Suntou,

Nice observations.   You picked out some salient points from the piece.
Mamdani's piece is very interesting.

Good day,

Mboge

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 11:19 AM, suntou touray <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Mboge
> Thanks for this material. It's both well written and captivating. I took
> some parts of the article for emphasis, it is not in the order that Mamdani
> wrote it:
>
>
>
> *"It is well known that the Danish paper that published the offending
> cartoons was earlier offered cartoons of Jesus Christ. But the paper
> declined to print these on grounds that it would offend its Christian
> readers. Had the Danish paper published cartoons of Jesus Christ, that would
> have been blasphemy; the cartoons it did publish were evidence of bigotry,
> not blasphemy." Mamdani*
>
> This is an interesting revealations. When they ran with the free speech
> thing, their comtempt is demonstrated in their bais approach. The sad thing
> is, Evangelist groups and right wing tink-tank groups tend to defend this
> recklessness.
>
> *"In that interview, Gunter Grass said the Danish cartoons reminded him of
> anti Semitic cartoons in a German magazine, Der Sturmer. The story was
> carried in a New York Times piece, which added that the publisher of Der
> Sturmer was tried at Nuremberg and executed." Mamdani*
>
> Sublimal messages are as worst as open bigotry.
>
> *The Kerner Commission Report made a distinction between what it called
> the trigger and the fuel: The trigger was an incident of petty racism, but
> the fuel was provided by centuries of racism. The lesson was clear: The
> country needed to address the consequences of a history of racism, not just
> its latest manifestation. Bob Gibson, the St Louis Cardinals pitcher, wrote
> about the Watts riots in his book ‘From Ghetto to Glory’. He compared the
> riots to a ‘brushback pitch’ – a pitch thrown over the batter’s head to keep
> him from crowding the plate, a way of sending a message that the pitcher
> needs more space. CBS withdrew Amos ‘n’ Andy after the long hot summer of
> 1965. The compelling argument that the NAACP and other civil rights groups
> could not make, was made by the inarticulate rioters of Watts." Mamdani*
>
> How revealing. Rome wasn't built in a day. Slow poisoning is equally bad.
> This is why, defining our problems according to ethnic lines is
> counter-productive.
>
> *"The irony is that a growing number of mainstream European politicians,
> perhaps nostalgic about empire, are experimenting with importing these same
> time-tested rhetorical techniques into domestic politics: The idea is to
> compile a list of barbaric cultural practices among immigrant minorities as
> a way to isolate, stigmatise, and frame them." Mamdani*
>
> This statement is examplify with the attempt by the right wing Daily
> Express news paper's attempt to block the visit to U.K of Dr Naik.
> Misquoting him, taking his lectures out of context and then branding him a
> terrorist. No one ever read them doing likewise for Christain groups, Hindu
> or even Jewish preachers*.*
>
> *Thanks to Mamdani, Pambasuka and Mboge.*
>
> *Suntou*
>
>
>   On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Modou Mboge <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
>
>>   Features Beware bigotry: Free speech and the Zapiro cartoons Mahmood
>> Mamdani 2010-06-03, Issue 484 <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/484>
>> http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/64923<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/64923>[image:
>> Bookmark and Share]<http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=fahamutech> Printer
>> friendly version<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/64923/print>
>>
>> *cc D B* <http://www.flickr.com/photos/dblackadder/166701361/>Zapiro’s
>> controversial cartoon featuring the Prophet Mohamed, published in South
>> Africa’s Mail & Guardian, prompts Mahmood Mamdani to ‘reflect on times and
>> places when humour turned deadly’. Speaking at the University of
>> Johannesburg, Mamdani explores the relationship between ‘two great liberal
>> objectives, freedom of speech and civil peace’. Zapiro’s cartoon, Mamdani
>> argues, has misread the real challenges we face today: The intellectual
>> challenge of distinguishing between ‘two strands in the history of free
>> speech – blasphemy and bigotry’, and the political challenge of building ‘a
>> local and global coalition against all forms of bigotry’. We need to learn
>> ‘how not to respond to a changing world with fear and anxiety, masked with
>> arrogance, but rather to try a little humility so as to understand,’ Mamdani
>> writes.
