Re: <nettime> a letter to the editor

[lotu5 <lotu5@resist.ca>]

Florian Cramer wrote:

> Multiculturalism is misguided when it makes concessions on those
> grounds and embraces reactionary demands just because they come from a
> minority culture.

I think a fundamental misunderstanding is demonstrated by your use of
the word "multiculturalism". I would argue against the publication of
the muhammed cartoons from an anti-racist standpoint that is not based
on the fallacy that we are all equal, but is based on the pragmatic
understanding of 500+ years of genocide and colonialism that have to be
accounted for before there can be any peace.

> Concepts like "free media" are cheap, or rather: worth nothing when you
> grant them only to the people whose political views you share.

Which is exactly the problem here. There is no "free media". Ask the
indymedia centers who've had their servers stolen, or ask sherman austin
why he spent a year in jail or ask the shac 7 why they're on trial. To
hide behind the sham of a free media is to ignore the very real media
censorshi that happens every day in the us and abroad.

Brian Holmes wrote:

> The point made very early on in this discussion by Louise Moanna
> Kolff, namely that Danish society has become overtly racist, is not
> a minor point. It is the real context from which the entire
> discussion springs.

I found this today on the SaveOurState.org forum, a forum for minutemen
and anti-immigrant discussions:

http://www.saveourstate.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=3D8331&hl=3D

The End of Tolerance

Stefan Theil, Newsweek, March 6, 2006

"The world has long looked upon the Dutch as the very model of a modern,
multicultural society. Open and liberal, the tiny seagoing nation that
invented the globalized economy in the 1600s prided itself on a history
of taking in all comers, be they Indonesian or Turkish, African or
Chinese...

The great cosmopolitan port city of Rotterdam just published a code of
conduct requiring Dutch be spoken in public. Parliament recently
legislated a countrywide ban on wearing the burqa in public...

Even before Jyllands Posten published the cartoons last fall, Denmark=92s
Minister of Cultural Affairs Brian Mikkelsen said, =93We have gone to war
against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally
valid.=94 These days, he speaks for most Europeans. Danes, and Dutch, and
a few other countries might be well on their way to creating multiethnic
societies. But make no mistake: they=92re no longer willing to tolerate a
European melting pot=97a broadly multicultural society=97where different
cultures live by widely different norms."

> Long historical experience has shown that racism is a cultural
> strategy to exert oppression on particular groups despite the
> safeguards of human rights. It is urgent to focus on this concrete
> situation, which is simply the most advanced point of a gangrene that
> is spreading throughout Europe. Those who want

Also, from DC Indymedia:

An American Indian's view of the cartoons
http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/132616/index.php

"Reading the first news reports about the cartoons depicting Muhammad as
a terrorist reminded me of the unfriendly media that printed then
Attorney General of South Dakota William Janklow's vigilante order, "The
only way to deal with the Indian problem in South Dakota is to put a gun
to the AIM leaders' heads and pull the trigger." Such ethnically hostile
and abusive reporting by mainstream media was what helped to kill more
than 60 American Indians and assault hundreds more during the federal
government=92s reign of terror that occurred between 1973 and 1975 on the
Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota reservation."

Thank you Brian for bringing the discussion back to the issues that
underlie it.


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