And the abyss stared back

[Toramana]

And the abyss stared back

Its official: We are not a nation. We are a mob.

All those ‘think positive’ types waiting for some kind of a ‘moderate Muslim awakening’ in this country are simply deluding themselves.

No amount of your egos, resources and ‘positiveness’ invested in ‘moderatism’ such as interfaith dialogues, Sufi music, lectures by ‘moderate clerics and Islamic scholars’, and your insistence on how peaceful our faith truly is, all this won’t make an iota of a difference.

You are fighting a battle that you have already lost; simply because all the mindless violence in the name of faith in this country has been tolerated for too long, sometimes even rewarded.

Thus, who should the mad mob which loots, burns, plunders and kills in the name of God and his messenger be afraid of? Not the police, not the courts, not the media, not the government and believe me, not even the Almighty himself!

Why should they? How can they when such mobs and those who fire them up have all been playing God themselves – judging, condemning and executing everyone and everything they deem ‘unIslamic’, heretical, blasphemous and infidel, without fear, remorse, or any chance of ever being reprimanded.

This faith-driven madness is not a recent happening. It’s been accumulating for decades.

And every time it has reared its ugly head in the shape of belligerent mob violence, it has not been dealt with the help of the law but with words and gestures that actually end up justifying it.

__________________________

In 1954 the former Chief Minister of Punjab, Mumtaz Daultana, after failing to solve the problem of food shortages and unemployment in the province, encouraged rabid hordes belonging to the Jamat-e-Islami (JI) to instigate anti-Ahmadi violence just to divert the people’s anger from his failing ministership.

Though Daultana was ultimately removed from his post, soon after the commotion all those arrested for instigating the violence, damaging public property and attacking members of the Ahmadi community were released unconditionally.

Then in 1974, the popularly elected Prime Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, capitulated like a man made from jelly when the JI used another round of anti-Ahmadi violence in Punjab as a way to reignite its failing fortunes and ask Bhutto to declare the besieged community as non-Muslim.

Instead of condemning mob violence, Bhutto, the great progressive democrat, did exactly what the mob demanded. As if overnight the Ahmadi community that had played a major role in the creation of Pakistan and was one of the most vigorous contributors to the new country’s economy, was reduced to becoming second-class citizens.

How many Pakistanis questioned Bhutto’s cynical move or JI’s politics of hate? None.

All that the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship (1977-88) had to do was to turn such politics of hate into actual state policy, thus beginning the now consolidated Pakistani tradition of churning out a continuous flow of blood-thirsty sectarian and Islamist outfits.

But more dangerously, these policies eventually generated an ethos that promised material, political and spiritual rewards and benefits for anyone willing to become violent, self-righteous, exhibitionist and hypocritical in matters of faith.

However, once the great tyrant and mastermind of this mindset blew up somewhere over Bhawalpur in August 1988, did the democrats that replaced him reverse the tide?

Not quite.

In 1995, late Benazir Bhutto’s Interior Minister, Naseerullah Babar, was busy sitting with ISI sleuths conceiving the creation of a dreadful and barbaric force that became to be known as the Taliban.

They said they were doing this to ‘end the civil war in Afghanistan and stabilise the region,’ all the while turning a blind eye to all the atrocities being committed by their creations once they took power in Kabul.

It was thus ironic that when Benazir was brutally killed in December 2007, the killers had used the services of Pakistani Islamists who had in turn been inspired by the same Taliban that Benazir Bhutto’s interior ministry had created with the help of Saudi money and ISI expertise.

Meanwhile, the other great democrat of the 1990s, Mian Nawaz Sharif, till even about 1996, was passionately leading emotional processions to Ziaul Haq’s grave site in Islamabad and promising to ‘continue Shaheed Zia’s mission.’

Though he finally faced a few assassination attempts by members of a sectarian organisation in Punjab in the late 1990s, this didn’t stop some of his party members to hold hands with leaders of the same banned organisation in 2009!

The so-called moderates let out a sigh of relief when a military gung-ho, General Pervez Musharraf, toppled Nawaz and positioned himself as a Pakistani Attaturk.

But he would go on to only tweak the Ziaist mindset by adding to it a fresh dose of schizophrenia. Patronising material modernism, he, at the same time, fattened terrorist outfits seen as ‘friendly’ to the Pakistan military’s ‘strategic goals’ in the region, while attacking the less friendly ones so his regime could continue getting and gobbling military and economic aid from the United States in its war on terror.

This schizoid disposition not only furthered the cause and cancer of moral and material hypocrisy already ripe in the society ever since the Zia days, it is exactly the kind of societal, cultural and political schizophrenia that became the grounds on which Pakistan’s newer, freer and louder electronic media actually began building its repertoire on.

It was this media that turned armed thugs who, in 2005, had taken over a mosque and a seminary in Islamabad, into heroes.

Even though the Musharraf dictatorship had taken its sweet time to crack down on the thugs who had been harassing the city for weeks, when the crackdown finally came, TV news reporters and anchormen transformed into becoming angry, foaming mouthpieces of the thugs, enough for the Musharraf regime to not only release most of the arrested men, but to actually provide funds and helicopters to the funeral arrangements of the self-proclaimed soldiers of God.

It is also the same schizoid mindset that has given a sudden raise to the profile of men like Imran Khan. He can sound like an impassioned fusion of Chairman Mao, Z A. Bhutto, Abul Ala Maududi and the myopic mullah of your neighborhood mosque within a span of just a few sentences!

So, whom should a mob setting out to lynch a ‘blasphemer’, or to loot, burn and plunder the city in the fine name of Allah and his last prophet be afraid of? Why should they have any reason to be ashamed of?

Imagine now, after last Friday’s ugly violence when a young member of a mob would have come back home after a day of looting, burning and killing, and he must have switched on his TV.

Do you think he would have done so because he expected to hear blunt condemnation of his actions from the media and the politicians? No.

What he must have seen and heard on the idiot box were TV anchors, talk-show hosts, journalists, religious leaders, ‘experts’ and politicians, all shouting at the top of their voices and simultaneously trying to convince their audience how much more ‘ashiq (lovers) of the prophet’ they were than the next guy.

Our young mob member would have then reclined on his sofa, or chair or whatever, smug in his belief that it was he who was the biggest lover of the prophet. Unlike the talking heads he saw swearing their Ishq for Allah’s last messenger; it was him who went out to express it on the roads. But the only problem was that this raving idiot’s expression in this respect included burning, plundering and even killing.

We as a nation have for long been staring into the abyss. But what many of us believe is a vision of some kind of a Muslim reawakening is in actuality just the abyss staring right back.

As a sad Sufi would observe, in our pursuit to become one with the Almighty, we have instead become one with the abyss.

http://dawn.com/2012/09/22/and-the-abyss-stared-back/

[Toramana]

19 Reported Dead as Pakistanis Protest Muhammad Video

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Violent crowds furious over an anti-Islamic video made in the United States convulsed Pakistan’s largest cities on Friday, leaving up to 19 people dead and more than 160 injured in a day of government-sanctioned protests.


