Rana Bose is a Montreal writer and poet.

Cartoon: "Mounting Expectations " © by Susan Dubrofsky

So here is how it all happens, invariably. A young stringer, craving for a career break-through piece, which will sizzle provocatively (or perhaps even a middle-aged, creatively-blocked graphic artist looking for a break from his insipid career), is walking down the street in Copenhagen, Denmark. He happens to work for the paper Jyllands-Posten. A group of Muslim, possibly all Arab, students is hanging out in a café. One of them has a kiffiyeh wrapped around his head. Another one is in a jalabiyah. They are all insanely vociferous and their mannerisms are quite aggressive. They even emit sounds from their throat, as opposed to the dignified whispers that flow out of the lips of the “others” in this serene and sedated hang out. The other patrons, who are also in the café, try to concentrate or avoid being attracted to this mayhem emanating from this one table. There are some who are trying to concentrate on their laptops. There are others who are occasionally peering over their newspapers. The Arab students continue to be loud, gesticulating wildly. They are discussing the last football game between Algeria and France, unknown to their audience. At some point, one Arab student bangs his fist down on the table, a coffee cup rolls over and shatters into pieces as it contacts the pavement. A waitress rushes over and smiles as she cleans up the mess. The Arabs are embarrassed and quiet for a while. The stringer watches all this and goes home to his desk. He is going to do something about this “Muslim” presence in his country. Do something provocative, something that will cross the limits and bring attention to what he feels inside and so do others, but who do not want to talk about it.

He pulls out a tall can of beer from the fridge. He remembers watching his father watching TV in the late afternoons. A beer can also in his hand. Muttering under his breath, about the refugees and “cabbage heads,” that keep streaming into the country.

He feels it all over. The beer washes down his throat and it feels good. A sense of aggression, a take-over by alien elements that have scant respect for the ways of this Nordic Valhalla, is brewing in his mind as the basis for a story or a cartoon. Denmark cannot become another Germany, another England. This is not an issue of Islamophobia, as such. It is just a pretty basic gut-level disgust for “foreigners.”

The idea is to provoke, not to engage in a intellectual “clash” whatsoever. It does not matter what the rights and wrongs of this debate are. It does not matter that this newspaper refused to publish a cartoon on Jesus Christ, saying that it would be “insensitive.” It is really not consequential that the so-called liberal sense of free-speak is replete with hypocrisy, when it comes to deciding what is “sensitive” and what is not. Even the recently released statement by a group of twelve well-known writers and scholars ( Ayaan Hirsi Ali , Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie,Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, Ibn Warraq ) pining for an age of “enlightenment”, misses the mark terribly by suggesting piously that they are really at odds with Islamic obscurantism and are opposed to the reaction in the Muslim world. As we write this, some bombs have gone off at Varanasi, in a temple. It was surely aimed at provoking a communal bloodbath. So far twelve people are already dead in the blast. Well, the Jyllands-Posten cartoon and its re-publication, three months later by several other papers, is similarly nothing but a Molotov hurled casually into a congregation. It was never meant to be an assertion of free speech. It stems from a deep-seated hatred for ” the others “ whose presence and public face keep increasing in the world, at a disproportionate pace.

This cartoon is not only humorless (after all a cartoon must elicit at least an intelligent reaction), it is actually quite stolid, boring and intended to create reckless controversy. That is the key. That is the intent. Because when you stoke such a fire, it is designed to bring out the worst in all communities.

Where does it end? Well, 6,000 dairy jobs in Denmark have gone up in smoke. Another company in Sweden is thinking of laying off 5,000 people. One company claims it has lost 65 million dollars in dairy products sold to the Middle East in six months. Where is the fellow who made the cartoon? He is hiding somewhere. Where will it finally end? Nowhere! Because the ultimate objective of the cartoonist and his editor was to instigate the flames of a stereotypical riotousness from Muslim zealots and the fatwah factory. Not only that, some of these so-called standard bearers of free speech, then decide three months later to republish the same cartoons, because obviously they were not sure that on the first go around enough disturbance had been caused. The first time around, very few people had actually heard about it.

So it was aimed well at insulting ALL Muslims, so that the larger issue of the role of the US and UK and ALL their allies (including the right wing conservative governments like that of Denmark) in violating all the rules of engagement, legality, righteousness, justice, fair-play are once again clouded over and covered up and all the crimes that are going on in Iraq in the name of returning it to “civil society”, are deflected.

Tariq Ali in a recent piece on the Islamophobia that is being nurtured and cultivated, draws attention to the following aspect of Eurpean self-grandeur: “How many citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers did take humanity forward by recognising no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: "Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes." Hume: "The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words." There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the generalised anti-Muslim ravings in the media.”

Let’s see now what really pisses off Muslims! Last year Afghans protested after a US marine in Guantánamo had urinated on the Qur'an. The marine explained that he had misdirected his pee and while he was aiming for the prisoner, a few drops sprayed on to the Qur’an. Not his real intent. What is quite amazing is that the colonial prerogative of pissing on your captives was considered acceptable!!

The problem is really on both sides. Including the Imams who go around the world trying to whip up passion against this incident while never really undertaking the same project when it came to Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. The problem starts with the deflectors, who have the colonial cultural acumen to provoke and the “natives” who live up to the stereotype and go on a routine rampage, and very soon everything dies down, working class jobs are lost and real political issues get forgotten. What remains is a festering racial pressure cooker.

It remains therefore the responsibility of all of us, in whatever discipline we are involved in, to engage in “political acts” that prevent mainstream journalists from causing havoc as they continue to do. Political acts that range from doing guerilla theatre, writing poetry, performing agitprop pieces, writing blogs and occupying the internet to carrying out investigative exposes, photographic documentation and generally enabling a pre-emptive strike on those idle brains who sit in the luxury of their editorial offices and cause wanton damage to the sensitivities of various nationalities and peoples. In this issue of Montreal Serai we have highlighted those political acts, be they in the local media and city politics or those that expose Canada’s murderous role in Haiti or in masquerading as a human rights beacon head. Political acts that lay bare the mainstream editorial hypocrisy.