The Muslims are coming (again). posted by Richard Seymour

The Muslim Scare is with us again. Look at the pictures of them swarming in Jakarta. Look at the Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade announcing its wrath. Look at the Iraqis protest. An hour long fracas in Gaza, where a German tourist is reportedly kidnapped and then released. All because some cartoons in Denmark depicted the Prophet Muhammed in the right-wing Danish newspaper Jyllands-Postens. And you're supposed to think from the television and newspaper reports: a bit excitable aren't they? 'We' would certainly never get this agitated over some similar offense to Christianity. Mocking images of the Christ would not induce this torrent of outrage. The whole issue is being presented as a simple matter of "free speech" and urbane satire versus crazed theocrats expostulating in tongues. Reporters Without Borders is worried about press freedom after one French editor was sacked for reproducing the images.

You can easily find a link for these images, although I won't provide one here. They are variously dull, racist caricatures and hideous slanders that evoke nothing so much as the images of Jews circulated by antisemites and Nazis in the early to mid 20th Century. One portrays Muhammed as a beard attached to a globular black bomb, embossed with an Islamic logo. Several others depict him as a hook-nosed, swivel-eyed, glowering Oriental with a large unkempt beard, often brandishing a sword. One has horns sprouting from his head. One, by Lars Refn, makes fun of the whole exercise, by portraying a Danish Muslim schoolboy called Muhammed who has written in Persian on a blackboard: "Jyllands-Postens journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs". The paper rebukes this cartoonist for "cowardice" and his refusal to acknowledge the "Muslim threat to free speech".

"Free speech". What a lugubrious phrase. It's a logocentric fallacy, for what is under discussion is a form of expression that is not speech. The phrase invites us to think of such expression as being nothing more serious than words falling into offended ears. But, okay, let's call it speech, then - what do these cartoons "say"? That "these Muslims are bloodthirsty, sword-wielding, limb-choppers, suicide-bombers, fanatics, sand-dwellers, despotic, lazy, corrupt, hidebound, medieval (for in 'Asiatic' history, there is no progression, unlike in Europe)". This is being presented as a mere religious jest - why shouldn't we "make fun" of others' beliefs? Malicious, racist slander is, then, nothing more serious than comedy. Get a sense of humour (racists always seem to believe themselves to be uniquely blessed with that quality). In what environment did the editors of a Danish newspaper commission these depictions? is one in which Pia Kjærsgaard, as leader of the far right Danish People's Party - which in the last elections took 13.3% of the vote to become the third biggest party in Denmark - is encouraging people to heed a "call-to-arms" against "Islamism", which they describe as a "world revolutionary movement" seeking to impose Shari'a all over the globe. (This could be related to a conspiracy theory propounded by some regarding a Muslim Brotherhood document allegedly located in Switzerland, which advertises a conspiracy to take over Europe - and thence the whole world! Cue evil laughter). Similarly, Queen Margrethe in her recent authorised biography urged the Danes to "stand up" to Islam. Louise Frevert of the DPP suggested that Muslims believe that it is their right to rape and assault Danish people and asserted in a pamphlet that the Muslims were conspiring to take over Denmark. Rape - the eternal crime of the aggressive, maladaptive Other. Instead of being a function of misogynistic society, it is cunningly made out to be a manifestation of some pathological anomaly among non-white communities

These lies are issued for a reason - much the same reason as the lies about New Orleans blacks a-raping and a-looting, or Haitian gun-toting "gangs" - and that is to justify violent repression either by the state or by vigilantes. It is the same reason that the BNP distributes literature claiming that there are "Asian gangs" raping white children in the north of England. Before the Oldham riots, similar lies were issued: Chief Superintendent Eric Hewitt told the press that Asians were responsible for the majority of racist violence. He said, in fact, that of 572 racist attacks in Oldham, "8 to 10" Asian youths were responsible for 343. He had done this before. In 1999, he said that out of 250 racially motivated incidents in one year, the majority involved violence on whites by Asians. He told the Oldham Evening Chronicle that "There is evidence that they [Asians] are trying to create exclusive areas for themselves. Anyone seems to be a target if they are white." The BBC and other national news organisations uncritically reported these claims. As the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism pointed out at the time, Hewitt's figures were cobblers. Hewitt is unsurprisingly seen by many Oldham residents as a racist. The BNP newspaper, British Nationalist, siezed on Hewitt's claims and proclaimed that there was ‘Ethnic cleansing in Britain’. In 2001, BBC radio reported once again that there were "no go areas" for white people in Oldham, and suggested that there was graffiti daubed on buildings to adverise this: no such graffiti existed, as the police later admitted. On Saturday 21st April 2001, two people were attacked: one was a white 76 year old man, who was cruelly beaten by some young Asian men; the other was an Asian taxi driver, who was stabbed. The first was reported, and falsely. The second was not reported at all. The first was reported as a racist attack upholding a "no go" area. This is how the BBC, the Mirror and the Daily Mail explained the beating. It made no sense to those who understood the case, not least the family of the beaten man because he had never indicated that it was racist and they didn't believe it had anything to do with that. It made no sense because the area in which the attack occurred was not "claimed" by any local gangs of any background. Yet, the police insisted on "believing" that it was a racist attack, and so the headlines followed from there.