It was the worst single day of violence in a Muslim country over the video, “Innocence of Muslims,” since protests began nearly two weeks ago in Egypt, before spreading to two dozen countries. Protesters have ignored the United States government’s denunciation of the video.

Peaceful protests had been approved by Pakistan’s government, which declared Friday a national holiday, the Day of Love for the Prophet Muhammad. The move was part of an effort to either control or politically capitalize on rage against the inflammatory video, which depicts Muhammad, the founder of Islam, as a sexually perverted buffoon.

Friday’s violence began with the fatal shooting of a television station employee during a protest in the northwestern city of Peshawar, and was amplified through armed protests in the southern port city of Karachi that left 12 to 14 people dead, Pakistani news media reported.

By nightfall Geo, the leading television station, was reporting 19 deaths around the country.

Less violent protests occurred in other Muslim countries, exacerbated by the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad in a French satirical weekly.

In Bangladesh, several thousand Islamist activists took to the streets of the capital, Dhaka, waving banners and burning a symbolic coffin for President Obama that was covered with the American flag. “Death to the United States and death to French,” they chanted.

Local television networks reported that a mob had ransacked and burned an Anglican church in Mardan in northwestern Pakistan. There were no reports that Christians had been killed or wounded.

In Tunisia, the government invoked emergency powers to outlaw all demonstrations, and American diplomatic posts in India, Indonesia and elsewhere closed for the day.

France closed embassies and other institutions in 20 countries while, in Paris, some Muslim leaders urged their followers to heed a government ban on weekend demonstrations.

In Pakistan, the streets started erupting early in Peshawar, where protesters burned two movie theaters. Two people, including the television employee, Muhammad Amir, were killed.

Mr. Amir’s employer televised graphic footage of hospital staff members as they gave him emergency treatment shortly before he died, a broadcast that other Pakistani journalists condemned as insensitive and irresponsible.

Some protesters tried to reach the city’s heavily guarded American Consulate, which has a strong Central Intelligence Agency component. By evening, hospital officials said, at least five people were dead and more than 50 wounded.

After Friday Prayer, more severe violence erupted in Islamabad, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan and Karachi, where normally bustling streets were instead filled with clouds of tear gas and the sound of gunfire.

Protesters in Karachi burned effigies, stoned a KFC and engaged in armed clashes with the police that left 14 people dead and more than 80 wounded by evening.

“An attack on the holy prophet is an attack on the core belief of 1.5 billion Muslims,” Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf said in an address at a religious conference Friday morning in Islamabad. “Therefore, this is something that is unacceptable.”

Mr. Ashraf called on the United Nations and the international community to formulate a law outlawing hate speech across the world. “Blasphemy of the kind witnessed in this case is nothing short of hate speech, equal to the worst kind of anti-Semitism or other kind of bigotry,” he said.

But chaotic scenes in the streets outside suggested that if the government had aimed to harness public anger on the issue, it had failed.

In contrast, the day passed peacefully in neighboring Afghanistan, where officials had been preparing for the protests for days. Clerics at major mosques in the capital, Kabul, acceded to official requests that they preach peace, or another topic entirely. Police officers set checkpoints to search cars, and no street violence occurred.

A senior American official in Kabul said his Afghan counterparts had worked hard to mute the impact of the video through the week. That was, in part, a product of their previous experience with what he called “a desecration or religious event.”

In Pakistan, however, extremist groups, many banned by the government, were at the forefront of the upheavals. Marchers in Karachi included members of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a banned Sunni sectarian group; Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen, which has fought India in Kashmir; and Tehrik-e-Ghalba Islami, a faction of another sectarian group.

In Islamabad, activists with Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan led a march toward the heavily guarded diplomatic enclave, where Western missions had closed for the day. They clashed for hours with the police outside the Serena Hotel before being pushed back.

In Lahore, activists from the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader, Hafiz Saeed, is subject to a $10 million United States government bounty, led protesters toward the American Consulate, where perimeter defenses were breached earlier in the week.

The devastation caused by the protests belied their relatively small size. The largest street crowds were estimated to have 5,000 to 10,000 people, fewer than would typically attend a mainstream political rally.

Instead most Pakistanis drifted home after Friday Prayer, apparently keen to avoid the trouble. Still, many analysts questioned the government’s decision to give free rein to the marchers.

“Pakistan is a conservative but not a radicalized society,” said Cyril Almeida, a writer with the English-language newspaper Dawn. “But when the radical fringe is bold enough, it can hold society hostage. And that’s what happened today.”

The government tried to control the momentum of unrest by cutting off cellphone coverage in large cities for most of the day, and in Islamabad, it sealed exits in the city after Friday Prayer.

Imran Khan, the cricket star turned conservative politician, addressed one of the Islamabad protest rallies and condemned American drone strikes in the northwestern tribal belt. “There is no end to this war,” he said.

The State Department spent $70,000 on Urdu-language advertisements that were broadcast on several television channels, dissociating the United States government from the video.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the American chargé d’affaires, Richard E. Hoagland, and requested that he have “Innocence of Muslims” removed from YouTube. YouTube had already been entirely blocked in Pakistan for several days.

In a statement, Mr. Hoagland said he had told Pakistani officials that the video represented “a deeply insensitive decision by a single individual to disseminate hatred” and did not reflect American values.

The protests largely abated by nightfall, allowing main roads in most cities to reopen. The government expressed some frustration at the day’s events.

“What kind of a love for the prophet is this where people are burning and looting?” said Qamar Zaman Kaira, the information minister, in a television interview, before berating the news media for giving excessive coverage to the trouble. “You should stop giving live coverage of protests,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/world/asia/protests-in-pakistan-over-anti-islam-film.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&smid=fb-share

[Toramana]

Rushdie says something wrong at heart of Islam

(Reuters) - British author Salman Rushdie, who lived in hiding for nine years under a death sentence from Iran's supreme leader, said in an interview published on Thursday that something had gone wrong at the heart of Islam.

Rushdie told Le Monde newspaper that his years fleeing the 1989 fatwa from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forced him to pay close attention to a radicalization of the Muslim world.

"Something has gone wrong at the heart of Islam. It is quite recent. I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture," he said in an interview published in French.

"For me, it is a tragedy that this culture has regressed to this point, like a self-inflicted wound. The Islam in which I grew up was open, influenced by Sufism and Hinduism, and not like the one which is spreading rapidly at the moment."

The fatwa, in response to his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses", made Rushdie synonymous with the tussle between freedom of expression and the need to respect religious sensitivities. A memoir of his nine years in hiding following the fatwa was published this week.

The interview was conducted on September 12, just as a film mocking the Prophet Mohammad sparked violent protests across the Islamic world. These included a deadly attack in Libya which killed the U.S. ambassador and three embassy staff.

