THIS MODERN WORLD

From John Suggs, senior editor for the Creative Loafing alt-weeklies:

So, let’s look at the guy who started this whole cartoon escapade. He’s Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper. In all of the Lexis-Nexis database of stories from the American media on the Mohammed cartoons, there is absolutely no mention of the fact that Rose is a close confederate of arch-Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Indeed, there is almost no context at all about Rose’s newspaper. Only a brief mention in the Washington Post gave a hint at a fact desperately needed to understand the situation. The Post described the affair as “a calculated insult … by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem.”

How bad is Pipes? He wants the utter military obliteration of the Palestinians; indeed, from the Muslim world, his racism is about as blatant as that of the Holocaust denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pipes’ frequent outbursts of racism – designed to toss gasoline on the neo-cons’ lust for a wholesale conflict of cultures – earned him a Bush nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank. Rose came to America to commune with Pipes in 2004, and it was after that meeting the cartoon gambit materialized.

He’s got more and you really should, if you will forgive the expression, read the whole thing.

Perhaps you remember George Bush and Tony Blair used to get mad at Al Jazeera for broadcasting tapes of bin Laden, on the grounds the tapes might include secret messages for his minions.

In light of that, here’s an interesting slice of 1953 history from Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. The “Roosevelt” it refers to is Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Teddy). He’d been sent to Iran by the CIA in order to organize the overthrow of the democratically-elected Mossadegh government:

Roosevelt told the Shah that he was in Iran on behalf of the American and British secret services, and that this would be confirmed by a code word the Shah would be able to hear on the BBC the next night. Churchill had arranged that the BBC would end its broadcast day by saying not “It is now midnight,” as usual, but “It is now exactly midnight.”

This makes me wonder two things:

1. When reporting on the Bush/Blair complaints, did the BBC mention this part of its own history—i.e., happily facilitating the overthrow of a government in a Muslim country?

2. Is the BBC still doing this kind of thing?

EXTRA CREDIT: In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Andrew Sullivan liked to call the BBC the “Baghdad Broadcasting Company” because it was “actively cooperating with Saddam.”

During my little experiment with comments last week, I noticed this post in a thread about the Toles cartoon:

SP4 Tomas V. Young (Ret) Says:

As a veteran of the war in Iraq who knows a thing or two about “traumatic and life-altering injuries” although not to the point of the soldier depicted in the cartoon (I was lucky enough to only be paralyzed from the chest down.) I can safely say that the cartoon was far less offensive than the unfortunate accidents I have when the external catheter I wear for when the bladder I can no longer control decides to “function” or the hours of frustration I get when I try to make love to my wife and none of the options presented to us have worked. And it certainly is not as offensive as hearing the pro war/anti-cartoon crowd say that I shouldn’t “whine” about my situation because I volunteered and that sounds to me like they are saying that I got what I deserved. So take what they say with a very large grain of salt, they have no idea about how veterans with traumatic injuries feel, because if they did they would do best to use this cartoon in their new laugh therapy program.

In an email, reprinted here with permission, the author elaborates:

I want to start off by saying that I am not whining. I am merely talking about all the things I deal with everyday. I know that I volunteered and I have to live with that. But I want you to know that I volunteered to go to where the all evidence told me to go which was pretty much every other middle eastern country that wasn’t Iraq (that’s the conservative disclaimer.) And I still support armed action against those countries, although not as much now as it’s safe to say our armed action has been spread wafer thin (that one’s for the liberals.) But this business with the cartoon needed the opinion of a so-called “traumatically life-altering” injuries, although thankfully not as seriously as the strip portrayed.

Being a paralyzed veteran of a war that our own president has admitted was started on false terms I have alot to be upset about. Not only do I have to deal with the injury itself and the physical limitations that come with it but I get a cool sidekick called PTSD that leaves me jumpy, unreasonably angry at times, and equally unreasonably depressed and on top of that I get to have great memories of what it was like to walk but the equally great memories of the friends I had that did not make it back from the land of sand (I know it may be hard to read in print but those are sarcastically “great” memories.) I go through things that constantly make me feel shitty and I look for every little bit of humor I can squeeze out of a life that now offers little. Saying this I laughed my ass off at the caroon an in fact it is the background for my desktop. I am more offended at the fact that I received these injuries in a unarmored open air truck and although I can’t speak for anyone else I’d be willing to bet I’m not the only “traumatically life altered” veteran who thinks so.

Tomas specifically asked me to include his email address, which is Tomasyoung8@aol.com, and to mention that he’ll be on 60 Minutes this coming Sunday. There’s a long interview with him here.

Tristero at Hullaballo articulates something I’ve been grappling with pretty much my entire career:

The objects of satire are often – always? – respected authority figures or ideas within the culture of the satirist. WITHIN the culture, not OUTSIDE the culture. Even in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the object of satire is not really the third world country to which Bill Boot has been booted by an editor who confused two Boots. It’s the British press’s hopeless, corrupt reporting from such countries. The satire was directed directly at institutions that were part and parcel of Waugh’s upper class British Twitworld.

In contrast, as I see it, Islam is not part of mainstream Danish culture. Mohammed has no genuine cultural authority the way, say, the royal family might. To call the cartoons satire, therefore, seems to me inaccurate. It’s simply ridicule, and ridicule of a figure from a culture that, from within Denmark – the satirizing culture – is Other. Danes are heaping scorn and humiliation on someone’s religion, someone who is not Us. Someone who doesn’t look like us, doesn’t act like us, doesn’t think like us, isn’t as rich as us. And just can’t be us.

And this is why so many right wingers have suddenly become free speech absolutists on the issue of the Danish cartoons. Right wingers hate satire, but they love ridicule.

A right wing white guy draws a black guy telling us what black people should think. August finds this problematic. Key graf:

Since the trademark of the Right seems to be ending posts with faux-sincere “advice” for the opposite side, by all means allow me to return the favor and offer some helpful advice to right-wingers chortling at “their” cartoonist: if you’re at the point when the most prominent black person you can put on your side of an issue is a fictional character in a white man’s shitty webcomic, your authority on cultural unity escaped this planet’s gravity quite some time ago.