Shortly thereafter, there were a series of outbursts of violence from football fans in the city, particularly against Bangladeshi residents. White supremacists attempted to organised marches through the city, while the BNP announced it would stand candidates in the area. The level of activity of the far right shot up dramatically, but so did racism on the ground (usually referred to as "tensions"). One attack by around 200 white youths on a road outside the Glodwick Estate resulted from some high-pitch arguments between local parents. And that was when, after 18 months of unmitigated, ceaseless racist drivel from the police and press, and after repeated and serious attacks on Asian residents by white football supporters, a number of young Asian men fought with the police and racists, and set fire to a number of pubs they believed tolerated the racists. Riots erupted which were predictably blamed on the Asian community. A year later, a BBC2 programme called Hooligans investigated the activities of Combat-18 in the area, and how they had organised and instigated the attacks on areas like Glodwick. It passed without much fanfare. The lies were just too valuable.

So, to speak as if the 20th Century never happened, as if slavery never happened, as if colonialism never happened, when we look at racist images, we are looking at a justification for murder. We are speaking of terror, of life and limb. That sort of injuriousness is hard to mistake. We don't need to think of anywhere exotic to imagine how this works. In the UK it is precisely claims that the Quran justifies the killing of non-Muslim civilians and so on that corroborate thugs in putting Muslims or simply non-white people in the casualty wards every weekend. Therefore, it is the 2% of Denmark's population who are Muslim who are the victims here, not the reactionary provocateurs who have vilified them. It is they who will need solidarity. For all the guff about "the new antisemitism", it has never struck apologists for Israel that this is the new antisemitism. It isn't about religion any more than the vilification of Jews was about religion. Of course, the value-significations are reversed: Jews were accused of introducing cosmopolitanism, liberalism, capitalism, communism etc; Muslims are accused of opposing all of these things, of being insufficiently liberal, too traditionalist, too rooted in organic communities, not atomised etc. But Orientalism and antisemitism were never separated at birth. They are conjoined, two forms of the same sickness.

Orientalism Comes Home To Roost:

The resemblance of Gibson's rabble to the Israeli-apologists invention 'The Palestinians' is really striking, even more than to anything from the classic European anti-Semitic tradition. 'The Jews' were never portrayed by Nazis as a 'mob' out in the public square, but as a shadowy enemy presence, infiltrating slowly and steadily, cautious and cunning, rats scurrying by night in niches and nooks but by day sinister others successfully masquerading as peace-loving, integrationist, and harmless. Classic anti-Semitism - which Gibson's film also employs for the roles apart from the mob, and which he has exhibited personally in his whining about persecution - portrays Jews integrating, non-violently, while working through their conspiracies and secret worldwide financial channels to bring down the 'host' society. Invisible parasites, seducing society (not badgering it or overthrowing its rulers through open rebellion) to evil and degradation through decadence, art and literature, money, media, requiring flushing out and extermination if the host society is not to sicken and be overtaken by them. Never a wild howling angry mob whom a sufficient number of Cossacks or tear gas could disperse, as the Jerusalemite crowd appears in The Passion.

'The Jews' of anti-Semitic tradition are stateless, a minority, a parasite in Europe. The portrayal of Jews in Schindler, as Art Spiegelman noted, is quite close to the anti-Semitic tradition - the Jewish seductress, the financiers doing business in the church - far closer than the totality found in Passion. The hideous crowd in The Passion is an indigenous population in Palestine under foreign occupation.

That is unmistakably a crowd of Palestinians in the imagination of Israel apology, but the current 'inter-semitic clash' which identifies The Palestinian as the diametric opposite of The Jew disguises this Orientalist product from popular perception. In the anti-Semitism from which Caiaphas comes directly, such a crowd of Jews is unthinkable, even disruptive to the coherence of the collective slander. Even medieval European and 19th c. Russian anti- Semitism portrayed Jews as virtually unseen, committing crimes clandestinely, at night, whisperers and plotters, not the dirty thuggish nihilistic insurrectionary rabble which here is Gibson's manufactured enemy humanity. There is no precedent for these images of Gibson's Jewish mob from the anti-Semitic tradition, but in the years leading up to the filming of Passion, and especially during the filming, there have been thousands of precedents for these images in Israel-apology and US-apology in the mainstream media.