The California-made film, and a series of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad published by a French satirical weekly on Wednesday, have revived international debate over free speech, religion and the right to offend. Many Muslims consider any representation of Allah or the Prophet Mohammad blasphemous.

"There is a limit beyond which you cannot blame the West any more," Rushdie told Le Monde. "Having said that, if there was the slightest sign that Muslim society was able to create an open democracy, I would change my opinion."

This week an Iranian religious foundation increased its reward for the killing of Rushdie, in response to the film mocking Mohammad.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/09/20/us-france-rushdie-idUKBRE88J0ZY20120920

[Toramana]

Pakistan explodes in fury as south Asia's Muslims join anti-US protests
Violent demonstrations leave 15 dead as Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka witness Islamic anger at America

Fifteen people were killed and nearly 200 injured in Pakistan on Friday as angry protests that have raged all week against a blasphemous US film mocking the prophet MUhammad continued to engulf the Muslim world.

There were violent demonstrations in Pakistan after the government took the questionable decision to declare a national holiday to allow people to rally against the video. Tens of thousands took to the streets in all major cities. Many protests descended into serious unrest. Protesters threw objects at police, who retaliated with teargas canisters and live rounds.

The provocative US trailer, Innocence of Muslims, also prompted protests in at least half a dozen other countries on Friday, with demonstrators burning American flags and effigies of Barack Obama. The unrest capped a tumultuous 10 days that has seen the murder of the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, in what the White House says was a well-plotted terrorist attack, possibly linked to al-Qaida.

The film has caused a deep crisis for the US administration. It has also provoked a pained discussion in Europe and the US over the boundaries of free speech. Several of the latest protests were also directed at France after the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo published fresh Muhammad caricatures.

France took a tough line on protests on Friday, with the interior minister, Manuel Valls, saying no demonstrations against the cartoons would be allowed. Paris closed its embassy in Egypt, where a few dozen protesters congregated on Friday. Germany also shut its Egypt mission.

But it was Pakistan that saw the most inflammatory scenes. Some 195 people were reportedly wounded in the cities of Peshawar, Karachi and Islamabad – with nine killed in Karachi and four in Peshawar. One of the Karachi dead was a policeman. He was apparently killed in an exchange of gunfire with protesters. Unknown gunmen also shot and wounded three other policemen.

In Peshawar, the frontier city close to the Afghan border, mobs attacked buildings and set fire to cinemas. One victim, Muhammad Amir, was the driver of broadcast truck owned by the television network ARY. He was hit by police fire. He later died of his wounds in hospital but not before the television station broadcast continuous loops of him in obvious pain being attended to in an emergency room.

In Karachi rioters torched police vans, looted shops and even attacked the coastal port city's fire brigade. For a second day running in Islamabad, the normally sedate capital, violence was concentrated in front of the five-star Serena hotel,situated on a road that leads to the entrance to the fenced-off diplomatic quarter where the US embassy is located.

"America has challenged the Muslim nation by making this movie," said a 19-year-old called Mohammad Fayyaz, who kept his face covered as he joined the violence in the capital. He added: "We will not go until the man who made the film is hanged."

The White House has made desperate efforts over the past week to defuse the protests. Speaking on television and radio adverts, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has emphasised that the US government had nothing to do with the film's production. The acting US ambassador in Pakistan, Richard Hoagland, met with government officials to once again to reiterate that the US government "condemned this video's content and its message".

But the US's vigorous campaign of public diplomacy appears not to have worked. In many places in Pakistan, crowds were able to break through barricades placed in their way by police. Images streaming in from all over the country on Pakistan's frenetic cable news channels got steadily grimmer as what the government had billed as "love of prophet Muhammad day" wore on and protests descended into battles and looting.

Mobile phone networks had been turned off in 15 cities in an effort to frustrate the ability of crowds to organise themselves, but it appeared to have no effect and services were restored well before the originally advertised time of 6pm. In Lahore, the grand colonial era Mall Road was the setting for skirmishes by demonstrators who also attempted to approach the US consulate in the city.

In Iraq about 3,000 protesters condemned the film as well as the French caricatures. The protest in the southern city of Basra was organised by Iranian-backed Shia groups. Some protesters raised Iraqi flags and posters of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, while chanting "death to America".

In the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, about 2,000 Muslims burned effigies of Obama and US flags at a protest after Friday prayers. In Bangladesh, over 2,000 people marched through the streets of the capital, Dhaka, to express outrage at the film. Small and mostly orderly protests were also held in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Thousands also gathered in Lebanon's Bekaa valley for the latest in a series of protest rallies organised by the militant group Hezbollah. There was also unrest in Indian-administered Kashmir. Police imposed a day-long curfew in the Kashmir valley, and in the main city, Srinagar, police chased away protesters. Authorities in the region also temporarily blocked mobile and internet services.

Critics in Pakistan lambasted the decision of the government to make Friday a national holiday. They said hardline religious parties, many of them fronts for banned terrorist organisations, hijacked the day off as a chance to show off their street power.

Raza Rumi, a prominent analyst and newspaper columnist, said the government had chosen a policy of appeasement. "The government is under immense pressure to appear as Islamic and as pious as anyone," he said. "But it could have chosen alternative strategy of engaging with the various religious groups and launched a public campaign to educate people rather than letting them take to the streets."

Earlier in the day, Pakistan's prime minister, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, addressed a gathering of politicians and top clerics in Islamabad. While he called for peaceful protests, he also used language likely to inflame the many protests that have claimed the video is part of a plot involving Jewish, Israeli and US interests. "It is ironical that denial of holocaust is considered a crime but no consideration is paid to the feelings of Muslims," he said. "I hope the international community and Islamic world will be successful in preventing such things."

If the intention of the government was to burnish its Islamic credentials in the run-up to the election in six months, many protesters were not convinced. "[President Asif Ali] Zardari is a man with no grace, he should resign," said Tabarak Lateef, a 22-year-old protester in Islamabad. "Our rulers are traitors, they are American slaves and they should be ashamed of themselves."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/21/pakistan-asia-muslim-us-protests

[Toramana]

COMMENT : Fighting hate with hate — Dr Mohammad Taqi

Keeping peace should be an end in itself and not contingent upon someone’s expression and another’s reaction to it

One was hoping that at least Pakistan would weather the storm that an absolutely abhorrent, shoddy video clip has unleashed. However, with the protests outside the US Consulate in Karachi turning violent and claiming at least one life, perhaps it was not meant to be. It is still too early to say if the protests would subside or snowball into something more ominous.

Leading a protest earlier this week, the Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed has demanded that the Pakistan government should push the US government to get the maker of the offensive and hateful movie punished by death. He also suggested that a way to ‘lean’ on the US administration would be to shut down the US embassy in Islamabad until such US action that he and his colleagues desire. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government is apparently under tremendous pressure and was reportedly threatened with a bloodbath should it not shut down the California-based video-sharing website YouTube and other services run by its parent company, Google. The PPP government, after being unable to block only the offensive video, did ultimately shut down YouTube in Pakistan.

