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ICONOCLASH
Sprache. Kultur. Deutschland.
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ICONOCLASH
ARTICLES, SPEECHES AND EXCERPTS FROM PANEL DISCUSSIONS
IN WASHINGTON DC, 2015-2016
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THANK YOU TO:
PETER WEIBEL - ZKM KARLSRUHE, GERMANY
&
JAMES BARBOUR, HENRI BARKEY, NORMA BROADWATER, SYLVIA BLUME, KATHY CULPIN,
GEERT DE PROOST, CHARLOTTE GRANT, KENDRA HEIDEMAN, ROSEMARY JOYCE, EMMANUEL
KATTAN, TOM MCINTYRE, ALEXANDER NAGEL, ALEXIS NICHOLSON, ALEXANDER PAWLITSCHEK,
MARTIN PERSCHLER, TIMOTHY RIVERA, PAUL SMITH, MELISSA WEAR, CONSTANCE WHITESIDE,
LINDA ZACHRISON, NUSKA ZAKRAJSEK - USA
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“ICONOCLASM IS WHEN WE KNOW
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE ACT OF BREAKING
AND WHAT THE MOTIVATIONS FOR WHAT APPEARS
AS A CLEAR PROJECT OF DESTRUCTION ARE;
ICONOCLASH, IS WHEN ONE DOES NOT KNOW,
ONE HESITATES, ONE IS TROUBLED BY AN
ACTION FOR WHICH THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW,
WITHOUT FURTHER ENQUIRY, WHETHER IT IS
DESTRUCTIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE.”1 -- BRUNO LATOUR
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
42 Ruins along the Nile
62 Pornographic Iconoclasm in
by Monica Hanna
Terrorist Propaganda: Islamic State Cinema and Audience Reactions
by Samuel Andrew Hardy
44 Looted Goods from the Near East: Attacks on the Cultural Heritage of 10 FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
Humanity
64 Rewiring the Islamic Net: Creating by Iris Gerlach
an Alternative to the Online
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More Alienation, Please.
Propaganda of IS
A Critique of Cultural Violence
46 Thinking on Policies
by Rüdiger Lohlker
Presentation by Slavoj Žižek
by Neil Brodie
68 Iconoclash: It’s The Clash, Stupid
20 Satire and Freedom of Expression
48 Trafficking Cultural Materials –
by Ben O’Loughlin
by Gisela Vetter-Liebenow
Appropriation of Mankind’s
Property
70 Destruction as Image-Act 23 Cartoons and Taboos – Dancing in
Panel Discussion
Remapping History
a Visual Minefield
with Tess Davis, Iris Gerlach,
Panel Discussion
Panel Discussion
Douglas Boin, and Alexander Nagel
with Honey Al-Sayed, Christian with Lecttr, Matt Wuerker,
Christensen, Nadia Oweidat, and
Ann Telnaes, and KAL
Rüdiger Lohlker
56 PICTURE POLICY 31
Can/Must Good Art Be Politically Correct?
76 PEACEBUILDING 57 Introduction
Reading and Discussion with
Salman Rushdie
77 Introduction
58 9/11 and After: Old Pictorial
Patterns and New Challenges
78 Countering Violent Extremism –
by Charlotte Klonk
36 CULTURAL HERITAGE
A New Era of Peacebuilding
Panel Discussion
37 Protecting Cultural Heritage Against 60 Terrorist Imagery Meets the
with Courtney A. Beale and
Marketplace of Ideas
Illicit Trade of Art Trafficking
Ben O’Loughlin
by Christian Christensen
by Tasoula Georgiou Hadjitofi
40 Reformatting Space: The Self
Proclaimed “Islamic State’s”
Strategy of Destroying Cultural
Heritage and Committing Genocide
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INTRODUCTION
by Nico Prucha
by Wilfried Eckstein
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INTRODUCTION
BY WILFRIED ECKSTEIN,
GOETHE-INSTITUT WASHINGTON /EUNIC WASHINGTON, DC CLUSTER
Iconoclash is when one does not know
what and why destruction takes place. In
Washington, some European cultural bearers
wanted to better understand how we all
have come to be involved in a conflict with
terrorists and their ideology, and what implications there are for our Western values
and our international cultural work.
We conceived this panel series two months
after the January 7, 2015 attacks against
the office of the satirical magazine Charlie
Hebdo. Western countries began to step up
their surveillance and military force against
terror in Europe and the Middle East. We
surmised that even if military strikes would
claim success after years of combating terrorism, the motivation behind and the ideology giving direction to this fight probably
would not easily disintegrate. But what do
we actually know about terrorism’s whereabouts and its forces of growth? These are
legitimate questions for people in the cultural
field, who are expected to think and act
within the limits of cultural reflection.
Today, eighteen months later, terrorists have
multiplied the death toll in the Middle East
and expanded their fearful presence in
Europe. They have attacked public places
in cities such as Paris and Brussels. In the
Middle East and in Africa, they have continued to humiliate, abduct, enslave, torture
and kill thousands of people.
In the name of their ideology, Islamic
State/IS/Da’esh/al-Qaida – in short, jihadist
extremists - have declared war against
cultural manifestations and people who do
not share their beliefs.2 In Central Asia,
the Middle East and Africa, their wrath has
turned against both the past and the present,
against representatives and guardians of
culture and learning, and against churches,
mosques, temples, shrines, and antiquities
in museums, on sites and in the ground,
from Bamian to Timbuktu, from Mosul to
Palmyra. They have destroyed and killed in
the name of a religion and their notions of
justice, truth and political order. Within the
framework of ideological confrontation,
their acts and their propaganda have contested European and Western values such as
the dignity of the human being, the freedom
of artistic expression and the integrity of
cultural heritage.
In the meantime, the coalition of armed forces
has intensified the battle against terrorist
strongholds by air raids, drones and boots
on the ground. Although progress in fighting
IS is reported almost daily, it seems that the
terrorist virus is spreading and will not be
extinguished by military intervention.
Elements of culture and pride have been involved in this fight from the start. To learn
more about the complexity of this conflict, we
wanted to approach it with a set of cultural
questions and to explore visual forms and
textual layers of terrorist propaganda through
pictures, artifacts, language and media.
We held ten panel discussions, seven at
New York University’s Brademas Center
Washington DC (NYU), two at the European
Union Delegation to the United States, and
one at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars. Those at NYU were webstreamed and recorded. These recordings
have been transcribed, shortened, and edited
to become part of this documentation. Other
sources for this brochure were the articles
we requested and received from scholars.
They were originally placed on the website
of EUNIC, the European Union National
Institutes of Culture, and are reprinted here.
All the materials have now been organized
into four chapters: Freedom of Expression,
Cultural Heritage, Picture Policy, and Peacebuilding. The publication and its distribution
online serve the same purpose as the panel
series itself: to review truth and falsity of values in both a reflective and self-reflective
mode and to support an informed dialogue
for international cooperation and peacebuilding with the aim to break the perpetual
cycle of terror and trauma.
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
After the first wave of solidarity with Charlie
Hebdo had ebbed, a number of people
demanded that lines should be drawn with
respect to “acceptable” and “unacceptable”
forms of provocation. Is there such a thing
as “acceptable” or “unacceptable” satire?
Thinkers and journalists have been threatened for expressing their thoughts, cartoonists have been killed because of their art, a
writer has been persecuted with a death threat
for more than a quarter century. Each of
them has suffered repercussions because
their works and words shed light on to
injustice or other contradictions between
public promises and plain realities. But their
independent thinking opens up new perspectives and inspires public discourse. Robert
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Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” may be
quoted here to show what art does for us:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
To observe and explore a different path is
how artists, writers and thinkers interact
with the world. For this both they and we,
the audience, need freedom of expression.
This right and those who make use of it have
come under severe attack by supposedly
religious extremists. The alleged role of
religion in the attacks reminds Europeans
of a series of wars at the beginning of the
modern era. The Reformation had just left
behind the old order of the Middle Ages when
territorial claims and religious truths amalgamated into one of the most destructive
epochs in European history. Lands and
territories were laid waste, villages and
urban centers destroyed, no family was left
unharmed. Not a church was spared the wrath
of iconoclasm. The Eighty Years War in the
Netherlands and the Thirty Years’ War in Central
Europe ended with the Peace of Westphalia.
This international agreement introduced
secular law and order as a new paradigm
for a peaceful neighborhood of communities
and states. One hundred and fifty years
later, the American Revolution built a new
world on the promise of the freedom of expression, which implied the freedom for everybody to express and live according to her/
his religious beliefs. Another one hundred
and fifty years later, Freedom of Expression
became part of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1947). The dominance of the
secular and its promise of freedom have
been challenged by members of different
faiths, but until recently not to the extent of
being uncompromising towards the secular
order or other religions.
The heritage of the Enlightenment has been
challenged by the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
German art historian Horst Bredekamp
expressed it eloquently:
“Whoever avails himself of the freedom
upon which our ability to criticize is based
will one day fear for his life. The ability to
withstand this and to find institutions that
support this freedom is of utmost priority. We
are confronted with a fundamental rethinking: freedom of expression can cost us our
life. Time will tell what consequences this
has – will there be policies limiting images
in order to prevent conflict? Or will we
withstand this in the press, at universities,
in art and politics?”3
To find out how committed we are to the
long-term obligation of a peaceful societal
co-existence, we invited outstanding cultural bearers Slavoj Žižek, Salman Rushdie
and cartoonists from Europe and the US:
LECTRR, KAL, Matt Wuerker and Ann Talnaes.
