In a multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious society no citizen has a special right not to be offended. That’s an important precondition to keep democracy alive and safeguard the right to free speech. That doesn’t mean that one gratuitously should offend anyone, though there may be situations when there is no other way to express the content of what an individual wants to say.
This is important in a society where groups with different taboos, histories and codes of conduct live side by side, because no one can be obliged to know everything about every other group and individual and take this into account before one speaks publicly.
This is evident from a recent incident in Germany. December 23 the state funded tv-station ARD broadcasted an episode of the popular show Crime Scene (Tatort), in which murder and incest within a modern Alevi family in Germany takes place.
The Alevis belong to a more tolerant and progressive Muslim minority that has been persecuted in the Middle East because they insist on equality between man and woman and the sexes are allowed to pray together. The Alevis preach tolerance towards people of other faiths and ethnic groups. According to the Alevis in the Ottoman Empire the Sunni Muslims circulated an incest libel against them because of their liberal brand of Islam.
Last Sunday 20.000 Alevi Muslims gathered in front of the Cologne cathedral to protest the broadcast of the crime show. The protest was peaceful.
”The Alevis respect freedom of the press and are opposed to any ban on cultural expression. But these values must not be used to insult the dignity of a minority,” Mehmet Ali Toprak, leader of the Alevi community in Germany, told AFP.
Angelina Maccarone, the director of the episode, said that she wasn’t aware of the Alevi incest libel, and explained that she had no intention what so ever to support any prejudice against the Alevis.
Before the broadcast of the episode Alevi community leaders approached the television network to pursuade it to cancel the show. They refused to do so, but in the opening credits they ran a statement making it clear that the episode was fiction.
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1. Piotr Bein:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=K44MUSWWXKKX3QFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/01/nbarclay101.xml
Barclaycard chief quits over Muslims remark
By Richard Alleyne
Last Updated: 2:22am GMT 04/01/2008
A leading bank executive has been forced to quit after making an insulting remark about Muslims.
Marc Howells, who was one of Barclaycard’s leading figures, left his £200,000-a-year job after making the quip during a staff meeting as he discussed quarterly figures.
Colleagues were stunned when he said: “The results were like Muslims - some were good, some were Shi’ite.”
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Offended members of staff complained to senior bosses about the “wholly inappropriate” comment.
Mr Howells, 42, who worked for Barclaycard’s European arm and has a £2?million home in St John’s Wood, north-west London, was forced out last month after negotiating an undisclosed pay-off, classed as “redundancy under compromise”.
A company source said: “No one could quite believe their ears when he came out with his Shi’ite joke. He had a very responsible job in a multinational company.
“What on earth was he thinking of?
“There were a few embarrassed guffaws but everyone except him knew he was for the high jump the moment he said it.
“Once word got round and a complaint was made he was toast.”
Another company insider added: “Part of the deal was that the circumstances of his departure must never be disclosed. But there was no chance of that once his Shi’ite joke started doing the rounds.”
Shi’ites and Sunnis are the followers of the two main branches of the Muslim religion.
A Barclaycard spokesman refused to comment about the departure, but said: “We do not tolerate discrimination.”
“We won’t comment on any individual cases like this.
“Everybody who works here gets guidance of what is right and what is wrong.
“We have a robust approach to equality and diversity and do not tolerate discrimination.
“But we have nothing to add on this particular case.”
Mr Howells refused to comment at his home yesterday.
Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP, said she felt his treatment was harsh.
“I believe that a rebuke would have been sufficient in this case,” she added.
Those who have made racist remarks have escaped with a reprimand in the past.
Most recently the BBC Radio 2 DJ Sarah Kennedy was censured but escaped the sack for a comment on air about how she could not see black men in the dark.
This was despite it being the second time she had been in trouble for similarly offensive statements.
The 57-year-old presenter had been admonished previously for making another racially insensitive gaffe in which she said black men dominate athletics because they are accustomed to being pursued by lions.
