Rebelión
February 8, 2006
West vs. Islam
Mohammed and
the freedom of the press
Lisandro Otero
Rebelión
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=26521
The publication of offensive
caricatures by a Danish daily, which were later reprinted in many other
European newspapers, has given rise to widespread confrontation in the form of
demonstrations, protest rallies, stone-throwing against consulates,
embassies set on fire, and a vast spate of Arab indignation at the West.
In one of the cartoons, Mohammed is wearing a bomb-shaped turban. Now picture this: a
bazooka-carrying rabbi bent on killing Palestinians, or an image of Jesus Christ
flying an F-86 as he machine-guns Iraqis. There would be an enormous outcry in
the Western media about its anti-Semitic, anti-Christian blasphemous author.
What the European papers are trying to prove, is that Islam is a violent
religion, a clumsy, bewailing statement which overlooks Islam’s endless nuances
and the social cleavages inherent in such a colorful, if differentiated, civilization.
All fighting comes from states and their political organizations, not from
religions. Any grudge about Islam stems from its resistance to being subjected to
foreign occupation, and its opposition to having its oil resources intensively
exploited.
To cap off all this sheer stupidity, media organs in Europe and even in the U.S. are
now reprinting the said images en masse so as to reassert a freedom of the press
which they claim is being jeopardized. Not quite so, actually. Europe and the
United States are determined to engage Iraq in a war and need to convince their
citizens that it is a just attack against aggressive, quick-tempered and cruel
people. All wars have been through this. During World War Two, the Germans and
Japanese alike were depicted in cartoons, films, newspapers and radio stations
as awful breeds of hatred and evil. Thus was created a negative image which
prevailed over any common sense, and that’s what they’re doing now: a string of
conditioned reflexes has to be in place to ensure a war-condoning spare pool of
opinion.
Everyone knows
there’s no such thing as freedom of the press. The big corporate owners of the
mass media place them at the beck and call of their own interests and make news
reporting conditional upon whatever theses they wish to impose. This was clearly
seen in Iraq from the very outset of the war. Famed media like The New York
Times and CNN, held to be “unbiased” and “no-nonsense”, gave versions so
distorted, intriguing and misleading that their reputation was compromised and
their ability to sway public opinion diminished.
The war in Iraq proved to the undecided that the much-trumpeted freedom of the
press is but a nonexistent myth. Without the slightest hesitation, newspapers as
well as radio and television stations in the U.S. took to defending Bush’s
official truth in their presentations. Newscasters invariably spoke about how
the troops had gone to Iraq to reinstate democracy, to fight to free the Iraqi
people and to crush terrorism for good. In no broadcast was anything ever said
about the ambitions of the big oil consortia, nor did they mention Bush’s,
Cheney’s and Condoleezza’s obvious links with petroleum cartels like Chevron,
Texaco, Mobil Oil and Shell. They paid no heed to the heart of the matter facing
the world: the imperialist voracity of wealthy capitalism’s great monopolies.
Mainstream America swallowed these lectures hook, line and sinker. It hit the
streets with its little flags, inflamed with patriotism, in the belief that
they were really fighting to rescue people in chains. They were unaware that
both the oil companies and their ruthless cat’s-paws in government were using them
like stooges to quench their thirst for profits.
Monopoly capital is more and more concentrated each passing day as the small
enterprises fall into the hands of big, mind-bending corporations. The new media
moguls are huge holdings within the so-called communication industry and
therefore related to newspapers, magazines, and radio and television networks.
For all intents and purposes, the media’s freedom of expression is the freedom
of great financial capital to shape public opinion according to its
interests.
By way of the mass media, the future of the market economy will bring us a grand
totalitarian technocracy, electronically connected to a common brain in a central
computer from which rules of behavior will be dictated for every given
situation. “Ffreedom of information” has been replaced by a collective
covenant to accept a single “truth". Cognitive will is being outdone by
robotized surveys and obsequious criteria.
This nonexistent “freedom of the press” must not become an excuse to foster
religious hatred, xenophobia and intolerance as part of a psychological war to
squash the Arab people’s justified nationalist rebelliousness.
---ooOoo---
08-02-2006 |