We asked them to share their views on the
Freedom of Expression and how they react
to the challenges posed by religious extremism and terror.
We asked Salman Rushdie a question which
reflected an often-heard uncertainty in the
exercise and defense of freedom of expression: “Can or must art be politically correct?”
He – who has thought about this question
more than probably anybody else - unwaveringly answers: “No!”
We asked Slavoj Žižek how the best of European and Western culture can be strengthened and made resilient against the challenges of jihadist terror. He, who had written
profoundly and presciently in 2002 about
the context and the consequences of 9/11,4
pleads: “More Alienation Please!” for the
conscious development of the modern as a
culture with long-term commitments.
We asked four famous cartoonists how they
face the repercussions and threats from
exercising their Freedom of Expression.
KAL answers with a response which we employed as the title of the event: “Cartoons and
taboos are like dancing in a visual minefield.”
CULTURAL HERITAGE PROPERTY OF HUMANKIND
Jihadist extremist groups like al-Qaida and
IS are waging international war. Houses,
settlements and cities are being destroyed,
people murdered, cultural sites ransacked.
Militants in Mali damaged shrines in Timbuktu, while Da’esh destroyed the ancient
Assyrian city of Nimrud, temples in Palmyra
and many more historical, cultural and
religious sites. These acts have caused an
outcry among archaeologists, art historians,
and the general public. UNESCO and the
United Nations Security Council condemned
the “barbaric acts,” stating, “We see clearly
how terrorists use the destruction of heritage in their strategy to destabilize and
manipulate populations so that they can
assure their own domination.”5
Members of IS have also engaged in grave
robbing and illicit trade of antiquities, not
only of past civilizations or Western cultures
but of the history of Islam as well.6 We hold
that legal provenance and legal trade in antiquities are of essential importance for both
gaining knowledge about the history of
humankind and for the preservation of this
heritage. However, the interplay between
robbery and international trade has aggravated our access to knowledge about
humanity’s cultural heritage.
For this chapter, we asked experts from various
cultural studies fields to share their views
on the value of history and heritage and its
need for protection. What makes objects
and sites part of the cultural heritage of
humankind? How do people living around
those highly valued sites actually relate to
this kind of heritage? Illicit trade is big business: who is involved and what can be done
to disrupt the interaction between supply
and demand?
Nico Prucha offers us a reading of texts in the
historical and geographical context where
IS operates. He connects the dots from the
dissolution of the Ottoman Empire one
9
Introduction
hundred years ago to an agenda to rectify
history, bring liberation and restore dignity
and history to the post-colonial order.
Iris Gerlach sheds light on the archaeological
situation in Yemen and observes how
theologically-legitimated warfare which aims
for political dominance bombs people and
cultural heritage. With respect to the illicit
trade in antiquities, she rejects the oftenheard suggestion that the West and significant institutions like museums and government should participate in this trade as an
act of saving’ antiquities from the cultural
vandalism of IS. “Quite the contrary,” she says:
dealers and collectors “are building up the
base for an illegal antiquities market.”
Neil Brodie highlights the financial importance
to IS of the illicit trade of antiquities and asks
what the appropriate government responses
should be. He concludes: “We must focus and
work together to eliminate the demand.”
PICTURE POLICY: DESTRUCTION
AS IMAGE-ACT FOR REMAPPING
HISTORY
Propaganda and imagery are integral to terrorism today. Their production by al-Qaida
and IS (Islamic State) in the last four years
has achieved a competitive quality and displays a bewildering resilience to counterterrorist measures. Made available to audiences
globally, this digital media exhibits a new
dimension of immediacy of crime and
ostentation. Following the searing images of
the collapsing Twin Towers, videos of trials,
beheadings, fighting and destruction have
borrowed formats from films and games.
The execution of people and the destruction
of cultural places have been used to produce
a self-righteous culture of annihilation.
While conventional video games make use of
historic events as a source of entertainment,
terrorists’ videos can successfully claim the
indivisibility of their acts of annihilation and
their ownership of the imagery and ideology
of this history. The failure of anti-terror
propaganda such as the U.S. State Depart-
ment’s video “Welcome to the Islamic State
Land (ISIS/ISIL)” begs the question of how
foreign cultural policy can meaningfully respond to the negative heritage of ideology
and imagery of terrorism.
We invited scholars who work in the field of
picture policy to share their knowledge with
us. They graciously responded and offered
their insights and thoughts.
Charlotte Klonk describes the traditional
ethical pattern of Western media reporting
on terror attacks and compares it with the
recent departure in pictorial communication,
which forces us to reconsider our own role
and the moral implications in the consumption and circulation of images. Christian
Christensen shifts the focus from journalistic
ethics and responsibility to broader questions
of free speech and corporate interests in
information. Samuel Hardy looks into the
making of propaganda videos and their
placement according to the tactical aims
of IS. Rüdiger Lohlker coined the term
“theology of violence” for the ideology of
al-Qaida and IS. He highlights that, while
governments in the region have been pledging for decades to erode the borders of the
Sykes-Picot Agreement, IS was able to do so
within the matter of a few months, complete
with tabloid-styled reporting of the event
for their electronic English-language outlets.
Ben O’Loughlin scrutinizes the religious
pretense that serves as a guide for political
dealings, and reveals the Islamic State’s
pragmatic interests, which yield an iconography without imagery.
Two additional voices were heard at a panel
discussion with Rüdiger Lohlker and Christian
Christensen, Honey Al Sayed and Nadia Oweidat.
They illustrated how the Internet presents
people in the Middle East with opportunities
to weaken the paternal power of the authoritarian regimes. Access to information has made
the world more transparent, opened up new
ways for artistic freedom and criticism, and
created an alternative world which will push
back against IS. This was a hopeful counter-
point, a plea for another type of report from
the Middle East.
COUNTERING VIOLENT
EXTREMISM - TOWARDS A
NEW ERA OF PEACEBUILDING
The series improved our understanding of
the cultural complexity and the role of media
in the rise of jihadist extremism. It also made
us more aware of the roles we all play in this
struggle. Extremists’ conquests of regions
and cities, during which they harm people,
annihilate memory, remap geopolitics and
impose apocalyptic imagery and narratives,
have paved the way for their ideas of order
and submission. Their apocalyptic imagery
and declamations are propagated through
social media, thereby gaining international
attraction and rele-vance. To overcome
the persisting threat requires more than
military hardware – it requires a completely
different approach to peacekeeping and
peacebuilding.
The final panel in April 2016 returned us to
our starting point. We asked what is needed
to achieve lasting peace in this region, what
foreign cultural policy can do to support
peacebuilding. To get the most updated
views on Western players in this field, we
invited Ben O’Loughlin, a British academic
in the study of power and influence in geopolitics, and Courtney Beale, a practitioner
in public diplomacy from the White House.
What are the lessons learned from over
twenty years of interacting with jihadist
extremism? How do we bridge the gaps of
disappointment, trust and understanding?
How do we build dialogue and cooperation
in a way that overcomes historic trauma
and achieves lasting regional and international peace? What can the arts or other
means of cultural interaction contribute to
overcoming the dialogue bottleneck?
This panel concluded the series Iconoclash
2015/2016, organized by EUNIC Washington DC
and supported by the EU Delegation to the U.S. n
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FREEDOM
OF
EXPRESSION
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MORE ALIENATION, PLEASE.
A CRITIQUE OF CULTURAL VIOLENCE
PRESENTATION BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
INTRODUCTION
BY WILFRIED ECKSTEIN
The attacks on Charlie Hebdo on January 7,
2015 triggered a wave of empathy as well
as shows of solidarity with the victims and
in support of freedom of expression and
opinion. Yet in addition, and in good old European tradition, they also triggered critical
self-questioning about the causes and circumstances of the terror. Slavoj Žižek’s short
but powerful essay “Islam and Modernity:
Some Blasphemic Reflexions”1 provided important impulses for this debate in general,
and our series of events in particular.
Žižek critically notes that jihadist Islamism
isn’t fundamentalist in the sense that it offers
a sole true path to happiness, for if it were,
it would have to be free of resentment and
jealousy as well as utterly indifferent towards
the infidels’ way of life. Instead, those “terrorist
pseudo-fundamentalists” are “deeply bothered,
fascinated, mesmerized” by the infidels’ sinful
lives. You can sense that they are fighting
their own temptations when they’re fighting
the sinful others. Some of them even grew
up in Western industrial countries or have felt
the impact of globali-zation in their own lives.
To Islamist fundamentalists, Western liberalism is first and foremost a provocation.
Žižek writes: “The liberal West is so intolerable to them because it not only practices
exploitation and rule of terror, but ironically
presents this brutal reality in the guise of
its exact opposite, as freedom, equality and
democracy.” These circumstances make it
“impossible” for a Muslim “to remain silent
in the face of blasphemy.” According to
Žižek, the problem is not so much cultural
differences between the West and Islam, but
rather the fact that fundamentalists “have
already secretly internalized our standards
and use them as a benchmark for themselves.”
With this self-reflective take on our enlightened heritage, Žižek denounces the failures
of the West to credibly make these values
of freedom, equality and democracy come
alive – at home as well as in the context of
globalization. That doesn’t mean, however,
that these values are being questioned. On
the contrary, it means defending them, even
against one’s own social context.
Applied to the conflict with jihadist Islamism,
this is about more than simply pitting Western
freedoms against pre-modern dogmatism.
Rather, a pluralistic society and democratic
rule of law on the one hand, and the prevalence of dogmatism and religious identity on
the other hand, have generated two incompatible value systems. One system strives
for social coexistence based on tolerance;
the other allegedly serves the holy will of
Allah, yet in practice draws its main motivation from an affiliation with a religious
community of true Muslims, hostility towards the West, and hatred for its values.
