss Islamophobia in the West. In the West, EU ambassadors are meeting to discuss diplomatic options in an effort to defuse the tensions.
Is it the spark to ignite World War III, a peak in the clash of civilizations, a molehill under the microscope, or an eruption from the underworld?
Perhaps a lot of chutzpa is required to have an opinion of exactly what this growing demonstration means. As of this moment, at least six people are reported dead, and demonstrations are reported in places nowhere near each other -- London, Afghanistan, Tehran, Lebanon, Somalia, Austria, and Indonesia. Lebanon's 2,000 army troops are outnumbered by 20,000 protesters.
I don't proclaim to know what this is truly about, but my soul roars back that it's about far more than a pictorial description of Mohammed. While most Muslims in the world feel great distress over these demonstrations, there are still tens of thousands of Muslims calling for blood, and they are claiming defamation of the Prophet as the cause.
In the past three weeks 738 Ukrainians have died from the cold, most of them homeless. Unknown to the typical tv newswatcher, the number of homeless people in the U.S. is growing, and in cold months they too die. Veterans returning from Iraq are standing by the freeway with cardboard signs asking for help. The number of children living in poverty in the U.S. has climbed ever higher. The U.S. neocons are pounding the war drums again, this time for Iran, who admittedly is challenging them in a way Saddam didn't dare, and we are talking more and more about "limited nuclear strikes." As the poor in our own country follow the global trend in getting poorer while the rich get richer, the U.S. White House has turned in a 2.77 trillion dollar budget that cuts a host of domestic programs. Our honored marine, sent off in glory to Iraq, is coming home with a DU-saturated body and has a fair chance of fathering a child whose body and life will be the victim of the depleted uranium; his wife and child may well need one of the slashed domestic programs. He may have left for Iraq believing they were involved in 9-11. Many still do.
Who, I can't help but wonder, should be the ones raging in the streets?
Serious stuff is going down, and it's easier for me, a westerner, to understand a westerner's shock that a drawing of a prophet, even an insulting one, can carry such weight when people are being starved and blown up. But I qualify that by reminding myself that I'm from a completely different culture. We don't burn buildings down when a taboo is broken. And I MUST add here, neither do most Muslims. It's the fanatics, and our world is too quick to confuse Islam with Muslim fanatics.
It seems that there is an unending war between all the fanatics. It dies down, lulls us to sleep, but it never goes away. Right now we are seeing the Islamic extremes, and self righteous as we might want to be, we have to remember that history is not just a linear occurrence. Everything that ever happened is, I believe, a part of everything that will ever happen in the future. The present is a soup. And the fanatics have been the cooks for centuries.
We don't like to read what the crusaders did to the Arabs, but in the Arab collective memory the atrocities of what they saw as the Frankish invasions has contributed to who the Arabs are today. From the 11th to the 13th century, under the name of "Christianity" westerners entered the Arab lands on the pretext of clearing a pilgrimage path to Jerusalem. In the process, they killed anyone, including a large number of Jews, in their path. By the time the whole thing was over, nine million people had been killed. Just as the U.S. is in Iraq, "we" were the invaders.
Then there were the Native Americans that the Europeans were driven to "Christianize" before we slaughtered their way of life. And slavery. One of the arguments pro slavery was that we had rescued Africans from a savage land where they had no opportunity to know Christ. Is that any less crazy than the reaction we're seeing to the forbidden drawings?
It goes on and on. You get a band of fanatics on one side and a band who believes something different on the other side and there's no stopping all hell from breaking loose.
Good Christians try to avoid the confrontations; good Muslims try to avoid the confrontations. But in the end, there will always be conflict. It's in the nature of fanaticism, a monster suffering from lifelong insomnia.
This is no apology for frenetic behavior that has killed people in the latest eruption of fanaticism, not at all. But I would have to say that most of us know the consequences of fanning the flames. My brother is a diehard Republican. It would be nothing less than STUPID to negatively refer to the neocons' greed for oil or to pursue the topic of the Bush theft of the White House. We have to live (in the same state). Muslims and Christians have to live on the same globe.
Fingerpointing doesn't work in cases involving fanatics. It doesn't brush a hair on their heads. And we know this. Analysis may be a bit better and synthesis may even be useful. In the current roaring outrages, what has happened is that Iran has sharpened its spears and the U.S. and Europe have been pulled closer together. "Things fall apart," Yeats so wisely wrote, presaging Armageddon. The Project for the New American Century, an evil, self-serving design for power if ever there was one, recommends we not allow other countries to arm themselves to the point of being a threat to us. Yet today, following a million screams over a couple of caricatures, Donald Rumsfeld is telling European leaders to better arm themselves.
Maybe I should have taken my son's tee-shirt literally. "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." In the end, fanaticism and its tunnel vision yields stupid behavior.
I (or probably you) cannot do anything about Islamic radicalism. But the next time my Republican cousin (who adores Bush as a "man of God") tells me not to worry in bumper-to-bumper, because she's praying to God and he will find us a parking place, I am going to remember that I'm down in the grass roots of fanaticism. The roots carry the danger that will eventually explode into hate of those who pray to different gods.
In the end, time is fast wasted trying to decide who of two sides is the better. "They" killed Pim Fortugn, a Dutchman who fought their rejection of gays. And we remember Theo van Gogh, who was murdered after offending strict Muslims? Thank goodness, Salman Rushdie got to safety, barely in under the wire. Are "they" then the bad guys? Who was ready to execute Galileo if he didn't "take back" his information that the planets revolved around the sun? Who lynched black men for daring to look at a white woman? Whose "Christianity" affected the young man who bludgeoned Matthew Sheppard to death for being gay? How many witches were burned at the stake when Christianity was sinking its fangs into the new land?
Far more productive would be to attack the roots of fanaticism here at home. After all, without Christian fanaticism, there would be no George Bush in the White House, no tortured-to-death prisoners at Guantanamo, no fuel to feed hatred for a century through the collective memory of what a wholesome-looking girl did to other prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Without Christian fanaticism, there would not be 100,000 dead civilians on the land some still think was once the Garden of Eden. It was Christian fanaticism that allowed the neocons to set their machine in motion. How many times have we heard a woman in the heartland say she voted for Bush because he is "a man of God"? Who told her such an interesting tidbit? And hey, she comes straight out of our western culture.
So there are tens of thousands screaming in the streets about a few cartoons and it makes no sense.
From another angle, the screams may be erupting from a place we don't comprehend. We're all angry about the destruction going on, but before we let self-righteousness analyze the hysteria at which we scoff, let's try harder to see this place we don't comprehend, to see it in a birds-eye view on centuries of history.
Dare we consider that POSSIBLY some western actions have contributed to the fanaticism that may today be one piece of the biggest threat on the globe? Dare we wonder if the hate we see on our tv screens was nurtured by a fanaticism on this side, one that dealt in taboos and beliefs no stranger than the forbidden cartoons?
Dare we conclude that unchecked hate, nurtured by fanatics, is the banshee of our worst imaginings?
They're bad, the crazies burning embassies and killing innocents. But on this side of the ocean, there are just as many crazies. And they're probably just a happenstance away from an equal violence.
This piece appeared in Leigh's column at My Town on February 6, 2006, at http://www.mytown.ca/saavedra/
Leigh Saavedra has written all her long life, writing under "Lisa Walsh Thomas" until May, 2005. Her second book, "The Girl with Yellow Flowers in her Hair" is available through http://www.whatIdidinthewar.com. She invites response at [email protected]
