Behind the Muhammad Cartoon Conflagration

What is missing from the analysis and debate on the Danish Muhammed Cartoons Controvery is some background and research on who is benefiting from and perhaps exacerbating this conflict.

It is striking how these cartoons were published in September 2005, but are recently becoming a major global debate and conflagration months later. The origin of the cartoons was in response to a children's book author being unable to find an illustrator for a book about Islam. The illustrators were afraid for their lives. The newspaper asked several cartoonists to illustrate the situation.

My sense is that the author's issue or even the cartoons are not what is behind this global terror-reaction. This is because the inappropriate over-reaction to the cartoons actually bolsters their meaning and matrix.

It may be coincidence, but since the Danish cartoons were published, there was a massive earthquake calamity in Pakistan that seems to be a humanitarian failure of catastrophic proportions. But this is largely off the world's radar screens, except for Pakistan's. Pakistan is a poor muslim nation that depends a great deal on Saudi aid, much of it in the form of education grants and educational litature and propaganda provided to ultra-religious rote memorization madrassas that are like their sibling talibans.

Much more recently, and almost as usual again, hundreds of pilgrims have again died making their Haj pilgrimmage to Mecca. The cartoons' controvery and violent reactions began in earnest after the Haj ended this winter. My sense is that certain extremist and pro-violence elements are taking advantage of Islam to turn attention away from the failure of Saudi Arabia to peacefully and efficiently manage the Haj and safeguard the holy sites of Islam for all muslims to safely and equally worship.

It is much easier to incite spectacular protests and violence to distract the public from the failure of a nation to safeguard its pilgrims, and the failure of the world to assist desperate Pakistanis in their time of need while oil economies reap record windfall profits due to the war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, rightwingers in Europe and the U.S., as well as liberals, get to cluck-cluck about how our civilizations are inevitably clashing. The real clash is rapacious greed, using propaganda to distract and divide the publics of the world to the benefit of the security-military-oil-industrial-complex, while the rest of us pay higher prices in war blood or money for higher commodity costs. Meanwhile poor muslims are regularly stomped and snuffed out while trying to 'stone the devil' in Mecca due to poor crowd control and insufficient hospitality.

According to BBC radio today (Feb. 7, 2006), the cartoon protesters also have fake cartoons depicting pigs in association with muslims, further inciting people, since pigs are dirty animals in Islam. This is reminiscent of the cartoons of pigs and jews that are often used to incite the public in Saudi Arabia and Egypt through their state controlled media. I hope the press is able to investigate the origin of these pig cartoons, and to see if they come from the Saudi-Wahhabi/Salafi nexus.

One hand washes the other. The Saudis profit as war crisis pricing revenues gush in. Their partners in religious extremism profit from Saudi largesse in exchange for spreading inciteful propaganda which can possibly unite muslims across the world against common enemies. Saudi customers, such as military companies, provide them with expensive goods. Right-wingers in Europe get to shut their countries to immigration or to restrict muslims, and the US for a change gets to get a lot of negative attention away from it while the Iraqi war lumbers on expensively and we seem to be stumbling into war with Iran and maybe Syria in 2006-2007 in time for the Congressional elections and the ensuing Presidential primaries.