While a Western state guarantees an individual
public freedom and personal rights, Islamist
theocracy regulates public life by norms that
hardly allow for any freedoms. Its slogan is:
“Take care of religion and public welfare will
follow.” Power is legitimated not by the will
of the people, but by reference to the Qur’an.
In their violent practice, Islamist jihadists
use modern media as a source of inspiration
for their propaganda (video games, film
clips) or as communication channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube). Yet their contents
are neither pre-modern nor conservative.
They are rather a “desperate attempt to create clear hierarchical boundaries, once and
for all.” The daily violence they commit in
the name of religion is incompatible with
European ideas of freedom and human
dignity. In order to protect them in the long
run, we must stand up confidently to those
who do not abide by them in our own
countries, but we also must work towards
long-term enlightenment and education in
our political and cultural foreign relations.
It would be arrogant to consider our Western
perspective the only universally true and
valid point of view. Our contemporary understanding of coexistence in a “global village”
calls for new dimensions of tolerance and
equality. “In universalism, people behave‘
universally’ in relation to themselves, they are
directly involved in this universal dimension
by transcending their own particular social
position,” Žižek writes. This is what makes
universalism in a liberal society truly universal not the assumption that one’s own values apply to all societies. Only if I’m able to abstract
myself from myself will my values become
universally valid and facilitate peaceful coexistence with my neighbors: “More Alienation, Please! A Critique of Cultural Violence.”
This event took place at New York University
on October 8, 2015, and was organized in
cooperation with the Embassy of Slovenia. n
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ULRICH BAER:
Žižek has taken on the difficult and urgent
task of being the conscience of Europe, a
continent in need of moral and political
guidance and direction. He has taken on the
task of being the conscience of our world.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
In his work, Žižek has always been concerned
with the coordinates and concepts, often
seemingly self-evident but just as often unexamined, which guide much of our thinking
today. Often he has turned to film, since film
can do the conceptual work that philosophy
may not always carry out, especially when
it comes to the reality of our fantasies. Over
the last few years, Slavoj Žižek’s work has
taken a kind of ethical historical turn - it
has always been in the work but more pronounced so - to address pressing issues,
urgent issues, especially questions of nationality, identity, belonging, rights, political and personal sovereignty and autonomy
and the law. The question of our conscience,
of a conscience, of what it means to have a
conscience, has always been the question of
philosophy from Plato to Hegel, Nietzsche,
Freud and Heidegger. Hegel, of whom we
will hear more informed things than what I
can offer you tonight, called our conscience,
which for Hegel meant to accept nothing in
our attitude that is not justified by reason,
the ‘high standpoint of the modern world’.
Hegel called the conscience “hohe Standpunkt
der modernen Welt,” the place from which
we can survey our modernity.
Žižek has made it his task to be the conscience,
especially of Europe recently. He has challenged Europe not to give up on its ideals,
and he has said in different contexts and in
many places that one of the greatest risks
faced in the world today is that the European ideals, part of those articulated in the
Enlightenment, are being surrendered by
their own proponents. The question posed
by Žižek is whether a newly invigorated
and different conscience of Europe could be
the conscience everywhere. Žižek does not
seek to resurrect the classical European tradition, which had claimed for so long in its
colonialist and expansionist ways that European thinking is inherently universalist,
and that from the position of Europe you
can lecture the world. Žižek carves out and
speaks from a new place, a different place.
He criticizes the idea of a European universalism and yet challenges Europe to realize
in the sense of to truly understand, take account of and start acting on its own potential for the world. This potential would be a
form of conscience that applies around the
globe in different ways. It would be a global
conscience which would not be European
in the narrow sense in which we’ve had it.
There has always been a risk in European
thinking of confusing the universal with the
colonial, of confusing Hegel’s lofty standpoint of the modern world with any of the
manifestations such as the guard towers
in Conrad’s Out Of Darkness or other such
places. Žižek remains or endures in a different and strange place which is also an estranged and alienated place, that of a global
thinker, a thinker estranged and alienated
from himself, precisely to tell others: “Wake
up to your own conscience and your own
alienation and estrangement as a true possibility of new behavior and thinking!”
As a displaced European myself who grew
up in West Berlin living in freedom – I grew
up in freedom but locked behind walls and
barbed wire from where the only outside
that beckoned seemed to me not Europe
but America where I moved and where I am
now a citizen – I looked to Žižek often not
as bringing news from the old world. I and so
many others read and study with and listen
to Žižek to search for a place for conscience
in our own alienated positions or a place
of moral direction that doesn’t repress or
overcome this alienation and does not cover
over it. In the context of today’s crises and
especially in light of the events of the past
few years, not just the last few months or
weeks, where migrants have arrived in Europe
in ever greater numbers and many thousands
have died in trying to do so and where the
European Union has desperately searched for
its own raison d’être, Žižek’s role is critical.
From his sustained critique of European
universalism, Žižek finds a new position and
new kind of global conscience. He issues a
challenge to Europe to wake up to its and
our potential while struggling through the
legacy of the continent’s ideological divide,
among other things during the Cold War and
before, and to realize this potential in a new
form of universalism that does not lapse into
colonialism or supercilious moralism. It is a
tremendous pleasure and honor to welcome
Professor Žižek tonight. n
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK:
To keep it lively, I decided to improvise a
lot with – what some people hate - my provocative spirit.
First, the usual gratitude. I am proud to be
here and I must emphasize this – I am proud
to be here with the Slovenian Ambassador
whom I appreciate– but not the Slovenian
foreign politics at this moment. J I violently,
brutally disagree with it the way our foreign
minister acts with all the dirty compromises
about refugees about Syria and so on. That
is not my politics. There are some other
problems with Slovenian identity like – sorry I don’t drink wine. Also the Slovenian national sport is skiing – well I have a problem
with skiing. J It is nonsense for me. What
does mean skiing? You climb up a mountain
and then you come down. Isn’t it better to
stay down and read a good book? J
But there are things which I love in Slovenia, some diplomats, philosophers, friends
and so on. Even in the darkest times - I am
not as tasteless as to compare today’s Slovenia with Germany in the late 30’s - there
were people who gave you hope. Let’s take,
for example, one victim for me. You know
the great – I am a fanatical Wagnerian – the
Freedom of Expression
great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. I
always considered it a great injustice that
whenever people mention classical music
and Nazism, they mention him. It is so unjust. OK, he was a national conservative, but
as Adorno – certainly not a right winger –
put it, you can feel in the way Furtwängler
conducted a terrible effort to save what can
be saved of great culture in a terrible time.
In the same way – not that I compare myself with it or whatever – we should fight
for Europe, for European legacy today as
you [pointing to Ulrich Baer] pointed out
very nicely. You know, I am more and more
suspicious about so-called anti-Eurocentrism, this standard accusation of Eurocentrism. Why is this all of a sudden so fashionable? I have a very dark premonition
precisely because – sorry if I put it in these
old-fashioned Marxist terms – because global capital, the way it functions today, no
longer needs European Enlightenment, European democracy and so on. It functions
even better without it. You know my friend
Peter Sloterdijk, who is politically my opponent, but personally we are good friends.
He once made a wonderful observation.
He asked a question: To which person from
our time will they be building monuments
50, 100 years in the future? And his answer
was Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of new Singapore, the guy who invented so-called
capitalism with Asian values. It is simply
authoritarian capitalism. And isn’t this the
tendency today? … It is so fashionable to be
against Eurocentrism. Yes, we are guilty of
many things, imperialism, cultural imperialism, but precisely now that we are on the
losing side, we should be fighting for what
is worth saving in European culture, and to
provoke you - this will be my conclusion but to give you what in sexual practice is
called Vorlust, this is why, as a radical leftist, I even think we should redefine in our
own way of course - not in the sense of European cultural conservatives - this unfortunate term of Leitkultur.
13
Leitkultur for me does not mean: “Oh, our
European culture is superior. We should impose it.” This simple, pure idea of European multiculturalism in the sense that each
group should have the full right to assert,
to practice its identity and all we need is a
kind of empty liberal legal state which guarantees legally - it doesn’t work. Why not?
Because - as a Hegelian, I know it, and you
should know it spontaneously - each culture
is not only defined but what it is. What a
culture is is always mediated by what it is
not, by how it constructs, how it relates to
different cultures, and that is for me the
problem. The problem is that each culture
not only relates to other cultures but contains a certain normative texture of how you
deal with other cultures. And here problems
explode. Even at the level of what both of
you, the introductory speakers, were right
to emphasize, this Charlie Hebdo problem
and so on.
Yes, we should be critical towards everything that belongs to this dark European
legacy, but I am more tempted to say that
we should also fully and shamelessly rehabilitate a certain brutal dogmatism. Dogmatism in a good sense of the term.
Look, let’s take rape… I would not like to live
in a society where you have to argue all the
time against rape. I would like to live in a
society where the inacceptable character of
rape is simply the most fundamental part of
what Hegel would have called Sittlichkeit,
the substance of morals and customs. If
somebody advocates rape in this stupid
male chauvinist way - you know ‘Oh, but
maybe she liked it…’- I would like to live in
a culture where you don’t even have to argue against it. When a guy talks like that,
you laugh at it. What a jerk, what an idiot.