Anyone who has seen the video would perhaps agree that it is a clumsy but quite malicious attempt at igniting interfaith rifts. I would call the effective message of the 14-minute trailer — no one knows if a full-length film was ever completed — as extremely hateful. The question, however, is whether it incites a hate crime no matter how poisonous and repugnant it is. The answer to that might be no, unless someone was already preparing to perpetrate a hate crime. By itself, the clip did not lead to any copycat acts or non-Muslim extremist groups acting out. A viciously crude attempt at driving a wedge between Christians — especially Egyptian Copts — and Muslims, it does appear to be, but in all probability would fall short of incitement or the closely-related concept of ‘fighting words’.

On the other hand, those protesting the video have set upon property and life from Morocco to Bangladesh. While the outrage of most Muslims against such an offensive video is spontaneous, the way such protests always get violent, without fail, suggests an infrastructure ready to exploit any perceived or real slight to Islam. The manner in which the Salafist-associated Egyptian television channel al-Nas and its televangelist, Sheikh Khalid Abdullah televised the till then obscure video suggests that the idea was to inflict maximum political damage on US-Arab/Muslim relations as well as to gain political ground lost to their domestic rivals, the Muslim Brotherhood. The role al-Nas television and Abdullah played in disseminating the nasty video has conveniently been ignored by those bent upon burning US diplomatic missions and killing its diplomats.

Up until al-Nas televised the video almost no one had heard of it and with merely a handful of online hits, its developer Morris Sadek aka Sam Bacile and his backers were clearly failing in what they had set out to do. But the way clerics across the Islamic world drew attention to it almost instantaneously is a replay of the reaction to Salman Rushdie’s book back in 1989 when leaders and cadres, none of whom had actually read the massive book, went on a rampage leading to several deaths. The dissent thus manufactured and manipulated and the violence it breeds is then used to impose the religious interpretation of a few to corner and silence the others, especially the intelligentsia.

Freedom of speech is perhaps the ideal most cherished by liberals. It was surprising to see one presumably liberal Pakistani English newspaper saying in its editorial: “Surely, some provision must exist within US laws to reprimand derogatory attacks on particular religious or ethnic groups, intended to incite anger. It is difficult to imagine that such false and offensive diatribes against African-American, Jews or other communities would be tolerated to any degree had it occurred in the US itself.” The paper is effectively calling for curbing freedom of speech in the US, but more than that it is taking almost the same line adopted by several clerics who say that Holocaust denial is prohibited in the US.

It may be news to some but the fact is that the First Amendment to the US Constitution does indeed guarantee freedom of speech and extends the same protection to the Holocaust-deniers and to their anti-Semitic hate speech as to anyone else so long as there is no imminent threat of or actual violence. Consider this anti-Semitic vitriol by the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, carried on one of its websites:

“As the Apostle Paul (who himself was a Jew) teaches in this verse, the only true Jews are Christians. The rest of the people who claim to be Jews aren’t, and they are nothing more than typical, impenitent sinners, who have no Lamb. You may have a Jewish heritage, but that doesn’t make you a true Jew in the spirit; that only makes you a Jew in the flesh. As evidence of their apostasy, the vast majority of Jews support f*gs.”

This is the same church that is known to picket against the funerals of US troops and for its virulently anti-homosexual views. Indeed, several countries in Europe have laws that criminalise Holocaust denial and hate speech to varying degrees. However, the Europeans did not arrive at that juncture by jettisoning the liberal principles under the threat of violence and open calls to murder as issued in Lahore by the JuD leader. In fact, many of the videos of Pakistani clerics and sectarian terrorists circulating on the internet would also fall under the ambit of the laws they wish to invoke when it suits them and that too by perpetrating and threatening violence.

If the threatened breach of peace and public order were accepted as a sufficient reason to curb free speech, the extent of freedom of expression would then be totally subservient to the whim and power of some to act violently against real or perceived affronts. Keeping peace should be an end in itself and not contingent upon someone’s expression and another’s reaction to it. There is absolutely no excuse for violence and indeed murder most foul, as committed in Benghazi. Fighting hate with hate is sure to beget more hate. The way out is drowning the odious voices with voices of sanity, not curbing free speech and calls for murder.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki

[Toramana]

Public co-operation after violent protests hides community divisions, writes Kelly Burke. Many cultures, one community. Any outsider strolling down Auburn's main
street will immediately recognise the veracity of the first half of this motto for the Western Sydney suburb, where almost 60 per cent of residents
have been born overseas.

But like any racially and culturally diverse suburb, a single community it is not; and that multi-faceted community became increasingly strained this week as police and the media descended on Auburn following violent protests in the city's central business district against an anti-Islamic YouTube video.

One in four residents of Auburn identifies as Muslim, compared with just over 4 per cent of the greater Sydney population. Islam is the single
largest religion practised, and it is made up of more than 100 ethnic groups.

In effect, Auburn serves as a microcosm for Islam in NSW; many cultures and
almost as many divisions. Leadership within the Muslim community in NSW,
which is home to half of all Muslims living in Australia, is fractured to
the point of dysfunction.

For the better part of a decade, three bodies claiming to represent the
interests of all Muslims in the state have vied for supremacy: The Lebanese
Muslim Association, the Islamic Council of NSW and the Australian Federation
of Islamic Councils (recently renamed Muslims Australia). What made
Tuesday's joint condemnation of last weekend's violence so significant was
the fact that 25 Muslim organisations managed to join forces and agree on a
position. But of equal significance was who was absent from that list of 25
signatories calling for an end to the violence.

Although Shiites make up about 15 per cent of Australian's Muslim community,
there were no Shiite organisations on the list.

An even more glaring omission was the Australian Federation of Islamic
Councils, which remained aloof from the collective condemnation and issued
its own directive. The inclusion in the group of the Islamic Council of NSW
was not unrelated to the federation's absence, so deep is the animosity that
runs between the two.

Over the past 15 years these peak bodies have dragged each other through the
Supreme Court, with the federation permanently expelling the council from
its membership umbrella more than a decade ago. Since then, the federation
has made a number of attempts to create a new NSW council (the current one
being Muslims NSW), while the Islamic Council of NSW remains stubbornly in
existence.

The spokesman these days for the federation is a familiar and controversial
Sydney figure. Keysar Trad was the former interpreter and right-hand man of
Sheikh Taj din al-Hilali, who was removed from the post of Grand Mufti of
Australia in 2007 after his comparison of lightly clothed women to
''uncovered meat'' proved one incendiary comment too many. Trad too has had
his day in the Supreme Court, successfully suing on appeal a defamation case
against Radio 2GB following comments made after the Cronulla race riots in
2005.