>> It warms my heart to see these flowing gowns. I congratulate you on work
>> accomplished! For over a millennium, these gowns have been a symbol of high
>> learning from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Should anyone ask you where
>> they came from, tell them that the early universities of Europe – Oxford,
>> Cambridge, le Sorbonne – borrowed them from the Islamic madressa of the
>> Middle East. If they should seem incredulous, tell them that the gown did
>> not come by itself: Because medieval European scholars borrowed from the
>> madressa much of the curriculum, from Greek philosophy to Iranian astronomy
>> to Arab medicine and Indian mathematics, they had little difficulty in
>> accepting this flowing gown, modelled after the dress of the desert nomad,
>> as the symbol of high learning. Should they still express surprise, ask them
>> to take a second look at the gowns of the ayatollahs in Iran and Iraq and
>> elsewhere and they will see the resemblance. Education has no boundaries.
>> Neither does it have an end. As the Waswahili in East Africa, which is where
>> I come from, say: Elimu haina muisho.
>>
>> Today, I want to talk to you about the core value of the liberal
>> university, critical thought, not just any thought, but thought which dares
>> to stand up to the dictates of power and to the embrace of wealth, even to
>> the seduction of popular prejudice.
>>
>> Yesterday, when I was in Cape Town, a friend gave me the week’s edition of
>> Mail and Guardian. I went straight for my favourite section, the cartoon by
>> Zapiro. To my surprise, Zapiro featured a cartoon of Prophet Mohamed,
>> agonising: ‘OTHER Prophets have followers with a sense of humour! …’ I want
>> to take this opportunity to reflect on times and places when humour turned
>> deadly. Such a reflection should allow us to think through the relationship
>> between two great liberal objectives, freedom of speech and civil peace.
>> Since Zapiro seems to present his series of cartoons as a second edition of
>> the Danish cartoons, I shall begin with a reflection on the original.
>>
>> When the Danish cartoon debate broke out I was in Nigeria. If you stroll
>> the streets of Kano, a Muslim-majority city in northern Nigeria, you will
>> have no problem finding material caricaturing Christianity sold by street
>> vendors. And if you go to the east of Nigeria, to Enugu for example, you
>> will find a similar supply of materials caricaturing Islam. None of this is
>> blasphemy; most of it is bigotry. It is well known that the Danish paper
>> that published the offending cartoons was earlier offered cartoons of Jesus
>> Christ. But the paper declined to print these on grounds that it would
>> offend its Christian readers. Had the Danish paper published cartoons of
>> Jesus Christ, that would have been blasphemy; the cartoons it did publish
>> were evidence of bigotry, not blasphemy. Both blasphemy and bigotry belong
>> to the larger tradition of free speech, but after a century of ethnic
>> cleansing and genocide, we surely need to distinguish between the two
>> strands of the same tradition. The language of contemporary politics makes
>> that distinction by referring to bigotry as hate speech.
>>
>> Just a few weeks after the Danish cartoons were published, the German
>> writer Gunter Grass was interviewed in a Portuguese weekly news magazine,
>> Visão. In that interview, Gunter Grass said the Danish cartoons reminded him
>> of anti Semitic cartoons in a German magazine, Der Sturmer. The story was
>> carried in a New York Times piece, which added that the publisher of Der
>> Sturmer was tried at Nuremberg and executed. I am interested less in how
>> close was the similarity between the Danish and the German cartoons, than in
>> why a magazine publisher would be executed for publishing cartoons. One of
>> the subjects I work on is the Rwanda genocide. Many of you would know that
>> the International Tribunal in Arusha has pinned criminal responsibility for
>> the genocide not just on those who executed it but also on those who
>> imagined it, including intellectuals, artists and journalists as in RTMC
>> (Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines). The Rwandan trials are the
>> latest to bring out the dark side of free speech, its underbelly: How power
>> can instrumentalise free speech to frame a minority and present it for
>> target practice.
