Raddatz-Watch: What a team! "Islam expert" Hans-Peter Raddatz joins forces with torture-defender editor-in-chief of Die Welt Roger Köppel to provide some "insightful commentary" on the Muhammad cartoon controversy. Die Welt was the first German newspaper to publish the inflammatory drawings, out of "solidarity" with the right wing Danish daily Jyllands-Posten. Here Raddatz informs readers that Islam is incompatible with religious tolerance:
Denn der Islam ist (noch) keine Religion im westlichen Sinne, weil er keine Religionsfreiheit und damit auch keine Pressefreiheit kennt.
This of course is nonsense, since the Qu’ran honors human rights and the respect for all peoples no less than the Christian and the Hebrew Bible. (Once again, I strongly recommend the book by Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God, as an important corrective for the misinformation propagated by Raddatz, Köppel, et al. )
Unfortunately a CDU politician in Baden Wurttemburg, Willi Stächele, repeated the nonsense he had read from Raddatz – namely, that the Qu’ran is incompatible with democracy = and on the radio urged the deportation of Muslims from Germany.
Meanwhile the Washington correspondent for Die Zeit – Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff – has a piece in the Washington Post where he takes offense at efforts by some in the US to lecture Europeans about freedom of the press:
Much of the U.S. reporting about the fracas made it appear as if Europeans just don’t get it — again. They struggle with immigration. They struggle with religion. They struggle with respect for minorities. And in the end they find their cities burning, as evidenced in Paris. Bill Clinton even detected an "anti-Islamic prejudice" and equated it with a previous "anti-Semitic prejudice."
The former president has turned the argument upside down. In this jihad over humor, tolerance is disdained by people who demand it of others. The authoritarian governments that claim to speak on behalf of Europe’s supposedly oppressed Muslim minorities practice systematic repression against their own religious minorities. They have radicalized what was at first a difficult question. Now they are asking not for respect but for submission. They want non-Muslims in Europe to live by Muslim rules. Does Bill Clinton want to counsel tolerance toward intolerance?
On Friday the State Department found it appropriate to intervene. It blasted the publication of the cartoons as unacceptable incitement to religious hatred. It is a peculiar moment when the government of the United States, which likes to see itself as the home of free speech, suggests to European journalists what not to print.
It is the total hypocrisy for the US State Department to lecture others about religious hatred, when President Bush and Vice President Cheney continue to speak of "Islamo-Fascism" and warn about an Islamic Caliphate that will take over the world while their neo-conservative propagandists write inflammatory articles comparing the Qu’ran to Mein Kampf.
