Said Zulficar, an Egyptian political analyst and activist and former UNESCO official, was recently invited to air his views on a Nile TV call-in program concerning the cartoon controversy. Said is no hot head or chronic conspiracy theorist yet he puts forward the premise that this particular clash, ostensibly over the red line between freedom of expression and blasphemy, has been carefully orchestrated.
In brief, Said believes that Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, may have deliberately set out to inflame relations between Muslims and the West in collaboration with US neoconservatives.
Said bolsters his argument with the fact that Rose visited arch Islamophobe neocon Daniel Pipes in Philadelphia during October 2004 and subsequently penned an uncritical article putting forward the views of a man, who regularly goes out of his way to vilify Palestinians, and who has been accused by the Arab-American Institute of “hatred and bigotry”.
Moreover, Rose has gone out of his way to translate the many hate-filled articles spewed by Pipes, whom the American president saw fit to appoint to the US Institute of Peace.
During the 20-minute program interspersed with clips of worldwide demonstrations and calls, Said had little time during which to expound further, so, intrigued, I asked him to elaborate further on his convictions.
Rose is known to have strong neocon links, which Said says could have been formed during his time in Moscow representing another paper when he would have probably rubbed shoulders with Daniel Pipes’ father, who advised Reagan on the Cold War and was consistently against any US-Soviet détente. The editor’s neocon rapprochement could have been consolidated during his three-year long stay in Washington, suggests Said, although he admits this is pure speculation.
One of the decisive factors of his premise, says Said, was the combined republication of the offensive cartoons that appeared on the same day months after their original publication, in seven European newspapers, which would have required the waiving of copyright on the part of Jyllands-Posten. Remember that at this time its editor knew the hurt they had caused to the Denmark’s Muslim community and the growing worldwide outrage. This is, therefore, indicative of Rose’s wish to provoke and further stoke the flames of anger. Why would Rose or anyone else wish to enlarge the already widening fracture between the Muslim world and the West?
“The neocons want to prove that Israel is the West’s only ally. In order to do this you must have extremists on the other side. This whole thing was concocted in order to fuel a negative response from Muslim extremists, firstly to paint Muslims in a primitive and medieval light for the benefit of the American people, but, more importantly, to psychologically prepare the Western masses for an attack on Iran,” says Said.
Prof. Mikael Rothstein of the University of Copenhagen appears to support this. He told the BBC that behind this anti-Islamic assault are “agents of a certain persuasion”
“And the Muslim masses are falling right into the trap,” says Said. “They’ve reacted just as they were expected to react with the burning of flags and embassies. This terrifies ordinary people.”
Said contends that Muslim anger has been redirected to the wrong recipient. “The Danish people have never harmed anybody. It’s a pity that Muslims are using so much energy punishing the Danes when those energies would be better directed in support of Palestine, Iraq and Chechnya. And what’s the use of boycotting silly things like Danish cheese and butter when the Israelis are opening up trade with the Gulf, and Pakistan and Malaysia are about to open their doors to Israeli-made goods.”
“A false enemy is being boycotted,” says Said, who believes that Muslim outrage has been deliberately redirected from the crux of the problem between the Islamic world and the West, which is the ongoing occupation of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan and US saber rattling in the direction of Syria and Iran.”
Interestingly, 57 percent of Americans say they would give the green light for a pre-emptive strike on Iran according to a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll, while several surveys indicate Americans now view Tehran as an even bigger threat to their security that Al-Qaeda. In the meantime, US officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are pointing fingers at Iran for stirring up the cartoon controversy. Three years ago, it was Iraq that could do no right.
Let’s face it. Following the Iraq fiasco, which as we now know went ahead based on faulty intelligence and, in some instances, on the back of downright lies, and has cost the US taxpayer some $240 billion not to mention more than 2,300 of its nation’s “finest”, who could have imagined the US public would agree to yet another misadventure. And what about the Europeans, who were mostly vehemently against the invasion of Iraq? Surely, they can’t be brought on board an attack on yet another Muslim country, which hadn’t threatened them? Or can they?
Put simply, the looming “them and us” situation triggered in part by the cartoons is great political currency for the neocons and those within the US administration eager to drop bombs on Iran. I am sure that most Muslim leaders are aware of this but they find themselves in somewhat of a cleft stick. If they come down heavily on the anti-cartoon protesters, they could find themselves being branded by their own publics as having being complicit by default in attacks on the Prophet.
Said Zulficar may or may not be right with his thesis that Flemming Rose collaborated with US neocons to bring about this current contretemps between the West and the Muslim world, but one thing is for sure. Disgruntled Danes and other Europeans have become new fodder for European right-wing groups eager to capitalize on their self-righteous anger over what they feel is an assault on their rights of free speech.
As for Rose, now that he has done the dirty deed he has faded into the sunset, or rather, been told to take an indefinite holiday by his superiors. The question here is which ones: The owners of his paper or the Potomac’s birds of prey? We’ll probably never know.
