I suspect the same happened in the US in 2003. It's just nice once in a while to have a go at hate speech with a target that doesn't really mind. Because it is pretty violent and nasty (if sometimes funny), and even when you're used to it (the level of French bashing in the UK press always leaves me bemused), it can be painful to hear. I do suspect that the current bit of self-flagellation is to some extent inspired by the permanent bashing of the French and the French model in the English language.
But in the end, it tells more about the basher (who feels threatened, scared, unsecure) than the bashee. The Danish cartoons show their latent fear of brown foreigners; the Muslim (over)reactions shows their terror at the insidious liberal ways of the West.
How do you fight fear and build trust? Be responsible. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
as long as the "insidious liberal ways" of the west involve controlling Muslim countries directly or indirectly, bombing Muslims, ignoring the plight of Palestine, etc., the Islamists' fear has somewhat deeper roots in reality than the Danes' (no matter how overheated and bizarre the ensuing rhetoric may become -- the greater the fear, the more bizarre the rhetoric will get). that said, I must also admit that with economic hard times a lurking possibility and social safety nets being vandalised wherever we turn, the fear of proletarians that immigrants will cheapen labour and drive down living conditions is also rooted in present realities. (divide et impera -- we plebes are least dangerous to our masters when we are at each other's throats.)
oh dear, everybody needs a Time Out, says the long-dormant day-care worker in me :-) [a job I did for a while as a teen]
another reflective riff: I think many of us fear -- deeply, in our bones and gut -- the slow or fast death of the Enlightenment, the recrudescence of zealotry and factionalism and fundamentalism, the stifling of science, a degradation in the quality of arts and letters, the decline of literacy, the failure of democracy, the coarsening of public discourse into jingo and brawling. we look around and fear a dying of the light -- at home, not just abroad.
and that fear I think informs our distate for and terror of the clerical authoritarianism and repressive ambitions of fundie Islam. but the imminent threat to my own personal freedoms comes from my own Western world, from the "security state" apparatus, the unravelling of the Constitution and the separation of powers, the disregard for posse comitatus and habeas corpus, the rise of evangelical rightist xtianity and its strong presence in the professional military... it is these forces that are starting to revoke my rights and restore feudalism in my time. it is easier to fear and revile repression and obscurantism with a foreign (and dusky) face, an alien power which I can "keep at bay," than to come to grips with what may be growing under the bed in my own house...
... a man was appointed by BushCo to one of the highest medical administrative posts in the land, who believes that most gynaecological troubles can be cured by prayer. imho we are reasonable to be afraid... but is our anger and defiance focussed where it needs to be? The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
