Rami G. Khouri has a spectacularly evasive editorial in Lebanon’s Daily Star. Read it here.
Khouri writes:
The current wave of intense protests was sparked when half a dozen other newspapers throughout Europe provocatively reprinted the cartoons last month. This was coupled with European political and press leaders flat out telling the Islamic world that Western freedom of press was a higher moral value and a greater political priority than Muslims’ concern that their leading prophet not be subjected to blasphemy and insult.
The issue is not “Western freedom of [the] press.” It is freedom of the press, period. When radical Islamists began threatening the cartoonists with death and vilifying the people of Denmark, the terms of the debate changed. Khouri doesn’t seem to acknowledge this. In fact, he minimizes the meaning of the violence and extremist rhetoric:
Clearly, some troublemakers in Europe and the Islamic world stirred up Muslims’ anger and provoked some of the destructive protests, especially burning embassies and offices in Damascus and Beirut. This is the political equivalent of football hooliganism in Europe – a small minority of unruly criminal thugs that preys on the legitimate sentiments of otherwise peaceful crowds that take to the streets in orderly if lively protests. It would be a huge mistake to focus mainly on the few violent political skinheads, and to ignore the meaning of the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of protestors who marched in earnest and in an orderly way.
This reminds me of the way a large segment of the Jewish community reacted to Baruch Goldstein’s Hebron massacre in 1994 — he’s just a crazy guy, he’s not one of us, he has no larger significance. Republicans now use the same line in regard to Pat Robertson (who of course hasn’t killed anyone, although he’s not above calling for killings).
Yes, the violent protesters are a minority of the world’s total Muslim population. But they are a substantial, influential and insidious minority, with supporters in high places (the president of Iran comes to mind). And when they take to the streets of London threatening more 9/11’s and 7/7’s, they remind us where their ideology leads. In this circumstance, yes, freedom of the press is a far more important value than freedom from blasphemy.
Khouri continues, in full whitewash mode:
The most consistent source of Arab-Islamic angst in the past two centuries – Western colonialism – has now run up against the resistance of the single most consistent form of indigenous identity and anti-imperial opposition – cultural and political Islam.
[…]
This is no mere clash of cultures. It is a new form of the colonial struggle that defined European-Arab and Asian relations in the 19th century. The difference this time is that the natives in the South are not helpless and quiescent in the face of the West’s large guns, disdainful rhetoric, or insulting cartoons. Muslims, Arabs, Asians and others today are much more aware of the policies of Western states, concerned about their goals, angry about Western double standards, able to resist through mass media, political and other channels, and willing to stand up, fight back, and assert their right to live in freedom and dignity.
“Able to resist through mass media, political and other channels” — Khouri fails to mention that one of these “other channels” is in fact premeditated mass murder. We hear a lot about the importance of “context” from Khouri and like-minded commentators, but somehow this doesn’t include the context of terrorism. It’s absolutely true that Muslims have a right to live in freedom and dignity, but political Islam stands in clear opposition to these things. The chief victims of Islamist extremism are Muslims, Arabs and Asians, not Westerners.
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