He was then the public face of the Lebanese Muslim Association, the third
group still vying for supremacy within the NSW Muslim community, and the
body which led the group of 25 at Tuesday's media conference.

Trad told the Herald last weekend's violence was the product of ''young and
empty-headed men'' but his organisation chose not to be part of the
collective because he believed the call for more government resources to be
channelled into Sydney's communities of disaffected Muslim youths was
''inappropriate for the occasion''.

This ongoing disunity is costing the state's Muslim communities dearly, says
Kuranda Seyit, the director of the Forum on Australia's Islamic Relations.

''The biggest hurdle facing Muslims in Sydney Australia is a lack of unity
and co-operation,'' he says. ''And the inability to unify or get a message
across comes with a lack of deep understanding of our faith.''

Seyit believes this problem has particular pertinence for the Lebanese
Muslim community, which remains the largest ethnic subgroup under the broad
umbrella of Islam. While the vast majority of Muslims with Lebanese heritage
follow Sunni orthodoxy and are in line with mainstream Muslims around the
world, small factions exist between the minority extremist groups, and those
small factions appear to be growing.

''Many grow up with only remnants of Islam, and as they get older and look
for meaning, certainty and camaraderie they come across the radical
fringes,'' says Seyit. ''These groups might only be made up of 2 or 3 per
cent of the Muslim population but the disproportionately high amount of
media coverage they get magnifies the perception that they are an important
part of the mainstream Muslim community.''

Since last weekend's violence, police have zeroed in on Auburn's Bakhari
House bookshop and prayer hall, where it is believed many of the rioters,
largely of Lebanese background, are regular attendees of lectures held by
the Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah movement, led by its spiritual leader, Sheikh
Abdul Salam Zoud, a graduate of the Islamic University of Madinah, in the
holy Saudi city of Medina.

It is largely thanks to one of Australia's home-grown clerics that the Ahlus
Sunnah wal Jama'ah chapter in Auburn has attracted increasing attention over
recent years. Sheikh Feiz Mohammed is known best to non-Muslim Australians
for his claims that women are to blame for their rape because of the way
they dress, his call for parents to offer up their children as soldiers for
jihad to fight the ''Kaffir'' (non-Muslim) and a number of publicised
hate-inspired rants against Jews.

Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah translates literally to ''community of the pure
descendants'' and its followers strive to in essence turn back the clock to
the time of Muhammad within its brand of Salafism, more commonly known in
the non-Muslim world as fundamentalist Wahhabism.

Within the national umbrella of Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah are a number of
organisations, including the United Muslims Association, Global Islamic
Youth Centre, Federation of Muslim Students and Youth, Islamic Cultural
Centre and the Islamic Dawah and Culture Association.

While the group is small, because it is highly organised and runs a range of
community and youth-focused programs it punches above its weight when it
comes to visibility and influence.

On Wednesday Mohammed issued a press release, condemning the weekend's
violence and insisting the protests were not authorised by him or the Ahlus
Sunnah wal Jama'ah.

''Although I am repulsed and disgusted by the provocative and repulsive film
which was released . I do not accept the violent behaviour associated with
the protest,'' he said, going on to point out that Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah
was one of the 25 Muslim groups which participated in the press conference
condemning the violence.

A fringe group which was clearly identifiable at last weekend's riots was
Hizb ut-Tahrir.

More political in its aims than religious, the movement is dedicated to the
return of the caliphate - the unification of the Muslim world under Islamic
law - and a popularly elected caliph, or leader, with much the same role as
the one played by the Pope in the unification of global Catholicism.

Essentially the ''Party of Liberation'', the Hizb ut-Tahrir's persistent
anti-violence claims in achieving this goal suggests either its spiritual
leaders and frontman, Uthman Badar, have lost control over their young
zealots, or that the movement's professed pacifism is a facade.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in several Arab countries and faced being
proscribed in Australia in 2005 after it was linked to the London bombings.
ASIO subsequently cleared the party as a security threat on the grounds of
insufficient evidence.

On Wednesday, Hizb ut-Tahrir issued a statement describing the actions of
the protesters as ''praiseworthy'' and calling on Muslims to ''continue in
their noble work of resisting Western attacks''. ''It is a clear
illustration that the major issue with events in Sydney is not the violence,
but the anti-Islamic agenda peddled by media and politicians,'' the
statement said.

Seyit says the only way to combat the growing influence of any fringe group
subscribing to extremism is by filling wisely the leadership gaps now
occupied by these groups. ''The Muslim community is about half a million in
total, yet of this population only about 50 or 60 per cent are active or
observant Muslims,'' he says.

''It is this group that needs to be motivated to act and empowered to do so.
Their efforts to act as a counter to extremist or fundamentalist groups will
be the only feasible way to diminish their relevance and influence over
marginalised fringe groups.''

[Toramana]

An Appeal to the Contemporary Muslim Conscience

One controversy subsides ; another worse one begins. After the Danish cartoons, the Dutch video “Fitna” and several low-grade irritants, a short, crudely executed—and scrupulously insulting—film has inflamed deep-seated resentments. Several hundred furious demonstrators gathered in front of the American Embassy in Cairo and the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. In the confusion and violence, a U.S. Ambassador and three diplomats were killed ; elsewhere embassies came under violent attack, with many wounded and serious material damage. Literalist Salafis succeeded in mobilizing a relatively small number of demonstrators ; over-excited young people and ordinary citizens who, firm in their intention to protect the Prophet’s reputation, joined in to express their rejection of the American government and its policies. The demonstrations were the work of a tiny minority, but media coverage and the rapid spread of the protest movement has destabilized the region, and may well have substantial consequences for the future of the Middle East, and for the process of democratization and normalization. The violence must be condemned unconditionally. To attack innocents, diplomats and to kill indiscriminately is anti-Islamic by its very nature ; Muslims cannot respond to insults to their religion in this way. On this principle there can be no compromise.

Still, there is every reason to ask what lies behind such vulgar provocations (whose intent is clearly to set off a reaction by mocking Muslims’ unanimous respect for the Prophet of Islam). Here we have individuals, or interest groups (and not the American government) that make cynical use of the noblest values—freedom of speech—to attain the most poisonous objectives, promoting hatred, racism and contempt. Well-established and protected in their rich and comfortable societies, they pretend to celebrate critical intelligence and wit at the expense of a religion practiced by much less fortunate people, many of who are struggling with numerous social frustrations and are barely surviving. But behind the celebration of freedom of speech hides the arrogance of ideologists and well-fed racists who feed off the multiform humiliation of Muslim peoples, the better to mock their “crazed” and “backward” reactions, thus to demonstrate the clear "superiority" of their civilization or the validity of their resistance to the “cancer” of retrograde Islam. In criticizing this ideological stance there can be no compromise either.