Jan 6, 2008 - 5:17 pm 2. Piotr Bein:As a minority immigrant for years, and a member of a nation targeted for “Nazification” by both German negative revisionists and Zionist extremists, I sympathize with the Alevis’ protest.
I believe, to start undoing bad habits in the Western media and give an example of good citizenship, the management and editors of ARD TV should sincerely apologize to the Alvis, not just say that the show was fictional. The undoing could perhaps be in a televised meeting with the Alvis at prime time, giving them floor to talk about the persecution for standing up for gender equality in Islam.
Negative depictions in the media are extremely powerful. Subtle propaganda adds up to a significant final impact on the public opinion. So do co-ordinated, international media campaigns. See what media manipulation of the masses could lead to… [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBo4E77ZXo]
Concerted Serbophobic campaigns in the Western media have made the whole Serbian nation and their political and military leaders into the only and the worst culprit of the recent Balkan wars. This depiction has “justified” US-NATO “humanitarian intervention” on behalf of Bosnian Muslim radicals and then Kosovo Albanian extremists (most of them are Muslims).
I recall a TV movie showing a disgruntled Serb with an A-bomb in his bag, being chased around a US city by the security people. This was the time when several intelligence services have found that extremist Muslims based in the Balkans, empowered by US, German and Vatican policies, had been responsible for terrorist attacks in the West.
Starting decades earlier, misrepresentations by media friendly to the extreme Zionists, have made Poles, the major victim of the Holocaust, into “Nazis” responsible for “Polish concentration camps” and willing helpers of Hitler in Shoah (the annihilation of Jews).
The purpose of the Polonophobic campaign became clear recently: international Jewish organizations lodged a multi billion claim against Poland for pre-WW2 Jewish properties destroyed by the German Nazis. Legitimate heirs are eligible for the restitutions, but the organizations concerned have a history of fraudulent claims and keeping the money for themselves instead of distributing it to the victims.
Many of the claimants are the former extreme Jews (and their offspring) from Jakub Berman’s terror apparatus in Poland. This right hand of Stalin led an equivalent of the Soviet Gulag in post-WW2 Poland. Berman’s terror machine, staffed disproportionately with Jews, killed tens of thousands and persecuted hundreds of thousands of Polish patriots expediently labelled as “fascists”.
Communist Jews were tasked with the liquidations because they had no loyalty to Poland and Stalin did not trust Poles. Piotr Wandycz of Yale University observed: “The average Pole could not but notice in the Stalinist era that the two most powerful men in the country – Berman and Minc – were both Jewish as was the dreaded security official Rozanski.” [New York Review of Books, 18.8.1983, p 51]
Actually, the Polish patriots had fought the German Nazis in WW2, and rescued thousands of Jews despite death penalty for doing so. Israel’s Yad Vashem organization honored some of them, making Poles the most numerous recipient of the “Righteous Among Nations” distinction.
Freedom of speech with due regard for ethnic and religious sensibilities - yes. But not round-the-clock bashing of a target group to demonize it in order to justify unjust wars, mass crimes, takeover of properties and so on.
Jan 6, 2008 - 9:29 pm 3. R. Atkinson:What is particularly despicable about the ARD “Tatort” programme on the Alevi Muslims is that they chose to target what appears to be one of the most tolerant and balanced forms of Islam.
Why did they not target the most reactionary, bigoted and intolerant forms as represented by certain Middle Eastern countries and the kind of British Muslim who encouraged the 7/7 bombers to kill 50 British commuters?
We should hear more from and about the more tolerant forms of Islam. Either they should speak up or the journalists should give them prominence in the news.
However we must realise that this is not easy given the less than helpful words in the Koran about other faiths and the fact that those words are seen (unlike eg the Bible) as the words of God!
Rodney Atkinson
Jan 8, 2008 - 12:41 pmFreenations.freeuk.com