Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.02.2006, Blaðsíða 17

It isn’t free speech that’s the issue. Hatred inspires hatred. In
refusing to acknowledge the obvious goal of Flemming Rose
and Jyllands-Posten’s attack on a minority group that has
already been held victim to a number of injustices in Denmark,
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, caricatured above, indicated his true
goal—to anger a picked on minority enough to start a fight, and
to prove that there might be some fundamental difference in
thought between this minority and the average human being. In
publishing the Mohammed Cartoons in the Icelandic paper DV,
that local media furthered a right wing agenda without critical
perspective, just as DV’s counterparts, the right wing France Soir,
Sweden Expressen and Magazenit in Norway, did. Together,
they hoped to incite a race riot—or, as in Iceland, to inspire a fear
of race riots on the continent. That Muslims outside of Europe
allowed themselves to be baited is unfortunate. That journalists
in Europe and the US present this issue as a matter of free
speech and don’t identify it as abject racism is inexcusable. Let’s
see, when have the right wing publications of Norway, Sweden,
France, Denmark and Iceland gotten together to demean one
specific culture before? What happened then? The conduct of
these papers, and publications like them, was inexcusable 60 years
ago. This ain’t about free speech. Nowhere near it.
Bart Cameron and the Grapevine Editorial Staff.