Global anti-Danish protests take on a darker tone, Serene Assir writes More than four months after a now infamous series of 12 cartoons were first published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 28 September, protests spreading across the Arab and Muslim world took on an angrier, and in some cases more violent tone. On Monday, at least five people were killed in Afghanistan when police fired tear gas and bullets at protesters shouting "Death to Denmark!" among other slogans. Meanwhile, in Puntland, Somalia, a 14-year-old boy was trampled by a stampede of demonstrators when police fired live rounds to disperse the crowds surrounding the United Nations and aid agency buildings. The cartoons vary in their degree of offensiveness to Muslims. While it is forbidden to portray the Prophet at all, some of them essentially characterise him as a terrorist. One shows him wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb. Protests have now been taking place for two weeks, when the global debate on the issue resurfaced and a boycott of Danish goods started to take its toll on the small European country, but it was in Damascus earlier this week that they began to involve a heavy-handed violence which police -- bizarrely enough, given the history of police action in Syria -- say they were not able to keep in check. To begin with, hundreds of protesters gathered around the building housing the Danish embassy, in what appeared to be the latest of peaceful demonstrations. It was not long, however, before some of the protestors lunged at the grounds and set fire to the building -- a far cry from protests in Cairo last week near Al-Azhar Mosque or even the occupation of the European Union offices in Gaza by members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. In Beirut, the scene was similar. Hundreds of protesters called by various Sunni authorities -- some political, others religious -- gathered outside the Danish embassy in the majority Christian neighbourhood of Achrafiyye and, according to demonstrator Sarah Hammoud, who works in the Lebanese Central Bank, "called out there is no God but God, and Mohamed is his Prophet. We were shocked when a new group of protesters arrived, however, and the day turned violent." The building housing the embassy was burnt, and a nearby church destroyed. "They were there to make trouble -- their demonstration had nothing to do with ours, and we felt terrible about what happened to the church," she told Al-Ahram Weekly. The trouble with violence, however, is that it is incredibly difficult to control once it has been unleashed. And there will always be groups of people, perhaps owing to a greater radicalism, or perhaps because they are simply expressing some form of pent-up frustration, who will seek platforms such as this at which to vent. "I suspect about one out of 1,000 of protestors in the different countries has actually seen the cartoons," human rights activist and director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies Bahieddine Hassan said, effectively likening today's phenomenon to that which emerged over Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. "I also suspect that those who initially expressed their anger -- including heads of state and leaders of public debate -- acted in a manipulative fashion to arouse passions in people for their own, selfish purposes." He added that it has been uniquely useful for various governments, including those of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and presumably Syria, to allow attention to be diverted so radically away from an array of domestic problems, such as the poor handling of the ferry disaster, which remains tragically unresolved. Of course, the double standards do not end there. While a number of European newspapers republished the cartoons last week, "the Danish government has still refused to provide Muslims with a sincere apology for carrying such deeply offensive material," Ibrahim Nawar, head of Arab Press Freedom Watch told the Weekly. While publishers in the West have either defended their own or others' right to publish the cartoons, "we consider this act one which amounts to hate speech rather than freedom of expression," he added. Indeed, several European countries have already integrated into their penal systems articles which punish hate speech, and although prosecutions and convictions have been very rare, the concept has been alive and well for decades. One need look no further than the prosecution of a British historian in Austria, for example, who challenged historical facts on the Holocaust. In an attempt to retaliate and blast a taboo or two, the Belgian-Dutch Arab European League published on their website through this week a series of cartoons smearing different issues considered "sacred" in the West. One depicted a man marrying a donkey, in an attempt by cartoonist Nabucho to mock gay marriage rights, while another showed Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler. "If it is the time to break taboos and cross all the red lines," reads the site, "we certainly do not want to stay behind." But perhaps this is missing the point. For, quite simply, the Western press has hardly practised freedom of speech over recent years, except when it has suited governments, regardless of their economic independence. And if the Danish press has crossed a whole gully of red lines with regards to the Muslims of the world, perhaps this global debate provides a good opportunity to focus on another, perhaps more urgent issue, namely, why exactly is it that such vilification, deliberate provocation or, at the very least, sheer ignorance of Muslim sensitivities was possible in the first place. "The problem has little to do with the so-called 'clash of civilisations', which in itself does not really exist," Hassan said. What has existed recently, however, was the deliberate withholding of information by the highly revered BBC -- which has been conspicuously, even cynically PC enough not to republish the cartoons, as have been United States publishers -- on Falluja and the use of poisonous gases which wiped out hundreds of people mercilessly, despite calls for exposure from bodies such as the BRussels Tribunal. Their excuse then was that they simply didn't have enough information -- which was bizarre given the number of videotapes they received from freelance journalists and activists working on the ground in Iraq, according to Italian film-maker Gabriele Zamparini. It is also strange how Western statesmen are now defending the inalienable right to freedom of expression, when a recently unearthed scandal exposed US President George W Bush's repressed intention to bomb the Al-Jazeera headquarters in Doha. Indeed, perhaps the cartoons scandal has exposed deeper hurts on both sides of the story. The Western press, albeit privatised and theoretically more independent than its counterpart in the mostly underdeveloped, economically deprived Muslim world, has also been subject through recent years to its own fair share of pressure from the political giants of the world, ranging from the all-too-well-established Zionist lobby, to Washington and London, to an increasingly domesticated, consumption-orientated public opinion which simply doesn't want to watch massacres which, whether we like it or not, continue to unfold in Iraq, Afghanistan and, on a smaller scale, in pretty much everyone's back yard. In this case, however, there was no lobby powerful enough to stop the cartoons from being printed in the first place, or to have any EU-based editors sacked. Sadly enough, as far as policy makers and donors -- who are the real movers and shakers in today's privatising economies -- are concerned, the cartoonist ended up on the right side (pun intended) and thus has had his freedom of expression protected. Only this once, mind you. Meanwhile, if telling the truth was ever the job of a respected journalist, then Danish cartoonists need to urgently revise their manuals. It would be na�ve to even try and argue that it is the job of a free press to vilify an already vilified people. And, as for the protests, perhaps now that the Muslim world has tried collective action and effective boycotts -- for once -- there is a vague possibility that someone, somewhere, may start to think about boycotting those who continue to occupy Arab lands, murder children, and are bent on worshipping the virtues of "free" trade to Third World rulers and hungry, unemployed peoples.
