While I'm being political

For something like the Danish cartoon controversy to have its flames fanned like it did, it had to be convenient news for a lot of people: first, for the ones who compiled the dossier, misters Akkari and Laban, I suspect they could very well have been believing their own bullshit, not merely wanting to get on the map.

The numerous other people involved, though: what did they get out of it? I couldn't quite figure it out, until I saw this post by Angry As'ad, a Lebanese professor at Berkeley:

This is absurd. In Arabic newspapers, some Western companies took out ads to declare that they are not Danish. This while Arab governments are doing business with Israeli companies. Personally, I boycott Israel and Israeli products, but will not boycott Denmark or Danish companies.

Here we see a professed standard (enmity towards Israel) not being translated into action, presumably because Israel has enough industrial power that a boycott would be seriously impractical. Railing against a perceived enemy that they're not particularly dependent on thus provides not only a handy outlet of frustration, but also a cover for this hypocrisy. How convenient.

On the other side, we have a class of people who believe that Islam is a scourge, but keep on buying colossal amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia. How to resolve this uncomfortable hypocrisy? Why, you bray loudly on your blog. Feels good, doesn't it.

Of course, being too obvious about blanket-hating an entire faith would be distasteful and in fact might get you arrested. But support Denmark, that's a pleasantly vague message that does most of its work through connotations. Sound familiar? It's all part of the war on specifics.

Support Denmark. Not support Jyllands-Posten, mind. That's a bit difficult to spell, what with all those wacky Danish letters in it, for the unwashed who already have trouble spelling free speech. Instead, J-P is represented by the entirety of Denmark, even though all the Danish government did was fail to take the extraordinary action of censoring newspapers. But c'mon, it's not like Denmark is all that big a country? How could they possibly need more than one newspaper, am I right? AM I RIGHT? Yeeeah.

This substituting the whole of Denmark for a Danish newspaper might be seen as a simple reaction to the fact that the boycotts were of Danish products generally. But given the average blogtard's propensity for tribalism and all these people who have trouble seeing that Europe even has individual countries in it... no, I don't think so.

With freedom of speech thus reduced to an excuse for a hot-air football match, people happily donned jerseys labelled "Denmark" and "outraged Muslims". By the time news emerged that Jyllands-Posten had previously refused charicatures of Jesus for fear they would offend, everyone were too busy thumping their chests to notice. Perhaps they had forgotten the name of the paper. Perhaps they had forgotten that there ever was a paper to begin with. The original circumstances merrily shed, it became the meme of The Danish Cartoon Controversy. Nevar forget!

Then the coarse lumping-together seriously backfired — or it would have, if people generally didn't have the attention span of gnats. In the case of Erik Haaest, the arts council that awarded him the money genuinely is part of the Danish government, making the whole-for-the-part actually somewhat justified.

Well, I certainly feel safer knowing that free speach is "defended" by a gang of tribalistic attention-deficit cases, their defence contingent on the opposition being someone they already hate. Don't you?

[Technorati Danish cartoons GSAVE NEVAR FORGET TWAT angryarab atheist bastardry blogtards cartoon controversy chest-thumping free speach global struggle memory hole metonomy never forget post-mortem equine flagellation soundbite culture vitriol war on memory war on specifics]