In the light of the contemporary Muslim conscience, while deploring and regretting the emotive reactions of the populations of the Muslim-majority societies of the Global South we must take into account their social and historical reality. Economically and culturally disadvantaged, their political and cultural sensitivities are sorely tried by deliberate insults to the sacred symbols that give meaning to their perseverance and their lives—the very symbols invoked by leaders or Islamist tendencies to nurture resentment and to give voice to anger. This reality in no way justifies violence, but helps us to understand its source and seek out possible solutions. It is the task of the elites, the leaders, of Muslim religious scholars and intellectuals to play a leading role in order to head off explosions of anger and mob violence. They bear three kinds of responsibility.

1. First, they must turn their attention to education, and work toward a deeper understanding of Islam, one that focuses on meaning and ultimate goals, and not simply on rituals and prohibitions. The task at hand is enormous, and requires the full participation of all schools of thought.

2. Second, Islam’s extraordinary diversity must be accepted and celebrated. Islam is one, but its interpretations are many. The existence of literalist, traditionalist, reformist, mystic, rationalist and other currents is a fact, a reality that must be treated positively and qualitatively, for each of them has its own legitimacy and should (must !) contribute a multifaceted debate among Muslims. Unfortunately, today today’s Muslim religious scholars, and the leaders of various trends, are caught up in ideological confrontation—and often a clash of egos—that create division and transform them into dangerous populists who claim for themselves the title of sole and authentic representatives of Islam. Within Sunni Islam, as within Shi’ism, between Sunnis and Shi’ites, scholars and schools of thought lash out at one another, forgetting the fundamental teachings and the principles that unite them and instead splitting along doctrinal or political lines that remain secondary at best. The consequences of these divisions are serious. Populism pushes people to vent their emotions blindly in the guise of legitimacy. The attitude—or the absence of attitude—of such scholars perpetuates among the Muslims nationalist, sectarian, and often racist postures based on their particular school of thought, their nationality or their culture. Instead of calling upon individual egos to control themselves, and upon minds to understand and celebrate diversity, leaders and scholars play, in their rhetoric or in their silence, upon people’s emotions and sense of belonging with catastrophic consequences. The Great Powers, West and East, not forgetting Israel, easily exploit these divisions and internal conflicts such as the danger-fraught fracture between Sunni and Shi’a. Instead, it is imperative that voices from the two traditions collaborate on the fundamental principles that unite all Muslims. Whenever considerations of belonging threaten to replace principles, religious scholars, intellectuals and leaders must to return to shared principles, must find common ground between these considerations, in full respect of legitimate diversity.

3. Third, scholars and intellectuals must have the courage to expose themselves further. Instead of encouraging popular feelings, or to use those feelings to further their own religious identity (Sunni, Shi’a, Salafi, reformist, Sufi, etc.) or their political ideology they must face the issue squarely, dare to be self-critical, commit themselves to dialogue and—more often than not—tell Muslims what they may not like to hear about their own failings, their lack of coherence, their propensity to play the victim, failure to understand and to accept responsibility. Far from the feverish rhetoric of the populists, they must put their credibility on the line to awaken consciences in an attempt to counter emotionalism and mass blindness. The educated elites, students, intellectuals and professionals also have a major responsibility. The way they follow their leaders, as does their status as intermediaries makes their active and critical presence imperative : holding the scholars and the leaders accountable, simplifying and participating in grassroots dynamics is an absolute imperative. The passivity of the educated elites, looking down upon inflamed and uncontrolled populations far below them, is a grievous fault.

Ultimately we end up with the leaders—and the peoples—we deserve. Without committed and determined religious scholars, intellectuals and business people aware of the critical nature of the issues, there can be little doubt that we will be heading for an upsurge of religious populism among the leadership, and the emotional blindness of the masses. The words and the commitment of the leaders must set the highest standards : beginning with knowledge, understanding, coherence and self-criticism. They must abandon the notion of victimization by appealing to responsibility, by freeing themselves from the illusion that opposition to the “other” can lead to reconciliation with one’s self. Make no mistake : the violent reactions to the insults uttered against the Prophet have driven many Muslims to behaviors far removed from the principles of Islam. We become ourselves not in opposition to someone else, but in accord and at peace with our conscience, our principles and our aspirations. In the serene mastery of ourselves, and not in the aggressive rejection of the Other. Such is the message the world’s Muslims need to hear, and most of all, put into practice.

http://tariqramadan.com/spip.php?article12539&lang=fr

[Toramana]

Beyond Insulting the Prophet: Defying Hypocrisies East and West

Rulers of Iran and Syria "exaggerate the significance" of the film to divert attention from their own problems.

In a rare public appearance, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has delivered a fiery speech protesting the film that has mocked Islam and Prophet Muhammad. He has called for a weeklong protest against the film. This is a diversionary tactic, directly from the apothecary box of the Islamic republic, intended to divert attention from the criminal atrocities of the ruling regime in Syria, and by extension Iran, the principal sponsors of Hassan Nasrallah.

The world has been distracted by such diversionary tactics once in 1979. It will not be fooled again in 2012.

Hassan Nasrallah is as much invested in diverting attention from the unfolding Arab Spring - particularly in Syria - as Netanyahu is, for on the urgency of this diversion they are identical, Nasrallah to keep himself relevant in a vastly changed political climate, Netanyahu to steal more of Palestine.

The Arab Spring has put them both on the spot as opposing open-ended democratic uprisings that is changing the political contour of the region away from clichés-ridden "resistance" to Israel that in effect sustains its colonial designs to gobble up the entirety of Palestine by making even the two-state solution obsolete, as we now hear the American Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney - bought and paid for by the Israeli benefactor - Sheldon Adelson - articulate it.

The fact that the Free Syrian Army has been discredited for its own violent records, and the fact that Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf client states and by extension the United States are trying to abuse the situation in Syria to their own advantage do not mean that Bashar al-Assad and his tyrannical rule are God's gift to the Syrian people. Bashar al-Assad is in trouble, even more than Ali Khamenei was in trouble two years ago.

In both cases, Nasrallah has had to keep his alliances with the two tyrannies intact - to keep himself afloat. He is making a historic mistake, for which generations of Lebanese Shias will pay. He must decouple himself from both Syria and Iran - as Hamas is doing -and realign Hezbollah with the democratic aspirations of Arabs and Muslims from Africa to Asia. That would be the true test of his statesmanship.

Instead of doing that, he has reached for the oldest and most predictable cliché extant -diversion. Nasrallah's diversionary tactic must be exposed and eyes must remain on the ball - the ball of the transnational democratic uprising that has toppled four dictators and pushed aside the politics of despair that Hasan Nasrallah and his Syrian and Iranian sponsors, as well as Israel and Saudi Arabia, each for its own reasons, wish to keep intact.

To keep our eyes on the ball, we must expose the two complementary sets of hypocrisies that Nasrallah’s move seeks to cover up - and the Arab Spring has already overcome.

Protesting too much

In a public letter to the Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has condemned the anti-Islamic film the "Innocence of Muslims" and demanded (original letter in Persian) that OIC see to it that the United States confront and deal with such hateful acts.