>>
>> To understand why courts committed to defending freedom of speech can hold
>> cartoonists responsible for crimes against humanity, we need to distinguish
>> between bigotry and blasphemy. Blasphemy is the practice of questioning a
>> tradition from within. In contrast, bigotry is an assault on that tradition
>> from the outside. If blasphemy is an attempt to speak truth to power,
>> bigotry is the reverse: An attempt by power to instrumentalise truth. A
>> defining feature of the cartoon debate is that bigotry is being mistaken for
>> blasphemy.
>>
>> The history of blasphemy as a liberating force is particularly European,
>> not even American. To understand the political role of blasphemy in Europe
>> we need to appreciate the organisation of the Church as an institutional
>> power. Institutionalised religion in medieval Europe was organised as a form
>> of hierarchical power, with an authority from the floor to the ceiling.
>> Institutional Roman Catholicism mimicked the institutional organisation of
>> the Roman empire, just as the institutional organisation of Protestant
>> churches in Europe borrowed a leaf from the organisation of power in the
>> nation states of Europe.
>>
>> The European example was not emulated in the United States of America.
>> Though blasphemy marked the moment of birth of the New World, the New World
>> was not particularly receptive to blasphemy. The big change was political:
>> Puritans and other Protestant denominations were organised more as
>> congregations and sects, more like voluntary associations, than as
>> hierarchical churches. There was also a change in religious practice: The
>> puritans shifted the locus of individual morality from external constraint
>> to internal discipline, displacing both the Pope and the Scriptures with
>> inner conscience. Pioneered by the Quakers, the Christ of scriptures became
>> the ‘Christ within’. Unlike in Europe, religion in the rapidly developing
>> settler democracy in the United States was very much a part of the language
>> of the American Revolution and of the public sphere. The European experience
>> has to be seen more as the exception than the rule.
>>
>> And yet, the European experience is not without a lesson for the rest of
>> us. It is precisely because of a history of opposition between organised
>> religion and political society, and the consequent history of religious
>> civil wars, that compromises have been worked out in Europe, both to protect
>> the practice of free speech and to circumscribe it through laws that
>> criminalise blasphemy. When internalised as civility, rather than when
>> imposed by public power, these compromises have been key to keeping social
>> peace in European societies. Let me give two examples to illustrate the
>> point.
>>
>> My first example dates from 1967 when Britain’s leading publishing house,
>> Penguin, published an English edition of a book of cartoons by France's most
>> acclaimed cartoonist, Siné. The Penguin edition was introduced by Malcolm
>> Muggeridge. Siné’s Massacre contained a number of anticlerical and
>> blasphemous cartoons, some of them with a sexual theme. Many booksellers,
>> who found the content offensive, conveyed their feelings to Allan Lane, who
>> had by that time almost retired from Penguin. Though he was not a practicing
>> Christian, Allen Lane took seriously the offence that this book seemed to
>> cause to a number of his practicing Christian friends. Here is Richard
>> Webster’s account of what followed:
>>
>> ‘One night, soon after the book had been published, he [Allen Lane] went
>> into Penguin’s Harmondsworth warehouse with four accomplices, filled a
>> trailer with all the remaining copies of the book, drove away and burnt
>> them. The next day the Penguin trade department reported the book “out of
>> print”.’
>>
>> Now Britain has laws against blasphemy, but neither Allan Lane nor Penguin
>> was taken to court. Britain’s laws on blasphemy were not called into action.
>> I want to point your attention to one issue in particular. Allan Lane was
>> not a practicing Christian but he had internalised legal restraint as
>> civility, as conduct necessary to upholding peaceful coexistence in a
>> society with a history of religious conflict. To put it differently, the
>> existence of political society requires the forging of a political pact, a
>> compromise.
>>
>> My second example is from the United States. It concerns a radio show
>> called Amos ‘n’ Andy that began on WMAQ<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMAQ_(AM)>in Chicago on 19 March 1928, and eventually became the longest running radio
>> program in broadcast history. Conceived by two white actors who mimicked the
>> so-called Negro dialect to portray two black characters, Amos Jones and Andy
>> Brown, Amos ‘n’ Andy was a white show for black people. Amos ‘n’ Andy was
>> also the first major all-black show in mainstream US entertainment. The
>> longest running show in the history of radio broadcast in the US, Amos ‘n’
>> Andy gradually moved from radio to TV. Graduating to prime time network
>> television in 1951, it became a syndicated show after 1953.
