Anti-Muslim cartoons
Doug Lorimer's article "Racist Caroons: Why Muslims have the right to be angry" (GLW #656) reflects on Muslim anger against a racist cartoon originally published in Denmark but also reprinted in several European newspapers. It isn't just Muslims who are angry though. Here in Palestine, everyone is angry. The Christians and Communists in Palestine are applying a touch one/touch all mentality to this one.
Remember that the second intifada occurred because of Sharon outside the mosque in Jerusalem. Insulting Mohammed is something that all people in this region take very seriously, not just Muslims. This sort of racism reinforces the daily racism of the occupation which Muslim and non-Muslim Palestinians experience.
Harrison Healy
Ramallah, Palestine
Munich review
Kim Bullimore's review of Munich (GLW #656) is an excellent dissection of the flaws of Steven Spielberg's latest clumsy attempt to explore major world events. But I feel that she has been too kind to Spielberg.
At several points in her review, Bullimore claims that Spielberg has broken with the Hollywood stereotype of Palestinians. This is true and it isn't, in that Munich joins a long line of films in which we are allowed to see Arabs as being human and empathise with them to some extent, and we are even allowed to hear about the crimes committed by the West, but only on the condition that we bear in mind that the people who talk about such things are, underneath it all, terrorists (see, for example, The Little Drum Girl, The Siege and Air Force One).
So we are allowed to see Avner's first target as a literate and articulate man, who has just translated one of the classics of literature into Italian, but only on the condition that we remember that he was implicated (somehow) in a bombing in 1972. We're allowed to hear a young Palestinian man, Ali, talk about the dispossession caused by Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing, but only on the understanding that the words come from the mouth of someone involved with a terrorist movement.
And, in typical Hollywood form, we must never be allowed to forget whose lives are worth more. So we are allowed to fleetingly hear about the Palestinians who died in retaliatory air raids, and we can see the doubts forming in the assassin's minds. But at the end of the film, the faces that haunt Avner in the cheeseball sex scene are not those of the dead Palestinians in the camps, nor of the people that he's killed, but the faces of the dead Israeli athletes.
Simon Tayler
Parramatta, NSW
'Free trade'
We are frequently told by the media and conservative politicians about the virtues of free trade., A high percentage of Australian companies that manufactured and processed food products have been purchased by United States companies. According to Dick Smith (February 5 Sunday Herald): "Australian farmers are pretty well doomed thanks to globalisation."
Free trade does not benefit the worker or the farming community. The policies formulated at International Trade Conferences are made by politicians and the prominent representatives of the business community who are mainly concerned with the profits of large corporations.
The Australian farmer in order to survive requires adequate assistance from the federal government as well as bank loans and overdraft facilities at low rates of interest.
The socialist sector of the labour movement should be campaigning to advance policies to assist the struggling farmer as well as providing assistance to people in country towns who require specialist treatment or surgery that is not available where they reside.
The hammer and sickle symbolises the basic interest and unity of the worker and struggling farmer. We proudly carry this banner on May Day.
We need to publicise policies that correspond to this ideal.
Bernie Rosen
Strathfield, NSW
Kerry Packer
While many Australians are in the process of being led to believe that Kerry Packer was a great Australian, I'm appalled that "our" government has given him the honour of a state memorial service. Rather than being a man who we can be proud of, I think he represented much that is wrong with our current society. For starters, he spent considerable money avoiding as much tax as he could, and given the laxity of our tax laws, that was a huge amount.
Packer didn't stop to think about what was best for Australia because he was too busy thinking about what was best for him. This included using his considerable influence with Liberal and Labor governments to amend the cross media ownership laws so as to make it easier to extend his media empire.
At a time when we should be diversifying our media ownership, the Howard government was helping Packer and Murdoch to do the opposite.
We all need heroes who encourage us to help build a better world: we certainly don't need people like Packer who promote, via their media empires, mindless consumerism.
Ross Edmonds
(via email)
From Green Left Weekly, February 22, 2006.
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