Solidarity 088, 23 February 2006

By Vicki Morris I’m not against people being allowed to publish or see the cartoons. I oppose people threatening people with violence for publishing them. And, yes, seeing them does give people more information about them (for example, they’re not all bad). But if the AWL were humanity’s last hope of seeing these cartoons, should it give them houseroom? I think what people knew at the start was probably enough to decide. If I know there’s a cartoon of the prophet’s head with his turban made into a bomb I pretty well can judge what idea is being conveyed without having to see it. I don’t think...

by Sami Zubaida, Emiritus professor of politics and sociology, Birkbeck College, London (open democracy website) Apart from the debatable wisdom, good taste or motives for publishing the offending cartoons, the episode does raise important questions. The denunciations of the cartoons are couched in wider demands: that we should all be bound by Muslim religious prohibitions regarding portrayals of the prophet, as well as showing respect. In Egypt, which is supposedly a pluralist society with room for different religions and for secularism, Islamist demands have long amounted to censorship and...

A petition being circulated by the Worker-communist Party of Iraq This is a issue between political Islam and freedom of speech, but it is secondary to the killing of Van Gogh who was murdered by Islamic people in Netherlands because of his short film about the real situation for women under Islamic rule. Now political Islamic forces and Arabic nationalist governments in the Middle East are provoking the religious feeling of people in Arab countries, Pakistan, and abroad. They are expanding this crisis, so they can reach their goals of preventing criticism or expression about the Islamic...

by emma hatton As Solidarity went to press, the Nazi apologist “historian” David Irving was a couple of days into a three year sentence imposed on him by an Austrian court for the crime of Holocaust denial. Irving went on trial for two speeches he delivered in Austria 17 years ago, in which he described the Auschwitz gas chambers as a “fairytale”, dismissed Holocaust survivors as “psychiatric cases” and claimed that there were no death camps in the Third Reich. He has been in jail for three months awaiting trial after returning to Austria to deliver more speeches — despite being barred from...

The fascist British National Party has seized on the Muhammad cartoons furore to push its racist cause. It has printed leaflets showing one of the cartoons and a photo of a “behead unbelievers” Islamist demonstrations, and asking: “Which do you find offensive?” Not that the BNP wants to criticise religion. They promise to defend “our Christian values”. They even betray a weird fellow-feeling with political Islam. “Individual Muslims should not be blamed for standing up for their way of life. The people who must be blamed and punished are the politicians who have... actively promoted open door...

Paul Anderson, writer, journalist and academic (from Tribune) It’s clear that Jyllands-Posten was deliberately attempting to provoke a reaction when it decided to publish, and by some accounts it seems to have been motivated by a rather crude antipathy to Islam. I also accept that the cartoons might offend Muslims either because they include images of the Prophet or because a few of them (though by no means all) ridicule aspects of their faith — the ban on depicting the Prophet, the vision of Paradise, the doctrine of jihad (holy war). But… in the end, so what? Even if Jyllands-Posten’s...

By Salil Tripathi, writer and journalist (from the Index on Censorship website) IN 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini posed a stark choice: would we support an author’s right to express himself freely, or would we stand by as he is hunted down by state-sponsored assassins? Margaret Thatcher was no fan of Salman Rushdie, but her government supported his right (at least in the early years), even as British Muslims burned copies of The Satanic Verses in Bradford and riots spread in South Asia. Today, another British government praises the British media for its restraint in not republishing the Danish...

by Martin thomas Danish author Kare Bluitgen could not find an illustrator for a children’s book on Islam. The illustrators were scared of being attacked by Islamists. Eventually Bluitgen found an illustrator to do the work anonymously. A Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, picked up on this story. They asked cartoonists to draw Muhammad. I do not suppose that they had any higher motives than staging a stunt and provoking a stir. One of the cartoonists did not draw Muhammad at all, but instead tried to poke fun at the Jyllands-Posten. Two of them focused on the plight of scared cartoonists. A...

Bruce Robinson reviews Gone Tomorrow — The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers, (The New Press, 2005) In the USA, the most wasteful society in the world, each person throws out two-thirds of a ton of rubbish each year. The US Department of Agriculture calculated that 27% of total food production in the US is wasted each year, though one academic thinks the real figure may be as high as 50%. Heather Rogers writes: “Every day a phantasmagoric rush of spent, used and broken riches flows through our homes, offices and car, and from there is burnt, dumped at sea, or more often buried under a...

By Daniel Randall (National union of Students National executive, personal capacity) 2006 is a big year for education. It sees the introduction of top-up fees in Higher Education, meaning that universities can charge students up to £3,000 for the privilege of studying. Statistics have consistently shown that the introduction of top-up fees is having, and will continue to have, a devastating effect on university applications, undermining even the government’s own opportunist nods towards “access” to Higher Education. It is also the year that will see the development of the Blairite government’s...