Is he retarded? You know what I mean. In
this paradoxical sense, I claim that a certain
type of dogmatism is a necessary component of historical progress. Progress is for
me that you don’t have to reason again and
again against rape. It becomes part of our
substance. I call this the Anti-Reagan, your
respected president. J Why? At one of his
press conferences, a journalist asked him
what about the accusation that you are
close to some people who deny the Holocaust and so on and that you have friends
among them and Reagan answered, “That’s
not true. How can you say this? Whenever
at my dinner table somebody denies Holocaust I always attack him and…” J The obvious question is what kind of friends does
he have if at every dinner he has to argue
about whether or not there was a Holocaust.
That’s my first point: dogmatism.
Let’s go on. When we talk about Charlie
Hebdo, we should see how the spectacle of
solidarity enacted by European politicians
was hypocritical and narrow. You remember the scene of the top European leaders
holding hands on the front of a crowd. Did
you see the true photo? Unfortunately for
them, there were some photographers some
thirty yards back and on a higher podium.
And you see it all. It was a staged event
on a barricaded square totally surrounded
by police, there the politicians with two or
three rows of probably secret police to create
the impression of depth of a crowd.
My position is pro-European, but at the same
time, critical of Europe. I am tired of hearing
the mantra “Oh how narrow they are, the
Arabs. We should demonstrate our sense of
irony, our iconoclasm - you can talk about
everything you want.” No, you cannot, and
it’s a good thing that you cannot.
Let me give you an example. OK, you can mock
the Koran, Islam. Don’t misunderstand me here.
I am not saying we should be allowed to do
it. It is just an example. But try to publish just
a slightly ironical text about the Holocaust
and you will see how quickly European intolerance appears. What is my point here?
Not that we should be open to everything
and so on. No. There are certain topics that
should be simply prohibited even by law.
14
The other important thing here is, don’t stigmatize other cultures too quickly. Yes, there
are many things to be criticized in Islam in
today’s Arab countries, but it is clear that this
– let’s call it – totalitarian turn of some of the
Muslims is a strictly historical phenomenon.
First, I have many friends there on the West
Bank. I can tell you they are normal people
with my spirit of obscenity – I engaged in
dirty jokes with them and they immediately
reacted at the same level. A Muslim friend
from Ramallah told me one of their jokes,
which is this stupid idea everyone knows –
I mean historical linguists – the idea that if
you die as a martyr, you will go to heaven
and seventy virgins will be waiting for you.
Everyone knows, every serious historical
linguist [knows], this is a mistranslation.
That word at that time was a term which
in everyday language meant from white
grapes the top quality, raisins. This was the
standard sign of Arab hospitality. To show
you are a welcome guest, we are giving you
a whole handful of seventy white raisins.
So here is a West Bank joke. There is an ugly
Palestinian boy. He wants to sleep with girls.
But he is too ugly, so he says, “I want that
so much that I will become a martyr by exploding myself.” He does and enters heaven
and hears, “Here are your raisins.” J He says,
“Sorry, there was a mistranslation. Can I go
back?” J They have sense [of humor].
Palestinians are ambiguous. Some people
may even accuse me of racism. Palestinians
are the Jews among the Arabs. That’s the
tragedy. We tend to forget that there are
ten percent of Christians among the Palestinians. My God, the best religious jokes I heard
not against the Arabs but against themselves
were from Palestinian Christians. If I may
tell you one which is on the edge of acceptability. J Don’t be afraid, it will still be accepted. This is from a West Bank Christian
Arab. It is the last evening of Christ’s life.
He knows that on the next day he will be
crucified. He is the son of God and knows everything. His apostles are gathered around
him. Christ is praying in the tent. They say:
“My God, our Lord did so much for us. He just
suffers. Wouldn’t it be nice to make his last
evening on this earth a little bit merrier?”
So they call Mary Magdalene. J “Could you
go in and seduce our Lord?” Of course, Mary
Magdalene goes in, but after five minutes
she comes out terrified, crying in despair.
The apostles ask: “What is going on? Is our
Lord a secret pervert or what?” “No,” says
Mary, “It worked. I undressed myself. I began to dance in front of him and he looked
at me with a certain interest. Then I spread
my legs wide and showed my vagina to him
and Christ looked at it and said, ‘Oh, what a
terrible wound,’ and put his hand on it and
closed it.” J This is the spirit, my God. And
you know what shocked me. I then had a
wonderful theological debate with these
people. These were not some atheist perverts there.
There is even a better one – a Christian joke
which tells a lot about the psychoanalytic
notion of a self-centered subject. You are
never fully yourself, you are never fully
identified with your real ego. Christ is tired
of doing his propaganda work J so he says to
one of his apostles, “Let’s take a week free
on the Galilean Sea and play golf there.” J
They play golf and Christ hits the ball and
misses it of course, and the ball goes into
the sea. Being Christ, he knows how to walk
on water. J He goes out and picks up the
ball and comes back. Then the apostle tells
him: “Listen, it is too difficult to hit the ball,
you cannot do it. Even Tiger Woods couldn’t
do it.” Christ says, “Who cares, I am Jesus
Christ. I can.” He does it again, misses again.
The ball falls into the sea and Christ walks
on the water there. At that point - and I
like it this historical nonsense - a group
of American tourists come there on a bus.
One of them sees this and steps up to the
apostle, “Who is that guy there? Is he crazy?
Does he think he is Jesus Christ or what?”
The apostle answers, “No it’s worse. He
thinks he is Tiger Woods.” J
Now you will say, I am obscene. But if you
really read the New Testament, this type
of spirit is already there. Look, Christ gives
some wisdom and then says,”I will tell you a
parable to explain it.” Admit it. You never get
the point of the parable. I claim that Christ
had a totally provocative style of reasoning
– enough of that.
I will openly address a very difficult question.
The question in Europe on cultural tolerance,
on how to practice it with tens, even hundreds
of thousands of refugees. First, we have to
reject the pseudo-leftist comfortable idea
that we Europeans are responsible for everything bad around the world. If there is a
war in Africa, we must be somehow guilty
for it, and so on. The best answer to this was
provided by an African friend of mine who
exploded at this and said: “Are you aware in
what patronizing way your attitude is racist?
You even don’t give us the dignity to be
evil. You treat us like children. If we do
something horrible, you must be behind it.”
In the colonial times we had the expression
‘white man’s burden’. Now we have the opposite white man’s burden. Whenever something horrible happens, we have to be responsible for it.
Now we are responsible for many, many
things but we should be much more careful
here. Why? Once I was in Missoula, Montana
to visit the birthplace of David Lynch, and I
met some so-called Native Americans there.
It was an epiphany for me. I loved them so
much because they detected so well the hypocrisy of our politically-correct respect for
them. First, they absolutely rejected to be
called Native Americans because quite intelligently they said to me, “Wait a minute.
Nature - what is the opposite of nature? It
is culture. So we are Native Americans and
you are cultural Americans, or what? Are we
part of nature?” Then they gave me a wonderful argument. Maybe you know it. We
much prefer to be called Indians because at
least in this way our name is a monument
to white man’s stupidity. J
Then one of them, a professor, gave me
a short book that he wrote demonstrating that Indians killed more buffaloes and
Freedom of Expression
15
burned more forests than all white people
together. And in a strange way he was right.
They hate the patronizing attitude that we
white people are culturally and economically superior. We just exploit nature while
Native Americans or Tibetans or whoever
- they have a holistic attitude. Before they
enter a mountain to mine it, they ask the
spirit of the mountain for permission and
so on. No! They detect very easily how this
false patronizing respect for the other is the
worst kind of patronizing attitude.
“We resist your technological civilization.
We listen to our ancestors’ spirits.” All that
bullshit. After I got really friendly with them,
they told me the true story. They had two
agents, one on NY, one in London, to tell
them what are the latest trends in the art
market, and then they take care that these
eternal spirits give them precisely the instructions which fit the latest fashion.
There is a wonderful anecdote which is allegedly confirmed. It is my favorite about
what is wrong with this European deep understanding of the others. Already in the
middle of the 19th century, a European anthropological expedition went into central
Guinea because they had heard a rumor that
there was some terrifying tribe there that
dances some death dance with black masks,
the ultimate encounter with death. After a
long trip, they arrived there in the evening
and they half understood the language of
that tribe and somehow explained to the
tribe what they are expecting to see, and
then they went to sleep. The next morning
the tribal people really performed a dance
for them. They were fascinated. “You see
authentic attitude towards death. What a
deeply felt ecstatic attitude with death.”
So they leave the village. They return to
civilization and write a nice anthropological
report. Everything is OK. Just one problem.
A decade or so later, another anthropological group visited the same tribe. They
took care to really learn the language and
learned the true story. When the first group
arrived, the tribal people just desperately
wanted to show their hospitality. So somehow they got it that these people wanted
to see some crazy death dance J and they
worked all night to invent it so they perform
it the next day for them. So much for authentic cultural exchange.
The last example of this. Did you see a wonderful Inuit - Eskimo to be politically incorrect - Canadian film Atanarjuat, The Fast
Runner (2001)? It retells the story of an ancient Inuit myth. They changed the end of
the mythic story. In the original myth, it is a
catastrophe and the whole tribe is slaughtered. In their [film] version the tribe members just exile the two evil guys, they don’t
even kill them, and there is a big reconciliation. There is always an idiot in such a story,
which was a politically-correct white liberal
journalist who attacked the director of the
movie claiming: “But didn’t you fall victim
to Hollywood commercialism? You changed
the ending just to make the movie more
commercial!” He got a wonderful answer.
The director said: “No, you are the cultural
imperialist. Because this notion of sticking
to the original, this is your white notion. It
is precisely part of our original culture that
there is no original. You retell again and again
to fit the present circumstances.” So things
again are much more complex.
