Question: Who made this statement – “The termites are in charge now, and that is not the way it out to be, and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation.” Was it Osama bin Laden or some other fanatical Muslim? No. This statement was made by Pat Robertson, the US Evangelical Christian who ran for President in 1988 and hosts the cable show the 700 Club. I begin this month’s article with this quote from Pat Robertson to make a point about how religious fanaticism does not just apply to Islam, but to Christianity as well.
In February, one of the issues that received a significant amount of media coverage was the response by Muslims around the world to cartoons run in a Danish newspaper that depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. Many media commentators in the West have expressed disgust with the response by Muslims, even making the assertion that “see, these people really are violent and fanatical.” Grand Rapids Press religion editor Charles Honey, in his February 11 column, reflects that arrogant western view when he says:
Muslim outrage over Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad as a terrorist has touched off outrageous acts of violence. The justified indignation of mainstream Muslims has been overshadowed by fanatics using the controversy to vent their frustrations and focus their ideological war on the West. The violence further damages the image of Islam that moderates have worked hard to promote. It gets fair-minded non-Muslims thinking, ‘To heck with these people. If this is what their religion does to them, let them suffer the consequences.’
Well, let’s look at the issue of this “cartoon scandal” and try to give it some context. First, the newspaper in question, the Jyllands-Posten, which first published the cartoons in September of 2005, has a history of supporting extremist inclinations, including support for Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. Some defenders of the newspaper will argue that the newspaper apologized for running the cartoons, but that was only after many in the Arab world threatened to boycott Danish products. Apparently, speech is defended only when there is no money to be made. Second, Denmark itself has seen a rise in racism and Islamophobia in recent years. According to Harsha Walia, writing on ZNet, a delegation of Muslim and Arab community members who traveled across Denmark produced a 43-page dossier on anti-Arab, anti-Islam attitudes. Even the Danish People’s Party, riding anti-Muslim resentment, emerged as the third largest party in the past two parliamentary elections in 2001 and 2005. So, no surprise that a major paper in Denmark, would print the cartoons in question.
Third, there seems to be a real lack of understanding about how Arab and Muslim countries view the US, England and their other junior partners in the so-called War on Terrorism. We are quick in the US to raise the flag of free speech in defense of the Danish Press’s printing of the cartoons, but do we really have any idea what the Arab and Islamic world thinks of us? One of Egypt’s most respected columnist Salama Ahmed Salama, recently said this about the impact of the cartoons, “When I insult your religion or your feelings it is crossing the limits of freedom of expression. For many Europeans, such things are not so important, but here religion is a daily food and we cannot just accept this.” In many ways we have not learned from what the late Edward Said told us 20 years ago in his ground breaking work Orientalism, “From a faintly outlined stereotype as a camel-riding nomad to an accepted caricature as the embodiment of incompetence and easy defeat – that was all the scope given to an Arab in media and literature.” They are violent fanatics. OK, let’s look at that for a second.
The US is currently occupying Iraq illegally, has supported the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands for nearly 40 years, has supported political repression in Egypt and Syria, bombed a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, financed dictators in Muslim majority countries like Indonesia, and is now threatening to invade Iraq...again. In 1953 the US led CIA coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran to put in power the Shah. (See Bill Blum’s wonderful book Killing Hope) Do you think that people in the Middle East don’t have a reason to react violently to yet another racist media depiction and insult to an ancient religion? If we are so concerned about religious fanatics why don’t we look a little closer to home. I quoted Pat Robertson at the beginning of this article. He and other Christians in this country like Jerry Falwell have for decades been engaged in fanatical crusades against gays, women who don’t want to be property of men, the poor, immigrants and anyone who doesn’t believe their brand of Christianity. What was it that Robertson said recently…” think the US should assassinate the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.” Was he painted as a fanatic by the US media? No, maybe a bit misguided they said, but the disagreement was with his tactics, not the general message.
This month, Ann Coulter, one of the ideologues in the right-wing echo chamber is in Grand Rapids to speak to the GOP faithful was quoted in the Grand Rapids Press in January as saying "I think we ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning. Boom! ... They're a major threat. I just think it would be fun to nuke them and have it be a warning to ... the world." The Press doesn’t call her a fanatic, they refer to her as “edgy.” Right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks Coulter wrote "This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack.... We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” So something doesn’t seem quite kosher here. When Muslims respond violently to cartoons that denigrate their spiritual founder we call them fanatics. When US religious and political leaders call for political assassination and bombing countries with nukes….we invite them as guests to speak or send checks to their organization because they prayed with us through the TV.
Jeff Smith is an avowed heretic and former seminarian in the catholic church. The quote from Pat Robertson is from a quiz called the Religious Fanatics Quiz, which can be found online, pages 19-20.