>>
>> Every year, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
>> (NAACP) protested against the racist character of the portrayal that was the
>> show. Giving seven reasons ‘why the Amos ‘n’ Andy show should be taken off
>> the air,’ the NAACP said the show reinforced the prejudice that ‘Negroes are
>> inferior, lazy, dumb and dishonest,’ that every character in the all-Black
>> show ‘is either a clown or a crook.’ ‘Negro doctors are shown as quacks and
>> thieves,’ Negro lawyers ‘as slippery cowards, ignorant of their profession
>> and without ethics,’ and Negro women ‘as cackling, screaming shrews … just
>> short of vulgarity.’ In sum, ‘all Negroes are shown as dodging work of any
>> kind.’
>>
>> But CBS disagreed. You can still read the CBS point of view on the
>> official Amos ‘n’ Andy website which still hopes that black people will
>> learn to laugh at themselves: ‘Perhaps we will collectively learn to lighten
>> up, not get so bent out of shape, and learn to laugh at ourselves a little
>> more.’ I was reminded of it when I read the Zapiro cartoon in Mail &
>> Guardian yesterday.
>>
>> The TV show ran for nearly 15 years, from 1951 to 1965. Every year the
>> NAACP protested, but every year the show continued. Then, without
>> explanation, CBS withdrew the show, in 1965. What happened? In 1965 the
>> Watts riots happened, and sparked the onset of a long, hot summer. The Watts
>> riots were triggered by a petty incident, an encounter between a racist cop
>> and a black motorist. That everyday incident triggered a riot that left 34
>> persons dead. Many asked: What is wrong with these people? How can the
>> response be so disproportionate to the injury? After the riots the Johnson
>> administration appointed a commission, called the Kerner Commission, to
>> answer this and other questions. The Kerner Commission Report<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerner_Commission>made a distinction between what it called the trigger and the fuel: The
>> trigger was an incident of petty racism, but the fuel was provided by
>> centuries of racism. The lesson was clear: The country needed to address the
>> consequences of a history of racism, not just its latest manifestation. Bob
>> Gibson, the St Louis Cardinals pitcher, wrote about the Watts riots in his
>> book ‘From Ghetto to Glory’. He compared the riots to a ‘brushback pitch’ –
>> a pitch thrown over the batter’s head to keep him from crowding the plate, a
>> way of sending a message that the pitcher needs more space. CBS withdrew
>> Amos ‘n’ Andy after the long hot summer of 1965. The compelling argument
>> that the NAACP and other civil rights groups could not make, was made by the
>> inarticulate rioters of Watts.
>>
>> Why is this bit of history significant for us? CBS did not withdraw Amos
>> ‘n’ Andy because the law had changed, for no such change happened. The
>> reason for the change was political, not legal. For sure, there was a change
>> of consciousness, but that change was triggered by political developments.
>> CBS had learnt civility; more likely, it was taught civility. CBS had learnt
>> that there was a difference between black people laughing at themselves, and
>> white people laughing at black people! It was like the difference between
>> blasphemy and bigotry. That learning was part of a larger shift in American
>> society, one that began with the Civil War and continued with the civil
>> rights movement that followed the Second World War. This larger shift was
>> the inclusion of African-Americans in a re-structured civil and political
>> society. The saga of Amos ‘n’ Andy turned out to be a milestone, not just in
>> the history of free speech, but in a larger history, that of black people’s
>> struggle to defend their human rights and their rights of citizenship in the
>> US.
>>
>> Can we deal with hate speech by legal restriction? I am not very
>> optimistic. The law can be a corrective on individual discrimination, but it
>> has seldom been an effective restraint on hate movements that target
>> vulnerable minorities. If the episode of the Danish cartoons demonstrated
>> one thing, it was that Islamophobia is a growing presence in Europe. One is
>> struck by the ideological diversity of this phenomenon. Just as there was a
>> left wing anti-Semitism in Europe before fascism, contemporary Islamophobia
>> too is articulated in not only the familiar language of the right, but also
>> the less familiar language of the left. The latter language is secular. The
>> Danish cartoons and their enthusiastic re-publication throughout Europe, in
>> both right and left-wing papers, was our first public glimpse of left and
>> right Islamophobia marching in step formation. Its political effect has been
>> to explode the middle ground. Is Zapiro asking us to evacuate the middle
>> ground as testimony that we too possess a sense of humour?
