DOHA (AFP) - Former US president Bill Clinton warned of rising anti-Islamic prejudice, comparing it to historic anti-Semitism as he condemned the publishing of cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.
"So now what are we going to do? ... Replace the anti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice?" he said at an economic conference in the Qatari capital of Doha.
The Junkyardblogger points out that despite Bill's claims to be a Christian he has failed to make similar complaints about those who insult his own religion. I would say worse is that he seems so keen to feel the pain of the poor Muslims that he completely mis-states recent history
"In Europe, most of the struggles we've had in the past 50 years have been to fight prejudices against Jews, to fight against anti-Semitism," he said.
Clinton described as "appalling" the 12 cartoons published in a Danish newspaper in September depicting Prophet Mohammed and causing uproar in the Muslim world.
"None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions ... there was this appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark ... these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam," he said.
Until the recent upsurge in anti.semitic events, many of which are done by recent (predominantly Muslim) immigrants, anti-semitism has been a minor part of the European racism problem. When you have entire football stadia making monkey faces to insult black (African origin) players and when you have a phrase like "paki-bashing" enter the language it seems clear that, unless there is a hithertoo unknown Afro-pakistani lost tribe of Israel, there are some major racist traditions that have nothing to do with the Jews.
Clinton criticised the tendency to generalise negative news of Islamic militancy.
"Because people see headlines that they don't like (they will) apply that to a whole religion, a whole faith, a whole region and a whole people?" he asked.
This was a large chunk of my previous post. If Muslims don't want to be treated like potentially explosive spoiledd brats then perhaps they need to act responsibly and not threaten death to critics of their religion. So far we have
Salman Rushdie - author of The Satanic Verses and threatened with countless Fatwas
Theo Van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali - creators of "Submission" one dead and one under police protection
The Jyllands Posten cartoons - newspaper and cartoonists receive death threats etc etc
There is a well known military aphorism that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and thrice is enemy action. Given that I have listed three examples of Muslim intolerance (google BTW lists 288,000 hits for the phrase "fatwa against writer") here we're clearly at the enemy action stage and hence the assumption that Muslims are indeed unable to react to perceived insults in any other way than violence seems proven.