The Cartoon Riots and the "Crazy Muslim" Slander

Whatever the reasons for Muslim rioting and protest over the cartoons published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, one thing is sure:  it advances the idea that Muslims are nuts.  

If the Bush Administration decides to attack Iran this notion, you can be sure, will be a significant part of the U.S. government's public relations campaign to whip up support for more war and more needless misery.

The reason that such a PR campaign will probably succeed is that it is has the requisite truthiness.  For propaganda to function there must be a "hook" or "peg" to justify the proffered idea.   When the administration makes the case for blood, and as the traditional media amplifies and supports that case, they will argue that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a violent and irrational extremist, a terrifying menace, who, if he gets nuclear weapons, will surely use them against Israel and/or the United States.  

Despite the probability that Iran is many years from nuclear weapon capability, the idea of Ahmadinejad's irrational extremism will be presented within the broader context of a generalized Radical Muslim insanity.  The Cartoon Riots will then be used as a hook to support this and Republican warmongers will harp on them in order to establish the rightness of war.  (They will also, of course, highlight the "weakness" of liberals, Democrats, and progressives, or any who fail to bravely call for more Arabic blood.)

We should therefore consider this:

The hostile reaction to the Danish cartoons was carried out by only a tiny percentage of Muslims.  The vast majority of Muslims did not protest or riot.  When American war-mongers in government or the media tell us that Radical Islam is irrational and violent, we must remember that this does not justify the slaughter of perfectly innocent Iranian civilians.

We should also remember that the cartoons did not, in themselves, cause any rioting.  Whatever manipulation of public sentiment that may have taken place by Islamic governments, or other entities, the reaction in the Muslim street must be understood within the larger context of the Iraq War and the subjugation of the Palestinian people.  The cartoons were a spark that ignited a conflagration, but the oil that fueled that conflagration is the unjust relationship between the West (including Israel) and the Middle-East.

Finally, we should remember that the reason that Iran has increased its nuclear production activity is out of a justifiable fear of US aggression.  The self-righteous bellicosity of the Bush Administration, the unnecessary Iraq War, and the fact that the US considers Iran as part of some "Axis of Evil," and thus beyond reasonable diplomacy, has proven to that country that the only way it can defend itself from American aggression is with a nuclear deterrent.  

Although the ongoing international proliferation of nuclear weaponry is frightening, we should not allow the Bush Administration to slander Muslims in order to justify yet more bloodshed.   If we honestly wish to increase American security we must give up aggression as a substitute for diplomacy.  When we suggest that Muslims are crazy or violent or extremist, we provide excuse to our own brutal tendencies; tendencies that have resulted in far, far more deaths than have the Cartoon Riots.

Does a nuclear-armed Iran present a grave danger to the world?  To the United States?  To Israel?  If Iranian leadership truly is irrational, perhaps it does.  Obviously any use of nuclear weaponry by Iran upon the United States or Israel would assure the annihilation of Iran, itself.  But when we slaughter Iraqis, or torture them, or fund Israel's miserable treatment of Palestinians, or when we call Muslims "crazy," we play directly into the hands of those, both in the United States and the Middle-East, who yearn for a bloody apocalyptic confrontation.