>>
>> If so, Zapiro has misread the real challenge that we face today. That
>> challenge is both intellectual and political. The intellectual challenge
>> lies in distinguishing between two strands in the history of free speech –
>> blasphemy and bigotry. The political challenge lies in building a local and
>> global coalition against all forms of bigotry. The growth of bigotry in
>> Europe seems to me an unthinking response to two developments: Locally, the
>> dramatic growth of Muslim minorities in Europe and their struggle for human
>> and citizenship rights; globally, we are going through an equally dramatic
>> turning point in world history.
>>
>> The history of the past five centuries has been one of western domination.
>> Beginning 1491, Western colonialism understood and presented itself to the
>> world at large as a civilising and a rescue mission, a mission to rescue
>> minorities and to civilise majorities. The colonising discourse historically
>> focused on barbarities among the colonised – sati, child marriage and
>> polygamy in India, female genital mutilation and slavery in Africa – and
>> presented colonialism as a rescue mission for women, children, and
>> minorities, at the same time claiming to be a larger project to civilise
>> majorities. Meanwhile, Western minorities lived in the colonies with
>> privilege and impunity. Put together, it has been five centuries of a
>> growing inability to live with difference in the world, while at the same
>> time politicising difference. The irony is that a growing number of
>> mainstream European politicians, perhaps nostalgic about empire, are
>> experimenting with importing these same time-tested rhetorical techniques
>> into domestic politics: The idea is to compile a list of barbaric cultural
>> practices among immigrant minorities as a way to isolate, stigmatise, and
>> frame them.
>>
>> But the world is changing. New powers are on the horizon: Most obviously,
>> China and India. Neither has a Muslim majority, but both have significant
>> Muslim minorities. The Danish case teaches us by negative example. To the
>> hitherto dominant Western minority, it presents a lesson in how not to
>> respond to a changing world with fear and anxiety, masked with arrogance,
>> but rather to try a little humility so as to understand the ways in which
>> the world is indeed changing.
>>
>> There is also a lesson here for Muslim peoples. The Middle East and Islam
>> are part of the middle ground in this contest. Rather than be tempted to
>> think that the struggle against Islamophobia is the main struggle – for it
>> is not – let us put it in this larger context. Only that larger context can
>> help us identify allies and highlight the importance of building alliances.
>> Perhaps then we – and hopefully Zapiro – will be strong enough to confront
>> organised hate campaigns, whether as calls to action or as cartoons, with a
>> sense of humour.
>>
>> BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
>>
>> * This article comprises the text of talk given by Mahmood Mamdani on
>> receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Johannesburg on 25 May
>> 2010.
>> * Mahmood Mamdani is director of the Makerere Institute of Social
>> Research <http://misr.mak.ac.ug/>, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
>> * Please send comments to [log in to unmask] or comment online at Pambazuka
>> News <http://www.pambazuka.org/>.
>>
>> *
>>
>> *
>> *
>> *
>>
>> *Hmm, Mamdani is on to something here.  I like this analysis and the way
>> it exposes the hypocrisy of the so-called custodians of free speech,
>> especially how the Left liberals connive with Right in the name of "secular
>> tyranny" to demonise "others".  *
>> **
>> *Mamdani himself on occasion is somewhat controversial especially in the
>> way he analyses the alleged genocide being committed by the Sudanese
>> government against the people of Darfur. *
>>
>> **
>> *Mboge*
>>
>> **
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> Surah- Ar-Rum 30-22
> "And among His signs is the creation of heavens and the earth, and the
> difference of your languages and colours. Verily, in that are indeed signs
> for men of sound knowledge." Qu'ran
>
> www.suntoumana.blogspot.com
>
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