My best friends [in this regard] are some
artists in New Zealand. First when I talked
to them they gave me the usual bullshit.
My point here is that is not cheating. There
is nothing shameful in it.
Let’s go on here with the basic line: Toleranz,
Leitkultur. Something happened to my friend
Udi Aloni, an Israeli filmmaker who has very
good relations with Palestinians and fights
for their rights. Udi Aloni brought to the US
a great West Bank Palestinian rapper [WE:
Tamer Naffar] who not only sings against Israeli occupation, but also against the limitations of their own culture, honor killings and
so on. You know what happened at UCLA?
After this guy sang some songs and he gave
a speech, some crazy pseudo-leftists at-
tacked him, “Why do you talk about honor
killing. You just support Zionist propaganda.
If there are honor killings, they happen only
because Israel keeps the Arabs isolated.”
This guy gave them a wonderful answer:
“You know what is the difference between
you and me? You are an upper-class graduate student here who talks in English stupid
things to please your professors. I sing there
in Arab and Hebrew to help real women
avoid catastrophes.”
This is so important. The way to really collaborate with Palestinians, Arabs and so on is
not with this patronizing attitude. My idea
is always: Find some struggle where we can
join forces, especially on the West Bank.
They don’t need our enlightened feminism.
Women are already organized. Hundreds of
women every year escape from their houses.
That’s the way to do it. To just connect our
struggle with their struggle. Especially now
in the Middle East, where all countries are
getting in a strange way fundamentalist.
Are you aware of what happened in Iraq as
the result of American intervention? Whatever we say about Saddam – I have no sympathy with Saddam, he was a nightmare –
but one thing he did the same as Assad. Do
you know that Syria and Iraq were the only
two Middle East Arab states which were, at
least nominally, officially secular? Islam was
not a state religion. This was not just a symbolic act. It meant something for thousands
of years. In Iraq, even in Saddam’s time,
there were around two million Christians
living there. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz
was a Christian. The result of American
intervention was that they disbanded
Saddam’s army in a very stupid way. There
was no other force, so fundamentalist Muslim militia took over and exerted pressure
so Christians practically disappeared from
Iraq. Isn’t this a wonderful irony? We went
there to save them from this primitive Islamist regime and what two thousand years
of history did not achieve, a short American
intervention did. To deliver a relatively religiously tolerant country to Islamists who
16
threw out Christians. The true scandal, and
it is the same in Libya - Gaddafi was disgusting – but do we have any idea what will happen
if we overthrow him? Now we have another
failed non-existing state.
The problem here is one of Leitkultur. What
rules regulate the interaction among different
cultures?
Again, with all my sympathy for suffering
Palestinians, and here I am a radical leftist,
I am not a friend of those stupid Europeans
who claim we should protect Christian Europe,
throw out the refugees now. But the problem
is real. In what sense?
For example, I read a report on ZDF (Zweites
Deutsches Fernsehen). Often people say, Muslim women should have a right to choose how
to dress, wear the burqa. We should allow
them. I agree. But my problem is what is if they
don’t want it and their family puts pressure
on them. This is not a marginal example. In
that report, they say that this happens over
two thousand times per year in Germany.
That a girl is under such stress of honor
killing. Germany already opened up over
200 women’s shelters.
Or another example. This happened to the
child of a friend of mine in Berlin. He is in
a high school whose student population is
around 10% Muslim. First they wanted no
pork in their school meals. OK, I agree with
this undoubtedly. Then they went on [and
demanded], even when other children eat
pork this disturbs them. The school sent
a letter to all parents claiming that girls
should not dress too provocatively, this
may disturb … Then you have these unpleasant scenes in Berlin. Organized gay people
felt oppressed. They wanted to help Turks,
Muslims – but the result was, many of them
were bitten by Muslims. This is where I see
the problem. Here, a Leitkultur is needed.
What is happening in Europe. Radical leftists tell you this bullshit: “Let’s radically
open the borders!” This is nonsense. It provokes an anti-immigrant right-wing populist backlash. I am for a unified world, not
for this militarization in the sense of putting
refugees into camps but a kind of – I don’t
think it will happen, it is too utopian – allEuropean action: you organize reception
centers in Turkey, Lebanon, at the Syrian
coast, and then in a very rational way you
register them, you take them to Europe here
and there. And of course, you make the rules
clear and by Leitkultur, I do not mean you
should renounce your values about these
basic things. We have certain elementary
rules of individual human rights, etc. Sorry,
you have to respect that here.
come from? Iraq. Sorry, but who attacked Iraq?
That is the tragedy of American politics.
Serbs have a proverb: “We win all the wars,
but we lose the peace.” Well, this could be
an epithet for United Sates politics today.
Of course, you easily won in Iraq, and what
is the result? That the majority of Iraq, the
Shia part, you basically delivered it to Iran,
to your arch-enemy. The other part is ISIS.
I agree with Habermas - otherwise we are not
best friends – when he said it is disgusting
to hear these stories, pathetic, sentimental,
“Poor refugees, don’t you have a heart to
help them?” They asked me on the street,
“Would you take refugees into your apartment?” I said, “No, I don’t even like my own
family in my apartment, you know. But,” I
said, “it is not a question of sympathy, it is a
question of simple duty.” I am ready to lose
half of my income to help them. I hate this
sentimental moralization. From here you are
one step from what I call the most intelligent
Starbucks socialism, which is an ingenious
preparation, today’s ideology.
One thing I would have done is ask a legitimate question. Did you know there are extra
rich Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Qatar, Emirates? You know how many refugees they accepted? Literally zero. I find
this an obscenity. Why? First because most
of the refugees are Sunnis. This means that
from a religious standpoint, that should not
be a problem. And they are also co-responsible, at least Saudi Arabia, which is openly
supporting anti-Assad forces.
The usual attitude if you want to be moderately left, “Yes, I am consumerist, but I feel bad.
People are starving in Africa …The Starbucks
trick: Our cappuccino is a little bit more expensive but one percent goes to some children
in Guatemala, the other one to…” So the
message is, you can be consumerist and pay
a little bit more, but your social duty is included in the price. This is why I am deeply
suspicious about this charity approach or what
you may call it. This would be my first clear
conclusion.
Yes Europe should do it. It is clear that we
Europe and also you, the United States, we
are not innocent here. Where do refugees
People are asking “Should we be intervening
in Syria?” What a stupid question. We already did – maybe not directly. We know
the story: Assad is supported by Iran and
Russia, partially by China, the other side is
supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
A pan-European strategy organizing it as a
complex military [endeavor]. I don’t see any
other institution apart from the army that
simply can do it.
Now you will say, in this way we are imposing our values. The moment you emphasize
personal freedom, doesn’t this mean that
we impose on others values which are
ultimately European values in the sense of
in other cultures it is considered more acceptable that family or collective tribe duties have priority. My answer here is very
brutal. Yes, but we have to accept it. You
cannot play both ways. You have to decide
here. We should drop this illusion that you
can have some literal liberal space in which
there will be two groups, one in which the
mothers will teach their daughters when
they are eleven years how to use condoms,
Freedom of Expression
how to put it on the guy, and in the other
group you will have a family where they
will do cliterodectomy. You have to make a
choice. We have to establish a certain set of
rules and I think we can do it with a clear
conscience. Yes I am aware behind all these
refugees, there is European intervention,
even in Africa…
Why the title: more alienation? Another part
of this European legacy would be as Peter
Sloterdijk – again with whom I politically
disagree – put it nicely. We don’t need today
politics of understanding, immersion, we
need politics of distance, of polite ignorance.
Let’s imagine I live in a large apartment
block, let’s say there is an Arab here, a Jew
there, a Chinese guy there, Latino-American
there, African there. I have absolutely no
interest in understanding them all and their
way of life. Why should I? Because my basic
Platonic premise is that they probably don’t
understand themselves. I don’t accept this
liberal blackmail. But did you really understand them? How do you know you did? No,
I think we should learn a kind of polite ignorance. You are my whatever, Jewish, black,
Arab, Chinese neighbor. I greet you nicely,
you can rely on me. If you are in trouble, I
help you; I hope you will help me and so on.
Maybe, exceptionally, with some of you we
establish a contact, but maybe not. We need
proper distance and I claim there is something
liberating in this distance. We absolutely
should not feel bad about this.
The other thing I radically disagree with is this
idea that since we live in global capitalism,
local cultures which are threatened by it are
the sites of resistance to it.
I was with that black guy, Tavis Smiley, PBS.
He is my type. We immediately exchanged
jokes. I explained to him why Malcolm X is
my hero. He did something ingenious, which
is politically at the level of Hegel. You know
what the X in Malcolm X stands for: ‘We
don’t have roots. We were torn out of our
original ethnic environment, we were de-
17
racinated.’ But his genius was what? His formula was not “return to our roots”. Malcom
X understood well that the X was not meant
as a stigma of victimhood but a chance, a
hope of freedom. “We are not constrained
by any tradition. We are more free to create a new emancipatory society, we can be
more universalists than you white people.”
He got this point.
It is the same way that I read – I know this
appears fashionable but I really think it
is a good novel – Toni Morrison’s Beloved
(1987). The novel’s heroine is my ethical
model, not that bitch Antigone, whom I cannot stand. This idea of woman is not defined
by motherhood. It is an extremely profound
novel of the birth of black feminine subjectivity out of overcoming this absolute priority of motherhood …
For the same alienation even at the level of
politics. Today most leftists admit it. [For]
two main forms of the left of the 20th century, social democracy and Stalinist state
socialism, their time is over. Even the Welfare state - in the conditions of today’s
world-wide global market, you cannot do it.