In a similar statement (original statement in Persian), Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, has equally condemned this film and declared that had previous perpetrators of such insults like Salman Rushdie were not protected by "Western governments" this supreme insult would not have happened.

As an icon of the Reformist Movement in Iran, former President Khatami does not usually see eye-to-eye with the Supreme Leader. But on this particular occasion they seem to have almost identical positions.

On the surface these are two Muslims leaders rightfully angered by an anti-Islamic film. But at a closer look questions arise.

Hypocrisy East

The entire edifice of the Islamic Republic - both its ruling regime and its Reformist opposition led by Mohammad Khatami - is standing on the mass grave of the Khavaran Cemetery, on the mass execution of political prisoners particularly in the 1980s, on the repeated club-wielding vigilante-led university purges and cultural revolutions, on the constitutionally undemocratic rule of the clerical class, on the dictatorial doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, on mandatory veiling of women and scores of other denials of civil liberties - all of which are made in part possible by the two smoke screens of the American Hostage crisis (1979-1980) and the Salman Rushdie affair (1988-1989) -namely precisely the current circumstances in a previous gestation that Khomeini and Khatami’s cadre of Islamists used and abused to secure an "Islamic Republic" for themselves.

Both Khamenei and Khatami are what they are - leaders of that Islamic Republic (either in power or wishing to be in power) - precisely because they and their cohorts used the American Hostage crisis and the Salman Rushdie affair (legitimate angers put at the service of illegitimate power grabbing) to establish an Islamic Republic against a multifaceted and polyvocal revolution - to destroy any voice of dissent and limit the field of politics to the sort of political Islamism which they - despite all their differences -approve and of which they are the beneficiaries, at the heavy cost to the worldly cosmopolitanism of Iranian political culture they have come together to deny and dismiss.

Before Khatami or Khamenei denounce this ghastly film, or even as they do so, they ought to do their own soul searching and answer the key question of who did what in those horrid years and beyond. President Khatami, the great advocate of the "dialogue of civilisation", as he calls it, in particular must first begin a dialogue at home - with the survivors of this grisly history of the Islamic republic.

That Khatami is no longer in a position to do any such thing, that he himself is now persona non grata in the Islamic republic, that once every four years he is brought out of the closet, polished and given a podium to warm up the otherwise illegitimate parliamentary and presidential elections, does not exonerate him or any other member of the opposition - including the leader of the Green Movement Mir Hossein Mousavi - from historical responsibility.

In the course of the Green Movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi at least in part (never to the full extent) revived the revolutionary aspirations that he and other Islamists were instrumental in suppressing early in the course of the violently Islamised revolution.

Over the last three years, Mir Hossein Mousavi has rightly, legitimately and consistently emerged as a vastly popular leader of a dormant civil rights movement - by virtue of his courage, steadfastness and loyalty to the masses of millions of people who have trusted and voted for him. But in a free and democratic future in Iran, even Mousavi with his vast current popularity among the generously forgiving Iranians must answer those thorny questions.

Both Khatami and Khamenei in their statements blame the horrid film on "Zionists". What Zionists exactly? When they wrote their respective statements, within 24 hours of investigative journalism it was a public knowledge that the man behind this clip was an Egyptian Christian Copt from California who was in fact an Islamophobic anti-Semite who could not help attributing his own film to "unnamed Jewish millionaires" to deal with "the cancer of Islam".

Forget about Khamenei, who if you take away the phrase "Zionist enemy" from his vocabulary, will not be able to utter a single sentence anymore. But what about the champion of a dialogue of civilisation? Could he or his staff not have a simple dialogue with the internet with a half decent search engine to know that Zionists had nothing to do with this particular atrocity?

Zionists have done lots of other atrocities and pro-Israelis have lavishly partaken in Islamophobia, as Adam Shatz demonstrated in his essay back in 2008 during the US presidential election. But this particular inanity had nothing to do with Zionists - and if we want the legitimate criticism of Zionism to remain legitimate, we cannot have any part of these pathological knee-jerk reactions.

In his letter to Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Khatami is caught red handed that he is no different from Khamenei when it comes to irresponsible statements blaming Zionists for just about everything - this amounts to a subconsciously whitewashing of the fact that his entire Reformist movement is predicated on never questioning the circumstances in which an illegitimate Islamic republic came to be.

In his letter, Khatami says that the US must do something about this horrid film. What exactly is to be done? Democracy is full of paradoxes. To paraphrase a popular saying these days and say it in a more polite way, if you ban the word "hell" people can no longer say "the hell with this government" either.

The same freedom of expression that enables that racist Islamophobe to make that ghastly film enables millions of others to criticise the criminal atrocities of the ruling class in the US, including to demand that former President Bush be tried for war crimes. Can any Iranian dissident do anything remotely like that? Yes, no one can make fun of Prophet Muhammad in Iran, but nor can he or she question the medieval tyranny of a band of Shia clerics and their doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, without ending up in the notorious Evin Prison.

So what exactly does Mr Dialogue of Civilisation have in mind when he says that the maker of this indecency be dealt with? If he and his cohorts were more tolerant of those courageous men and women who were brutally executed with a single stroke of pen by Ayatollah Khomeini simply because they had a dream of a far superior and healthier future for their homeland than the unending nightmare that Khatami and other Shia clerics and their Praetorian Guards (The Pasdaran) have delivered to 75 million Iranians then they might have been more tolerant of a thug in California.

Where were you and what was your position Mr Khatami when those precious jewels of the nation were being slaughtered in prison and buried in mass graves in Khavaran, sir? You don't think just because Iranians of this generation are forgiving and vote for you as opposed to the others they have forgotten their history, sir - do you?

So instead of writing a letter to Organisation of Islamic Co-operation demanding that something to be done about this imbecilic video, or in addition to that request, how about if you ask OIC to preside over a committee of truth and reconciliation of those mass executions, sir? What do you say? I suggest the Khavaran Cemetery as the site of this meeting.

Hypocrisy West

That the Islamic republic has a criminal record of systematically abusing, torturing, forcing into exile and outright murdering its dissidents does not mean that dissidents have a splendidly rosy life here at the heart of the American empire.

No: pro-Israeli lobbies in conjunction with neo-conservatives scandalise them, create website against them, have some of their students spy on them, write books and produce "documentaries" against them, show it to their employers and demand their dismissal, as New York tabloids picture them like two-headed monsters who devour their own children - thus trying to force them out of our jobs, or else into silence.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has spoken very eloquently of her own distaste for this spoof against Prophet Muhammad but has added that alas there is nothing she can do for in the US we have freedom of expression. Indeed we do - occasionally.

