well...

I forgot to mention that a lot of Nicaraguan workers on strike. Teachers just ended; government workers just started; public transportation in Managua; and, the scariest, doctors are on strike. Although there are definitely a lot of complicated politics at play, the role of the IMF and of neoliberal politics in all of this is hard to look by. The IMF mandates a cap on social spending, including health care and education, meaning these professionals get a whole lot less than they should. (My coworker wrote an article about this recently.) Neoliberalism says that privatization is always more efficient and better for everyone in the end; what happens with the bus strikers, for instance, is they want subsidies from the government to be able to pay the insanely expensive oil costs but to also be able to make prices affordable for most people. The government doesn't want to do this, saying it's inefficient. So, the bus strikers have begun burning tires, people are getting used to walking a lot and crowding into trucks, and oh yeah, dying because they don't have access to doctors. Shit.

I went out with some Danish friends the other day. Naturally, the topic of the cartoons came up. I used to really strongly argue that there were no limits to free speech, but as I've gotten a little wiser, I question that belief. Whether or not it should be made illegal may be another question, one that I have yet to decide about. I do think it's interesting how the media keeps framing it as a religious issue, as so often happens with Middle East issues: Muslims are only upset because it's against their religion to depict the prophet Mohammed. Well, I'm not going to suppose to know why they're protesting, but at least to me the bigger issue seems to be that the cartoons were equating the demagogue of more than a million people with murder and terrorism. That seems to me like making a cartoon with Jesus killing an abortion doctor or something; the point is, it's not only depicting Mohammed, it's also denigrating an entire group of people. So, does that excuse burning the embassies? Well, as MArk Levine points out, the embassies themselves (as well as US air bases in Afghanistan) could be interpreted as symbols greater than just anger directed towards the cartoon. In any event, I think the media has (surprise, surprise!) distorted the issue. Overall, I think this is an interesting sentiment expressed by Reza Aslan:

Of course, the sad irony is that the Muslims who have resorted to violence in response to this offense are merely reaffirming the stereotypes advanced by the cartoons. Likewise, the Europeans who point to the Muslim reaction as proof that, in the words of the popular Dutch blogger Mike Tidmus, "Islam probably has no place in Europe," have reaffirmed the stereotype of Europeans as aggressively anti-Islamic. It is this common attitude among Europeans that has led to the marginalization of Muslim communities there, which in turn has fed the isolationism and destructive behavior of European Muslims, which has then reinforced European prejudices against Islam. It is a Gordian knot that has become almost impossible to untangle.

And that is why as a Muslim American I am enraged by the publication of these cartoons. Not because they offend my prophet or my religion, but because they fly in the face of the tireless efforts of so many civic and religious leaders—both Muslim and non-Muslim—to promote unity and assimilation rather than hatred and discord; because they play into the hands of those who preach extremism; because they are fodder for the clash-of-civilizations mentality that pits East against West. For all of that I blame Jyllands-Posten. We in the West want Muslim leaders to condemn the racial and religious prejudices that are so widespread in the Muslim world. Let us lead by example.

The issue may be a little deeper for me than stereotypes and tolerance, but I think it's true that the incident, as portrayed by the media, has become "fodder for the clash-of-civilizaations mentality". And that is just unfortunate.