But there is a third fetish which still remains. What they call anti-representative.
We need immediate local self-organization,
local communities, transparent self-organizations. I would hate to live in a society like
that. You know, every afternoon I would
have to participate in some stupid local
meetings about how we organize kindergartens, water and so on. I want efficient alienation, I want some efficient visible state apparatus who does it. I want my freedom to do
it to watch my stupid movies and to read books
and to write books. That’s enough for me.
Some of the last provocations. One would
be this one. Amy Goodman, [host and executive producer of] Democracy Now, no
longer wants to talk to me. You know why?
Once I gave an interview on her show and
she asked me innocently – she did not know
what kind of a madman she is talking to, –
“I AM CONVINCED THAT WE NEED EUROPE
MORE THAN EVER. JUST IMAGINE A WORLD
WITHOUT EUROPE. YOU WOULD ONLY HAVE
TWO POLES LEFT – THE USA, WITH ITS BRUTAL NEOLIBERALISM – AND SO-CALLED ASIAN
CAPITALISM, WITH ITS AUTHORITARIAN POLITICAL STRUCTURES. BETWEEN THEM YOU
WOULD HAVE PUTIN’S RUSSIA, WITH ITS EXPANSIONIST ASPIRATIONS. YOU WOULD LOSE
THE MOST VALUABLE PART OF THE EUROPEAN LEGACY, WHERE DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM ENTAIL A COLLECTIVE ACTION WITHOUT
WHICH EQUALITY AND FAIRNESS WOULD NOT
BE POSSIBLE.”
ŽIŽEK IN AN INTERVIEW
WITH THE SPIEGEL, MARCH 31, 2015.
“How do we fight right-wing fight and rightwing racisms?” I answered her immediately:
“With left-wing racism” and she said, “Oh,
are you crazy?” No!
Without the minimal exchange of obscenities, you simply cannot have authentic contact. On the other hand, I am so sick and
tired of this universal carnival logic. ‘It is
wonderful in Athens Syntagma Square or
Tahrir Square, one million people, we were
all together crying solidarity.’ This is the
easy part. The true test of radical change is
the morning after. How when things return
back to normal, how do you feel then the
actual change? That is the tragedy for me.
This topic of the liberating force of carnival
like, at least for a brief moment, social rules
are suspended, the king is a beggar, the
beggar is a king. You know who elaborated
the theory of carnival? The Russian fellow
traveler of formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, in his
book on François Rabelais. You know what
Boris Groys – a friend of mine, I don’t agree
with him – but a well-known Russian art
theorist. He and his friends discovered the
archives of Bakhtin from the 1930s when
he was exiled into Kazan – that is how he
survived Stalinism. His manuscript notes
for the book on carnival. You know what
was the shocking discovery, you know what
was the secret model for Carnival, Stalinist
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purges. This was a big carnival. Today you
are a party secretary, tomorrow you are an
English traitor.
Look at the Klu Klux Klan in this way.
T.W. Adorno saw this very well already in
the 1930s. He said totalitarian regimes are
never just that. Stupid denunciation. They
always, as it were, bribe you with some
false anti-emancipatory enjoyment. To pretend to be a fanatical fighter and you can
rape the Jews and you can beat them, you
can have your fun.
Let me conclude with a Hegelian point. My
favorite joke, which I used in two of my books.
I hope you don’t know it. There is a movie
director in Ernst Lubitsch’s film Ninotchka
you have one of the best dialectical jokes.
If you want to understand what Hegel means
by bestimmte Negation, determinate negation, you should listen to that joke. A guy
comes to a cafeteria and says “Coffee, but
without cream please!” The waiter says:
“Sorry, sir, we don’t have cream, we only
have milk. So I cannot really give you coffee
without cream, I can only give you coffee
without milk.” J You see the paradox. Literally in this fetishist identity, you get the
same coffee but the Hegelian lesson is if it
is coffee without milk it is not the same as
coffee without cream. This is, for example,
the problem of universality. I agree with those
critics of Euro-centrism. It is one thing to be
universal by overcoming just our European
identity or to be universal also by overcoming another identity. You can be universal
in different modes.
I admire here my other hero, Tossaint L’Overture,
Haiti Revolution. They did something wonderful. In 1804 they established finally the
black state and they wrote the constitution.
They had a problem. They wanted to be a
black republic but at the same time they were
honest enough to admit that many white people,
especially Polish soldiers from Napoleon’s
Army, joined their side. They also wanted
to give them the right to be full Haitian citi-
zens. So we have a wonderful paradox.
Article 4 of the Haiti Constitution from 1804.
‘Haiti is a black republic. All citizens of Haiti,
independently of the color of their skin, are
black.’ J This is what we should do.
Our liberals, when they want to help the blacks,
implicitly they are saying, “You know, even
if you are black but if you behave well you
will be really white like us.” You see the
similarity with this Ninotchka joke.
Let me conclude with my favorite topic which
always fascinates me: micropolism of racism
and what Hegel called sittliche Substanz.
This should be the place of fight. The paradox is the following one. In every society
we have certain rules that regulate interaction. But it is not just like that. Did you notice that you have meta-rules which tell you
how you should take the explicit rules? In
every culture there are certain things that
are prohibited, but in reality but you are silently even solicited to do them. Like most
of the sexual prohibitions in patriarchal societies work like this: Father tells you: “Beware of the girls!” and then secretly: “Did you
already do it?” or whatever. Again there is
prohibition.
But the much more interesting phenomenon
is the opposite one. There are things that
you are allowed, permitted, solicited to do,
you are given the right to do them on the
condition that you don’t you use the right.
The whole problem with emancipation of
the blacks. They were given the citizenship
right on the condition that they don’t use it
still in the 1960s, 1970s and so on.
This is how I read Freud’s great motto from
the Traumdeutung, acheronta movebo (die
Unterwelt aufrühren), Move the Underground.
It is not so important to change the explicit
rules, but to change this invisible texture
which tells you how to use these rules.
Just two or three examples of how this
works: Imagine that we are in the Soviet
Union in 1935. This is the Central Committee. I
am Comrade Stalin. I give a speech, then of
course you applaud. Then there is a debate.
Then one of you is stupid enough to stand
up and attack me. The next day the question
will be, “Who was the last one who saw you
alive?” But then imagine another person
stands up and starts to shout at the first
person, “Are you crazy? How dare you attack Comrade Stalin? Don’t you know that
we don’t do this here?” I claim that he would
have been arrested even faster. You know
the paradox. It was prohibited to criticize
Stalin, but it was even more prohibited to
publicly announce this prohibition. This
structure is not necessarily an oppressive
structure. It is more complex.
Look what happened to me with my politi-cal opponent and good personal friend
Judith Butler. Once I was tasteless to her
and used in my style some dirty words and
so on. So I felt bad and called her later on
phone: “Listen, I am very sorry and so on.”
Ok, it was no problem. She is a nice lady.
“Listen, Slavoj, it was a little bit ambiguous,” she said. “We all know how you are.
No problem you don’t have to…”and so on.
But then she said: “You don’t owe me any
apology.” But then with my evil mind, my
immediate reaction was, “If I don’t owe it
to you then I take it back.” J This is the refined paradox I am mentioning. How does
an apology really function? If I apologize to
you, the only way for you to really accept
the apology to say it was not necessary. If
you say, “My God, I deserved it,” it means
you don’t really pardon me. The beautiful
paradox is you do something and you succeed in what you wanted to do precisely
when it is proclaimed superfluous. I think
all erotics work like this.
This is my second example. Did you see the
film with Ewan McGregor, Brassed Off (1996)?
There is a wonderful scene. He accompanies
a girl to her house, very Hegelian dialogue.
There the girl tells him: “Would you mind to
come up to my apartment and drink some
Freedom of Expression
coffee?” “Yes, but there is a problem. I don’t
drink coffee.” And she says: “No problem, I
don’t have any.” J Can you imagine a more
erotically provocative invitation? But you
know the problem is, it must remain implicit.
The moment you mention sex, everything
would have been ruined. If she says: “Listen,
I just want to f….” it ruins everything. That
elegance fascinated me. Again: you do something and you proclaim it to be superfluous.
Or another classical example. It really happened to me with a black friend of mine. I
don’t want to embarrass him only for this
reason. I will not say his name. I was in my
usual extremely bad taste mood. So I asked
him, “Is it true that you black people not
only have penises like this but you even can
move them freely so if you walk naked and
you have a fly here ‘Bamf’ you can do it?”
It worked. He embraced me and said: “Now
you can call me Nigger! This meant you are
really one of us.” Try to call them Nigger
if you are not one of them. But then when
I told this story to other friends they told
me: “But you did not get the point. It was
not meant that you really call him ‘Nigger’.
But that is the whole point. Of course, he
did not mean you can shout Nigger at me.
It was simply an offer to be rejected. It was
not meant for you to really do it. It was just
a kind of gentle sign that we are really close
at this level.”
The very last story. You get its mechanism at
its purest. I have a photocopy of this document at home. When I was young, in the
mid 1970s, we still had obligatory military
service in ex-Yugoslavia. For one week you
get some preliminary training, then the big
event happens. All soldiers are gathered.
Then publicly you say your name: “I am
ready to give my life to protect my...” and
then you are a good soldier and after
that you have to sign your name in a big
book. A friend of mine did an incredible
thing. When it came to him he said: “Is it a
free choice or do you order me to sign my
name?” The officer said: “This is an oath.