Consider the case of Tarek Mehanna. According to Christian Science Monitor:

"On April 12, the United States government successfully convicted another young Muslim male, who believed he had the right to express his deep disdain for American foreign policy in the Middle East and Asia. Tarek Mehanna, an American-born Bostonian, took his First Amendment rights quite seriously when he vocally condemned his government for killing thousands of Muslims abroad. As a result, he was convicted of conspiring to help al-Qaeda."

So what you say Madame Secretary - how about we hand this Nakoula Basseley Nakoula ("Sam Bacile") character to the same judge who tried Tarek Mehanna - for I need not remind you, Ma’am, this thug has threated American national security, as you call it, infinitely more than Tarek Mehanna could possibly have.

What about Bradley Manning, Madame Secretary? Is he entitled to his freedom of speech, perhaps? As he is being tried for treason, there are millions of Americans who consider him the true conscience of the nation?

Isn't a functioning democracy contingent on freedom of gathering and disseminating information about two successive wars that have cost unimaginable human suffering, Ma'am? So perhaps Bradley Manning could be extended his constitutional rights the way this thug in California is protected by the same constitution? What you say?

I hear you say "but we have due process of law in this country". Yes indeed Ma'am, we do - every once in a while.

Consider the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) that President Obama has signed into law and that contains provisions allowing for the indefinite incarceration of American citizens on suspicion of being terrorists.

According to a recent piece by Trevor Timm for Al Jazeera, a federal judge has "recently blocked the implementation of that law, saying it violated both the free speech and due process clauses of the Constitution. The Obama administration has predictably appealed".

Now what? Is "free speech" an American value guaranteed by the Constitution, or is it a crime punishable by law - written into the law by a constitutional lawyer now the US president? And what exactly happened to that “due process” and to habeas corpus?

As for the holier-than-thouEuropeans championing the cause of freedom of expression, how come when it comes to the naked pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge there is royal outrage at the insolence of showing those pictures on a French Magazine, and if an Irish newspaper decides to publish them, BBC raises its front-page eyebrow?

For sure the Duke and Duchess are entitled to their privacy and no paparazzi should intervene in that privacy - but why is it when it comes to the same press not publishing (or even objecting to the publication of) these pictures they have no qualms about the freedom of expression but the selfsame freedom of expression suddenly becomes a "western value" when it comes to demeaning a prophet sacrosanct to the dignity of millions of people?

I hear my European interlocutors saying well the Duke and Duchess have not climbed any embassy wall or burned any flag or murdered any ambassador - true but they have just unleashed their army of clean-shaven three-piece suit lawyers to punish the perpetrators in legal terms equivalents to poor people's outrage posing in front of a Newsweek camera. The sentiment is identical but the means of retribution vary depending to what is available to people.

Neither Newsweek calling up Ayaan Hirsi Ali to write yet another silly Islamophobic piece for them, nor Anders Breivik's mass murder in Norway, nor a lonesome pastor in Florida warming up to a copy of the Quran, nor indeed Sam Bacile’s imbecility is an isolated event in the US and Europe. They are integral to a pattern.

Yes, we cannot hold the US government responsible for what anyone of these folks has done - but what about when the US army is integral to the selfsame desecration of what Muslims hold sacrosanct? What about the systematic abuse of the Quran to torture Muslim prisoners - not by a racist thug in California or loony tune in Florida, but by members of the US army, all the way from Afghanistan to Iraq to Guantanamo Bay torture chambers?

According to The Washington Post in June 2005:

"The US military released new details yesterday about five confirmed cases of US personnel mishandling the Quran at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, acknowledging that soldiers and interrogators kicked the Muslim holy book, got copies wet, stood on a Quran during an interrogation and inadvertently sprayed urine on another copy."

On another case, reported by The Newsweek, part of which was subsequently retracted, United States personnel at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp had "deliberately damaged a copy of the book by flushing it in a toilet in order to torment the prison's Muslim captives had been confirmed by government sources".

President Obama cannot be held responsible for what Sam Bacile does in California - but doesn’t the proverbial buck stop with him when it comes to being the Commander-in-Chief of the US military?

What about the US military course that taught American officers "Islam is the enemy" and suggested "that Mecca and Medina may have to be obliterated"? That was not a lunatic fraud in California making those comments. That was "Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Dooley … in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. The college, for professional military members, teaches mid-level officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war".

Sam Bacile is integral to a pattern, an Islamophobic streak of racism, that runs deep into American culture - of which neither President Obama nor any other elected official can easily be exonerated. President Obama to this day is "accused" of being a Muslim. Never ever could he bring himself to day, "I am not a Muslim, but there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim". Quite to the contrary when he was trying to woo pro-Israeli votes in Florida in 2008, he concealed the obvious Arabic etymology of his name, and offered a Hebrew etymology for Barack!

People revolt

The only legitimate reaction to a bad film is a bad review. That’s it - on to the next atrocity. But since the politics of despair wants to pull the rug from under the feet of Arab revolutions, too much protestations become utterly hypocritical on both sides of the divide. Muslim leaders denounce Islam bashing and forget about their own atrocities, as American officials defend freedom of speech but forget about denying it to those who question their warmongering.

People at large - Muslims and Americans alike - need to chart a third way. They are charting a third way.

It is sad to see an ageing warrior like Hassan Nasrallah being left behind by the force of history and resorting to a predicable cliché like asking for no less than one whole week of protest by his supporters ostensibly to vent anger against a pathetic racists video but in effect to distract attention from the criminal atrocities of his allies in Syria and Iran, or perhaps to regain the popularity he once had before endorsing Assad and before him Khamenei. But such is the force of destiny and the unfolding drama of the Arab Spring.

Nasrallah's loss is not Israel's gain. Israel stands to lose far more than Nasrallah from the Arab revolutions - and that is precisely the reason it is trying to pick a fight with Iran. The real existential threat to the Jewish settler colony is the democratic tsunami that is engulfing it. Nasrallah still has enough political cache from his spectacular victory over Israel in 2006 to change course and trust the democratic will of multiple nations and abandon his two security blankets of Syria and Iran.

The Arab and Muslim revolts we code-name Arab Spring is a reaction precisely to the thicket of these confounding hypocrisies East and West. People have defied both sides of these false divides. The rulers of Iran and Syria, now joined by the leader of Hezbollah, love to exaggerate the significance of this obnoxious film in order to divert attention from their own respective problems.

President Obama is not exactly the picture of resolution and vision or goodwill as to how to deal with these sorts of crisis either. Israel is putting pressure on him in this election year to lead a military strike against Iran.

Netanyahu, Assad, Khamenei and Hassan Nasrallah are identical in their resolve to distract attention from the unfolding Arab revolts and push the situation back to status quo ante.

But this smoke screen is clearing and the fact that a boorish banality like this video is being trumpeted by all who are on the losing side of the Arab revolutions is a clear indication that they have run out of stratagems to distract people from the real course of history that has left them all behind. Through the smoke appears the clear horizon ahead of the Arab Spring.

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His most recent book is The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (Zed 2012).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201292063638169981.html