TOON: Sunday's Doonesbury (Meanwhile, In Iraq...)

[Hissyspit]

[Bucky]

1. Perpetuating a stereotype about middle easterners

Their bloodfeuds run back a few years, but not that many. The "hundreds of years of conflict" meme makes no sense to people who come from that region of the world. To my experience, they can usually cite real grievances that run to the last decade--traitors & Iranian spies or sympathizers during the war with Iran, Ba'ath party members who used police connections to hide or even commit felony crimes, and of course many examples of the troubles unleashed--from robberies to kidnappings to ethnic cleansings (aka, stealing someone's house)--since we shocked and awed our way into control of that country.

[JackRiddler]

2. Agreed... this one made me angry

Trudeau's playing up the new propaganda about Iraq, which is that the invasion was wrong, yes, but the problem now is that it has "unleashed" the animal urges of the Iraqi ethnic factions, and "we" are simply turning into the bystanders in a "civil war." This is a disgusting attempt to blame the victims of the US war of aggression and to absolve "us" of responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It's as though US forces did not first destroy the society and its physical infrastructure, set the factions fighting each other, arm the death squads, and probably carry out many of the bombings and night-time executions themselves. Certainly US forces continue to bomb and kill hundreds of people from the air, on a daily basis, and the lack of attention on this is one of the major ongoing cover-ups.

[Cocoa]

4. and the ethnic strife was exacerbated by imperialism

the British involvement in Iraq played a role, and this follows a pattern.

Rwanda for example...

http://www.wsws.org/news/1994/jul1994/rwan-j29.shtml

<snip>

German colonialism, followed by Belgian, exacerbated and institutionalised the divisions between the two groups. The Germans attempted to use the Tutsis as colonial administrators, introducing racial theories about their supposed superiority over the Hutus and even their "Aryan" origin.

This system of racial classification had no more basis in science than the master race theories propagated by the Nazis a few decades later. The two groups speak the same language, share the same customs and a common land. Inter-marriage between them is commonplace.

The move toward independence in 1962 did not lift the burden of this legacy of colonialism. Instead independence was accompanied by a campaign on the part of Hutu leaders to settle accounts with the Tutsis. The racist theories of the Germans were adopted, albeit in an inverted form, by sections of the aspiring Hutu bourgeoisie, who attributed a foreign origin to the Tutsis and advocated their expulsion.

When a Hutu-dominated regime came to power in Rwanda, it ran a system resembling apartheid, with "tribal" identity cards and an ethnic quota system limiting the access of Tutsis to schools and government jobs.

[Ian_rd]

5. This is more than a just a stereotype, it's based on cultural fact

The ethnic groups of the Middle East are based on a tribal system which goes back thousands of years. One of the ways many of these tribes handled the tensions between each other was that if, for example, a Sunni killed a Shia, then a Shia may rightfully kill ANY Sunni in retaliation as a means to settle the grievance.

While this might have been effective to get all tribal members to police each other (because, of course, if your buddy killed a member of an opposing tribe, you or your family could end up being the target of the retaliation), it also led to problems, especially if a supposedly retaliatory kill is disputed. Such a situation could lead to one murder, then another one in retaliation, but then the other tribe said the first murder never occurred so they enact their own retaliatory kill, and on and on until you've been killing each other for hundreds of years and no one remembers why.

The above cartoon is based on a factual cultural phenomenon of muslim society and in my opinion deserves serious criticism.

In addition, I've often wondered if this old aspect of tribal relations contributes to islamic terrorism and its practice of targeting civilians. In this tribal mindset, wouldn't it be acceptable to kill members of the "American tribe" in retaliation for deaths of the "Islamic tribe," even if the American victims had nothing to do with the original murders of Islamic people?

[intaglio]

3. Exaggeration, extreme exaggeration, is a part of the cartoonists art

Yes, it can lead to stereotyping but it can serve a purpose. In this case I am aware that grudges can be held for centuries - even here in the UK. Of course any "evidence" I might have of that is purely anecdotal but still ...