19
You cannot be forced to take an oath. You
do it freely.” My friend said: “Then I don’t
sign it.” The officer said: “Are you crazy?
You will be put in prison.” After long negotiations my friend – and there is the historical document - got a paper where the officer wrote: “I, Officer XYZ, formally order this
soldier to freely sign the oath.” J I don’t
think this is some dark totalitarian mechanism. Our social links always work like that.
You see in all this paradoxes of you say
something, but how are you to take it. Let’s
say I am poor and you are rich. You want
to invite me out to dinner. We know in advance you will pay. But do you also have
here this ritual when the bill arrives we
will play this game “No, I will pay…” You
see the elegance. We both know it is a
hypocritical play but it is not hypocritical.
It establishes an authentic social link. n
© Klaus Enrique Gerdes
ULRICH BAER is Vice Provost for Faculty,
Arts, Humanities and Diversity at New York
University. He received his B.A. from Harvard
in 1991, and his Ph.D. from Yale in Comparative Literature in 1995. He joined NYU as
assistant professor in the Department of
German in 1996. A widely published author,
editor, and translator, Baer is the recipient
of numerous awards and honors. He was
moderator of the evening with Slavoj Žižek.
© Slavoj Žižek
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK is one of Europe’s most influential intellectuals. His thinking is rooted in the European Enlightenment, with
a strong foundation in German Idealism,
Hegel, Marx, Lacan, and psychoanalysis. He
is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of
Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of
German at New York University and international director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities of the University of London. His work is located at the intersection
of a range of subjects, including continental
philosophy, political theory, cultural studies,
psychoanalysis, film criticism, and theology.
He is valued for his critique of global capitalism and as an intellectual figurehead for
the leftist protest movement.
20
SATIRE AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
BY GISELA VETTER-LIEBENOW
INTRODUCTION
BY WILFRIED ECKSTEIN
European literary history since the Middle
Ages records that jesters played an important role in speaking truth to people in power.
The jester would articulate a different perspective, a view unheard of, a taboo better
left unmentioned. The jester gave it a voice.
This was something we would deem today a
counter narrative, against mainstream belief
and thought.
Cartoonists, and good artists in general, tread
in the footsteps of this tradition. They enlarge
our worldview. They present a different way
of thinking, inviting us to reflect upon what
seems to be the normal order of things. They
continue an important tradition in European
and Western emancipation. Satire has been a
tool for pointing the finger at all kinds of wrongs
being committed, in particular by rulers and
governing regimes. Anything which limits the
freedom of human beings is a steppingstone
for life and a provocation for thought.
Artists, thinkers, and writers take on the task
of refining this moment of being provoked.
They are people with a special gift foreseeing things differently, and those who work
hard and are talented in their abilities and
expression are sometimes privileged to receive
recognition. They add an original view to the
public conversation because they touch the
nerves and often the self-deceit of our time.
This sets them apart from the rest of us, who
owe them our respect. In order to survive,
they must present unpleasant truths in such
a way that they are received with a confirming nod, positive affection or a smile–
but unfortunately this is not always the case.
The massacre of artists and workers at the
French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie
Hebdo on January 7, 2015 alerted Europeans
to a new reality: that artists working in our
environment can become victims of murder
in revenge for what they do, touching taboos
and opening our eyes to a different way of
looking at things. This tragedy motivated the
panel series ICONOCLASH, the online article
by Gisela Vetter-Liebenow and the panel
discussion with four famous cartoonists. n
GISELA VETTERLIEBENOW:
Finding caricature and satire at the heart of
controversy is nothing new, as they have been
accompanied by suspicion, criticism and
outright rejection since time immemorial.
But the attack on the editorial office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by Islamic
terrorists on January 7 of this year was unprecedented, prompting a heated public and
media debate about the limits of freedom
of speech and press.
Freedom of thought is a central prerequisite
for caricature and satire. Yet whether in
the past or the present, those who take the
liberty to express critical, rebellious, even
seemingly heretical thoughts must expect
some sort of backlash, sometimes significant. And they may be reminded of a German folk song whose passionate plea for
freedom of thought is rooted in ancient traditions. It was not by coincidence that Tomi
Ungerer chose the first line of this song as
the title for his memoirs about a childhood
spent in German-occupied Alsace during the
National Socialist era:
“Thoughts are free,
Who can guess them?
They fly by
Like nocturnal shadows.
No man can know them,
No hunter can shoot them
And so it will always be:
Thoughts are free!”
Caricaturists have been addressing this issue
time and again: for example, in the first half
of the 19th century, when Reactionism triumphed over Revolution at the Congress of
Vienna and liberal ideas were repressed, by
force when necessary, as in the so-called
‘Demagogenverfolgung’, the persecution of
demagogues. An anonymous artist captured
this spirit in a folio from ca. 1819: A group
of scholars is gathered around a table, all
wearing their prescribed muzzles in order
to avoid the temptation of speaking their
minds and having any nonconforming discussions about the question that looms on
the agenda above their heads: “How much
longer will we be allowed to think?”
Ronald Searle, the great English caricaturist
of the 20th century, was also very preoccupied with the topic of freedom of thought,
as well as with his self-concept as a satirical artist. In 1977, he drew “The Thinker” for
Amnesty International, a scrawny man going
limp in the stranglehold of a hulking monster who sports a faceless globe for a head.
The man is dropping his papers, the ink
from his pen is splashed all over the ground
as a symbol of the futility of his efforts. It is
a pessimistic view, which Searle kept trying
to refute with his own work: his reportage
drawings, such as the ones he drew on the
occasion of the Adolf Eichmann trial, or his
Freedom of Expression
21
Club of Thinkers
© Germanisches National
Museum Nürnberg
political cartoons for the French daily
Le Monde. In 1991, he put “The Caricaturist”
in the spotlight of one of his folios. It shows
him as an artist who chastises the world for
all its injustices, abuses and hypocrisies. For
this purpose, he dons the guise of a fool, as
indicated by the figure on the bottom left of
the image. Searle thus describes the fundamental mission of caricaturists: to point out
contradictions, identify weak spots in society
and in politics, and hit nerves, again and again
- with wit, sarcasm and humor as their weapons.
But aren’t we, aren’t artists and the media,
intimidated by attacks such as the one in
Paris? Haven’t we already begun to build
self-censorship into our minds? Wouldn’t
we rather shut out the unpleasant and be
“politically correct” instead of taking risks?
There are no simple answers to these questions, as public debate in recent weeks has
shown. At the same time, these debates are
not new. They just re-ignite in moments of
serious crisis or in the face of suspected and
“perceived” provocation.
Searle’s cartoon is currently displayed on the
facade of the Wilhelm Busch Museum as an
advertisement for its permanent collection.
Yet it is also, and chiefly, the museum’s way
to take a strong stance following the Paris
attacks: Caricature and satire are expression and
barometer of an enlightened, liberal society.
To defend them in these difficult times also
means to defend freedom of thought.
I do not have to look very far: Wilhelm
Busch had his own experiences with public opinion and authority. His story about
the rascals Max and Moritz initially sparked
fierce insults. The publisher of his picture
story Saint Anthony of Padua was sued for
“debasement of religion and inciting public
nuisance through indecent writings.”
“What is satire allowed to do? Anything,”
Kurt Tucholsky declared. Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe once said about satirist Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg: “Whatever Lichtenberg makes a joke about is certainly concealing a problem.”
Lichtenberg was fascinated by the potential
of pictorial satire to encapsulate complex
contents succinctly yet pointedly, to use
“shortcuts” to shed light on truths, “which
could not be expressed in any other way,
in the quickest and the most familiar manner, yet at the same with humor and wit”.
Truth per se is no predetermined value for
Lichtenberg. It is generated by the joint discourse of connected people - and to achieve
it, one must be willing to think for oneself:
“Have the courage to think, to take charge of
your situation,” he noted in his Sudelbücher
(muck books).
22
When it comes to controversial issues such
as caricature and religion, this “courage to
think” in Lichtenberg’s sense can become
dangerous. This is true not only when it comes
to Islam, as illustrated by the controversy
over Mohammed caricatures in 2006 or the
attack on the editorial office of Charlie Hebdo.
In 2002, Austrian caricaturist Gerhard Haderer
made headlines for months with his book
The Life of Jesus. He was fiercely attacked,
especially in Austria, and even sued and
sentenced to six months in jail in Greece,
although he was later acquitted. He commented: “I targeted the Church, not Jesus!
... It has to be possible to make fun of the
‘ground crew’ if they mess up – just like
with anyone else”.
As Andreas Platthaus put it in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung: “What’s frivolous is not
laughing at religion, it is the bigotry of the
religious. What’s frivolous are utterances by
people who dislike someone else’s irreverence and then wish some trouble on them
to make them aware of the risks of their
actions and more “responsible” – in other
words, that people would muzzle themselves. These people may not think in terms
of actual blades or bullets, which would really make them the biblical ‘poor in spirit’.”
Caricatures as such are provocation; if they
don’t provoke, they are toothless and thus
useless. Gerhard Haderer is one of those
artists who does not back down in the
face of the “political correctness” that
coats society like mildew, but who instead
takes a stance and will not allow society to
deceive itself about its own state. “Irreverence,” says Haderer, “is the basis of caricature and satirical expression, in whatever
form. It would be a dire development indeed
if we had only conformist and respectful
caricaturists who cater to expectations
sanctioned by mainstream tastes.”
An open society should be capable of differentiated debate. By no means do you have
to agree with every caricature, you don’t
have to approve of them, you have the right
to be annoyed by them - but the right to
free speech must be defended at all cost.
