Spotprenten

Palestijnse jongeren in Hebron verbranden de Deense vlag uit protest tegen de spotprenten waarin de profeet Mohammed belachelijk wordt gemaakt. Hebron is een Palestijnse stad waarvan het centrum door Israel wordt bezet en waar soms maandenlang een uitgaansverbod geldt. Zelf ben ik getuige geweest van de terreur van joodse religieuze fundamentalisten en het Israelische leger tegen de Palestijnse burgerbevolking. De laatste keer dat ik er was, was in gezelschap van Bertus Hendriks, Midden-Oosten redacteur van de Wereldomroep. Het was tijdens 1 van die gewelddadige invallen van het Israelische leger. Omdat de stad door de bezetter van de buitenwereld was afgesloten, moesten we via kleine landweggetjes Hebron in. We troffen er een uitgestorven stad aan, nagenoeg alle bewoners hadden zich in hun woning verschanst. Het is begrijpelijk dat in Hebron de woedde tegen de vernederingen en het onrecht groot is. De spotprenten zijn ook alleen de aanleiding van de protesten, niet de oorzaak. Het is een druppel die de emmer deed overlopen. Dat dringt nog niet echt door in de Nederlandse commerciele media, maar wel in de buitenlandse pers. Zo schrijft Carol Eisenberg van de New Yorkse krant Newsday: 'Rage over cartoon goes beyond politics. Their anger was raw. Several New York Muslims protesting the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad became irate when asked if the global furor was an overreaction. "Do you know the atrocities that are happening to Muslims every day?" one demanded. "In Iraq? In Pakistan? In Palestine, Muslims feel as if we are under siege."The deep offense many Muslims have taken to the cartoons, published recently in several European newspapers, is about present-day politics as much as theology… the reaction to the cartoons cannot be understood outside of a broader post-Sept. 11 political context: Many Muslims see the drawings' publication as a deliberate attempt to insult them at a time when they perceive themselves to be a suspect and stigmatized minority in Europe and a humiliated civilization in the Middle East.' Lees verder:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-womusl074616886feb07,0,779661.story Andere voorbeelden zijn te lezen op Justwatch, de listserver van de University at Buffalo, de universiteit van de staat New York: 'There is no more “democratic” value in the anti-Muslim cartoons than in the Holocaust-denying screeds of anti-Semitic British author David Irving. But today, as Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul observed aptly, hostility against Muslims has replaced anti-Semitism as a staple of the European and American press.' En: 'Does any one ever stop to be objective and critical and realize that for every Westerner or Israeli killed (criminally and horrifically) by Arabs or Muslims, there are probably literally dozens of Arabs and Muslims who have been killed, particularly by Israel, an ethnic cleanser and law breaker that gets a free pass by obscenely exploiting the horrific tragedies of the Holocaust to deflect all censure? If someone had done a cartoon depicting Jews being gassed at Auschwitz and making light of it, I'd be first in line to speak out against them. I would not torch an embassy, But I'd be horrified, and would even demand that the editors and cartoonists be brought up on charges and forced to go to the sites of the death camps and the Holocaust museum in DC (a profoundly excellent museum in my estimation) and also to Yad ve Shem. To step on what is sacred to people, to insult their dignity and brand them as idiots, monsters, or less than human is the first step on the way to the abuses and crimes all of us on this list have devoted a lot of our lives to preventing and decrying.' Lees verder:
http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0602&L=justwatch-l&D=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=24293