The foreign minister of one Muslim country, Indonesia, says radical groups are exploiting genuine public anger over the prophet Muhammad cartoons for their own ends. A United States military spokesperson also says extremist groups may be inciting the protests.
As anger and controversy over the caricatures continues, there are growing questions whether countries like Syria and extremist groups like the Taliban are fanning the outrage.
Few doubt there is genuine anger throughout the Muslim world. For religious and secular Muslims alike, the images of the revered prophet Muhammad with a bomb strapped to his head are crude, racist and deeply insulting.
”It was a message that all his [Muhammad’s] followers are terrorists,” said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamic and militant groups. In a world after the September 11 attacks, when Muslims already feel they bear the brunt of the war on terror, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and new pressure on Iran and Syria, Muslims feel more threatened than ever, Rashwan said on Wednesday.
”That only further fuelled the anger this time around,” he said. In essence, the cartoons may have simply pushed an already edgy Muslim world into a frenzy, releasing bottled-up anger and frustration.
Others think the violent crowds in some countries had encouragement.
In Afghanistan, where two days of riots left more than 10 dead, US military spokesperson Colonel James Yonts said the US and other countries are examining whether extremist groups incited riots.
”Other countries are having the same demonstrations, same problems — very violent demonstrations, starting peaceful, turning violent,” Yonts said when asked if al-Qaeda and the Taliban may have been involved.
He said the US and other countries will look to see ”if this is something larger than just a small demonstration — if there is a tie to it, if there is an infrastructure, a connection to it”.
Zahor Afghan, the editor of Erada, Afghanistan’s most respected newspaper, said he felt there was definite incitement.
”No media in Afghanistan has published or broadcast pictures of these cartoons. The radio has been reporting on it, but there are definitely people using this to incite violence against the presence of foreigners in Afghanistan,” he said.
In Indonesia, that country’s foreign minister said he also believes radical groups around the world have jumped on the issue.
”The cartoons have hurt the Islamic community, so it has added to ammunition for [global] radical groups to exploit the situation,” Hassan Wirajuda said.
In Lebanon, protests against the Danish embassy turned into the stoning of a nearby Christian church. Anti-Syrian groups have accused Damascus of sending in violent rioters to destabilise the country and reignite a Lebanese civil war.
Analysts say Syria — under intense pressure over the slaying of Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri and US accusations of harbouring terrorists — is sending a message that it can, and will, cause trouble if pushed too hard.
”They’re [Syria] basically telling the West that we have a lot of potential for rage and anger and here is a sample of it, so stay away from us,” said prominent Egyptian-American democracy advocate Saadiddine Ibrahim.
As in Syria, several hundred protesters burned and ransacked the Danish and Austrian embassies in Iran’s capital, Tehran. In a country where the government has absolute control, few believe the protesters could have pulled off such a brazen act without tacit government consent.
”It’s clear these reactions were supported by some political elements. Even state media alluded to the fact that European governments intentionally ordered the production of cartoons,” said Iranian political sociologist Hamid Reza Jalaipour.
He thinks the violent protests were payback for the United Nations nuclear watchdog referring Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme.
The cartoons were first published on September 30 in a Danish Daily, the Jyllands-Posten. Several days later, a coalition of Muslims in Denmark demanded a meeting with the country’s culture ministry to protest the drawings, but the ministry refused.
The Muslim coalition turned to foreign embassies, and then went on a tour of the Muslim and Arab world, calling attention to the cartoons. On a tour of several Mideast countries between December and January, the group showed the drawings that had been published by the Jyllands-Posten, but they also compiled a document showing other cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, some even more offensive than those the newspaper had published.
The tour prompted governments in the Mideast, including Saudi Arabia, to order boycotts of Danish goods. Soon after, newspapers around the world began republishing the drawings and the issue was brought back into the spotlight.
Newspapers have argued that publishing the cartoons is a matter of free speech, but many Muslims find that argument hard to believe. One 40-year-old Afghani farmer, Sher Mohammed, said Americans and Europeans ”are trying to impose their culture on us by abusing our religion”.
Even further angering Muslims is what they view as an apparent double standard the West holds on free speech. In 2004, France’s media watchdog, the CSA, forced a Lebanese TV network to pull a programme off the airwaves because Jewish groups had complained it was anti-Semitic.
Repeated calls for restraint from all sides, including the European Parliament and Arab and Muslim governments, have so far fallen on deaf ears.
”There are people on both sides that want to ignite this flame,” said Reshwan. — Sapa-AP