Real riots in a cartoon world

 

The bullet entered at his shoulder, carved a bloody channel of destruction through his left lung, before and exiting, in explosive rage, though his back. The force spun him off his feet and into the dust of the half-completed sidewalk. There he lay for nearly an hour before unconsciousness mercifully took him. Around him screaming people dove first this way and then that, whilst burning cars and flashing red lights, eerily smothered by the smoke and tear gas, competed with the loud speakers to overwhelm any sense of human proportion. The occasional crack of gunshot punctuated the fear soaked atmosphere with fresh bursts of adrenaline.

 

One building was burnt to the ground and ten people lost their lives.

 

The occasion, we are told in every banner headline, a cartoon riot in Libya. The cause was apparently due to an Italian politician in a fascist government, he sported a tea-shirt representing Mohammed as a terrorist. The press who, after-all, are in a difficult position, for they find that not only are they the subjects of their own reports but also instigators of the very subject they report, pounced on Roberto Calderoli (the politician in question) with all the finesse of a drowning man clutching at straws. Here was man who could lift the burden of accusations and shift the responsibility for the cartoon deaths, not only that but he was a senior member of a European government.

 

Far from absolving any accountability for impartiality, the move uncovered an unlikely alliance and shone the clear light of reason on the whole debate. The message was as clear cut as it was unpalatable - those who support the right for free speech are, in fact, right wing nutters of organisations with names like 'anti-immigration Northern League party'. Mr Calderoli, the unlikely minister for reform, wore a look of gormlous greed, strikingly in contrast to the chic thugs who surrounded him, as he announced that he had suddenly developed a sense of responsibility but was unrepentant of his act. "I resigned out of a sense of responsibility and certainly not because it was demanded by the government and the opposition" he smirked and went on to add his own banal clarification of his actions by adding "I don't intend to allow further shameful manipulation of the kind which has been recently been brought to bear against me, and against the Northern League, from members of the government." Regardless of the intriguing inner mechanisms of the Italian political theatre, which are bewilderingly opaque even to those who are enmeshed in them, his actions led to the deaths of ten people and added petrol to the already raging flames of a potential world war.

 

Whilst Libya burns, British troops are fighting to quell the disturbances in Afghanistan, 20,000 Muslims take to the streets of London and Pakistan erupts in bloodshed. "Why", agonises the media, "do Muslims act violently over a cartoon?" Roberto Calderoli and others like him provide the answer - in a nut shell: it is the Mad Arabs. The threat is apparently so great that nothing but the violent intervention of the God and democracy can save us. A week before he bared his underwear bombshell, Calderoli had petitioned for the usage of force against the Muslims and the intervention of Pope Benedict XVI to form a "coalition"; needed, apparently, to keep the immigrants out.

 

Immigrants, broadly defined as people who have been bombed, gassed tortured or starved by the west, it seems, are arriving in hoards, degenerating and destroying our higher culture. The logic is chillingly consistent with Nazi propaganda and the ideology is echoed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the West, in Chechen by the Russians and in Palestine by the Israelis. War, suffering and profits occur in equal measure where those who hold, an albeit more subtle version of, Calderoli's philosophy wield power.

 

From Auschwitz to the American Abu Ghraib the result is equally consistent.

 

It appears that free speech, as a right to say what we like in a responsible way, is not the same as the right of might to physically annihilate any argument.

 

As long as this continues to be the paradigm of the west, the two will be inextricably confused.