Sunday, February 05, 2006
Protest against caricatures of the Prophet
Hello good morning and welcome to Cybersurf – this week coming to you directly from our studios in Parliament, Cape Town. I am Steven Lang.
And to get some synergy going between the SABC news dot com web site and our special parliamentary broadcasts this week. We are putting up a special section on the SABC news dot com web site where you will be able to have a look at what we are doing. In the features section we will give you an idea of who we are going to interview and what we are going to discuss on the after eight debate.
So remember that – go to special features on sabcnews.com and you will find the section by scrolling down the left hand side navigation bar.
Let us change focus now to one of the more dramatic events of this past weekend. Protestors in Damascus – the capital of Syria attacked the embassies of Denmark and Norway because they objected to caricatures of the prophet Mohammed that were printed in certain newspapers.
The attacks and weekend protests in Lebanon were triggered by a set of twelve cartoons published in a Danish newspaper – Jyllands-Posten - in September last year. They were subsequently carried by one or two Scandinavian publications without provoking a huge reaction. Last week Muslim reaction ratcheted up several notches when French, Spanish and German newspapers republished some of the caricatures.
However, in my view, the scale of the protests would have been far less if these drawings had not been widely distributed on the Internet. While there is no doubt that the perceived insult to Islam greatly offended those Muslims who read Danish newspapers, it is unlikely that the cartoons would have enraged the crowds in Damascus and Beirut.
Without the Internet’s ability to penetrate borders, no more than a handful of people on the streets of Damascus would have known about the cartoons. We can therefore conclude that the existence of the Internet was at least indirectly responsible for the anti-Scandinavian rage sweeping through Muslim communities.
Is this boiling down to an argument against the Internet, or perhaps for facilitating censorship on the Internet as Google and Microsoft have just done in China?
On the contrary, it is an argument against the gagging order imposed this weekend on a South African newspaper. The pre-publication censorship of a newspaper considering the publication of cartoons is an exercise in futility because anyone who wants to see the cartoons can go to any one of dozens of web sites and blogs that have already put the caricatures online. If a listener would like to find the addresses of some of these sites, please check out the Cybersurf blog at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com
If you object to such drawings then please do not go to the Cybersurf blog.
The unfolding reaction to the cartoons is extra-ordinary – the UN is to investigate the publication of the caricatures; Sudan has boycotted Danish products and CNN – that great bastion for free speech showed pictures of the cartoons on air – but pixilated the images out – and the station admitted that it was doing so not because it was against the dissemination of the caricatures but because it was afraid.
And that wraps up today’s edition of Cybersurf. Thanks for listening and please tune in again next Monday for more on the best of the web.
Related links:
And to get some synergy going between the SABC news dot com web site and our special parliamentary broadcasts this week. We are putting up a special section on the SABC news dot com web site where you will be able to have a look at what we are doing. In the features section we will give you an idea of who we are going to interview and what we are going to discuss on the after eight debate.
So remember that – go to special features on sabcnews.com and you will find the section by scrolling down the left hand side navigation bar.
Let us change focus now to one of the more dramatic events of this past weekend. Protestors in Damascus – the capital of Syria attacked the embassies of Denmark and Norway because they objected to caricatures of the prophet Mohammed that were printed in certain newspapers.
The attacks and weekend protests in Lebanon were triggered by a set of twelve cartoons published in a Danish newspaper – Jyllands-Posten - in September last year. They were subsequently carried by one or two Scandinavian publications without provoking a huge reaction. Last week Muslim reaction ratcheted up several notches when French, Spanish and German newspapers republished some of the caricatures.
However, in my view, the scale of the protests would have been far less if these drawings had not been widely distributed on the Internet. While there is no doubt that the perceived insult to Islam greatly offended those Muslims who read Danish newspapers, it is unlikely that the cartoons would have enraged the crowds in Damascus and Beirut.
Without the Internet’s ability to penetrate borders, no more than a handful of people on the streets of Damascus would have known about the cartoons. We can therefore conclude that the existence of the Internet was at least indirectly responsible for the anti-Scandinavian rage sweeping through Muslim communities.
Is this boiling down to an argument against the Internet, or perhaps for facilitating censorship on the Internet as Google and Microsoft have just done in China?
On the contrary, it is an argument against the gagging order imposed this weekend on a South African newspaper. The pre-publication censorship of a newspaper considering the publication of cartoons is an exercise in futility because anyone who wants to see the cartoons can go to any one of dozens of web sites and blogs that have already put the caricatures online. If a listener would like to find the addresses of some of these sites, please check out the Cybersurf blog at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com
If you object to such drawings then please do not go to the Cybersurf blog.
The unfolding reaction to the cartoons is extra-ordinary – the UN is to investigate the publication of the caricatures; Sudan has boycotted Danish products and CNN – that great bastion for free speech showed pictures of the cartoons on air – but pixilated the images out – and the station admitted that it was doing so not because it was against the dissemination of the caricatures but because it was afraid.
And that wraps up today’s edition of Cybersurf. Thanks for listening and please tune in again next Monday for more on the best of the web.
Related links:
- SABCnews.com - Feature on Parliamentary briefings
- Die Welt
- Jyllands Posten
- Stuff New Zealand
- Cryptome - caricatures
- SANEF