In an interview with newspaper Die Zeit on
January 29, Art Spiegelman made it clear:
“You just have to adore Charlie Hebdo as an
‘equal opportunity offender’ that dishes out
insults in every direction. I think that’s the
only position that somehow makes sense.
Once you start being cautious and considerate towards one group and not towards
others, freedom of expression has already
gone down the drain. My formula for this
is: If you do not defend the perimeter, there
can be no center.”Just a month later, he
summa-rized his comments in a comic which
was published exclusively by the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung on February 21. Andreas
Platthaus translated it into German, along
with the commentary: “The first panel of the
comic goes far back. It shows a 1908 ad for
a school that trains cartoonists. Departing
from this, Spiegelman criticizes art that
yields to rationality, addressing both the
dialectic of enlightenment by caricature and
the cowardice of Western society.”
Together with caricature institutions in
Kassel, Frankfurt and Basel, and with the
support of Antenne Metropole in Lower
Saxony, we have created an online presentation about Charlie Hebdo, its artists and
its cultural environment. You can visit this
page at www.museen-fuer-satire.com - as
over 60,000 other users have already done
since it first went online.
The website gives an overview of the artists
and presents a selection of caricatures
whose titles have been translated into
German, with short commentaries wherever
helpful. Georges Wolinski, who was slain
on January 7, summarized the leitmotif of
many Charlie Hebdo cartoons as follows:
“Humor means that no subject is taboo. We
cannot shy away from anything. Except
viciousness. We are cruel, but not evil.”
I would like to close with the two last panels
from Spiegelman’s comic strip, at the point
where the artist sheds his mouse mask: “I
have NO interest in baiting psychopaths, but
I must show respect to the foolhardy and
brave Charlie Hebdo artists.” And he reveals
a head with a turban, drawn in a blurry outline, wishing readers “a nice day.” n
Photo courtesy Gisela Vetter-Liebenow
GISELA VETTER-LIEBENOW studied art
history, history, and contemporary German
literary history at the universities of
Constance, Stuttgart and Freiburg. She received her MA in 1986 from the University
of Freiburg, and her doctorate in 2001 from
the University of Hamburg. She has worked
at the Wilhelm Busch Museum of Caricature
and Graphic Arts since 1987, and assumed
the position of director of the museum in
2012.
Freedom of Expression
23
CARTOONS AND TABOOS –
DANCING IN A VISUAL MINEFIELD
PANEL DISCUSSION WITH LECTTR, MATT WUERKER, ANN TELNAES, AND KAL
We organized this panel in commemoration
of the January 7, 2015 assault on the satire
magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was also an
attack on freedom of expression. The slogan
Je suis Charlie became ubiquitous. All of
Europe showed its solidarity with France.
Many citizens living in capital cities placed
garlands of flowers in front of the French
embassies. The European media reproduced
caricatures as a show of solidarity. European
cultural organizations hold on to the belief
in the freedom of expression, and refuse
to avoid difficult topics or refrain from the
use of satire.
Four caricaturists accepted our invitation to
participate in a discussion about the role of
cartoonists and cartoons in our political and
media culture.
This discussion took place at New York University on February 11, 2016, and was supported by the Embassy of Belgium and the
House of Flanders, New York and the EU
Delegation to the U.S. n
LECTTR:
This is how I look after a day of work (see
drawing on page 30). I have been drawing
all over myself. I work for De Standaard,
which is a quality newspaper, not a tabloid.
It’s one of the biggest quality newspapers in
Belgium. By quality we mean, of course, the
cartoons and not the rest…. I also do a lot of
non-political work…
I spend all my time to thinking of a good
joke, thinking of a good message, and none
of the time goes to drawing it decently.
When I work on a cartoon for an hour, I
would work forty or forty-five minutes on
the idea, ten minutes on the drawing and
then five minutes on the color and then
twenty minutes on trying to get it mailed to
the editor and being late….
Even in my non-political work, I try to always be a little bit annoying. It is what we
cartoonists do. We are faceless. Nobody can
hurt us normally. That is also why cartoonists do not participate in group panels. J
24
And then the next day, I made this cartoon
(see cartoon at top of page 25). J J
When you go back to the cartoon that got
me into the trouble, you will notice that I
didn’t draw Muhammad. I have never drawn
Muhammad. I drew Muhammad Ali once. I
never drew Muhammad. That’s really important to know. I did get a death threat
because of drawing a jihadi. Before the
Charlie Hebdo attacks, the boundaries were
set at drawing Muhammad. When everybody agreed that you should not draw Muhammad or you would get killed, then the
boundaries were shifted into another direction: you shouldn’t laugh at the warriors
of God. That is why we started to make
these kinds of cartoons in Belgium, where
we do still laugh at these jihadi. It is important to do, because otherwise we’ll end up
only drawing cartoons about ourselves,
about bald elderly men who stay at home
all day wearing pajamas and drawing funny
pictures. J
Are there any Muslims in the room? J
Religion is obviously one of the main topics I address, and also politics, because I
work for a political newspaper. The things
that get people annoyed are mostly things
that are interesting. You get great jokes
when you put a finger into the wound, and
it hurts a bit. You get the best jokes when
you get the finger into the wound and pus
comes out. That’s what I try to do. J When
I get a lot of attention because of that cartoon, then I know I obviously do something
well. It is also a bit of a European tradition,
I think. We don’t tend to back off when you
get a lot off hate mail or things like that.
Actually newspapers even like that, because
it brings them attention as well.
This one got me into trouble (see above).
This is the cartoon I made when the Charlie
Hebdo attacks happened. It went worldwide,
it went viral. I have no idea how many
newspapers reprinted it. It got a lot of good
press. And it got one really bad one, coming
from an extremist Islamic corner. We had
to go into police protection and things like
that. It was actually a cartoon that changed
my life. Probably because of that cartoon I
am standing here – otherwise people outside Belgium wouldn’t have known my political work, but also it got me into a lot of
trouble and it got me to think about the position of me as a cartoonist. Should I put my
finger into that wound until pus comes out?
Should I back out a little?
The idea of what a cartoonist is has changed
a lot since Charlie Hebdo. We used to be
normal people, people who were a bit envied because they really didn’t have a real
job, they were paid properly to sit at home
and they made a drawing every now and
then for a newspaper, and suddenly we were
freedom fighters. We never really asked
for that. You should see me as a freedom
fighter. J
Freedom of Expression
Stereotypes are our big weapon. We use clichés and tropes. We look for the common
denominator in human culture, something
an entire population will understand. It’s
very cultural of course: some hand gestures
often used in Turkish cartoons are very
rude, because they are rude in Turkish culture. But for Belgians, these hand gestures
have no meaning. But still, all cartoonists
have this in common. Whether you’re a European cartoonist, or an Asian or American
one, or one in the Middle East or Africa: we
all use clichés mainly to make our point. n
MATT WUERKER:
I get to make fun of politicians and I work
in DC, so I have the easiest job in the world.
The cartoons just write themselves.
I’ve been doing this for 35 years professionally. My first professional cartoons were
done back when Jimmy Carter was president. The landscape has changed, the place
that we work as cartoonists has changed.
But the actual idea of this funny combination of a funny picture with a pun or a caricature hasn’t changed.
25
Political cartoonists are sort of anachronisms
that go back a couple of centuries. In my
case, I am working with 18th century technology, like pens and brushes and water colors
and things like that. But the delivery system
that we use has dramatically changed in
the 35 years that I’ve been doing this.
When I started 35 years ago, the goal for
any cartoonist was to get a job working for
a daily newspaper. Cartoonists are sort of
opportunistic parasites, and for a couple of
centuries the thing for us was to find a big
fat newspaper and attach ourselves to that.
In my career time, that opportunity has diminished. Those newspapers have started to
die. People are going freelance or going online. We’re working in this different world.
The delivery system for cartoonists has actually never been better and the reach for
cartoons has never been larger.
Visual metaphors are very dangerous things
in this new media landscape because they
travel by themselves around the world into
societies where the nuance of the metaphor
is lost on the audience perhaps, and the opportunity to misinterpret the cartoon or the
nature of the humor is huge. This didn’t use
to exist. When I started out in Portland,
Oregon in the 1970’s, if you drew a cartoon
for the little paper in Oregon it stayed in
Portland, Oregon and it didn’t have to work
in London, Paris or Lahore.
Cartoons work really well on social media.
People share cartoons quickly across the internet. Once upon a time, the biggest compliment for a cartoonist was getting cut out
of the newspaper and stuck on the refrigerator door. And then people would wonder
through the kitchen and say “God that’s sort
of funny.” Well the Internet is a great refrigerator door, and it connects to millions and
millions of other refrigerator doors.
The things really blew up with the Danish
Cartoon Controversy. A very small publication in Denmark published a group of cartoons and then imams in Denmark took
those to imams in the Muslim world and
they spread. They basically weaponized the
cartoons. They were not particularly rough
cartoons, but the people who wanted to use
them as political organizing tools knew exactly how to use them. And suddenly cartoonists who were sitting in their basements
and pajamas doing these little drawings
were turning into freedom fighters. We are
now thrust into the middle of this strange
argument, this clash of civilizations, where
the fundamentalists are saying, “You can’t
26
© Matt Wuerker
It started me thinking about other forms of
censorship and what limits of free speech
we put on ourselves. In Europe, you have
laws against denying the Holocaust. In China, they severely restrict the use of the internet by their citizens, and the Islamic extremists think that the appropriate response
to offensive images is to kill the cartoonist.
When we talk about red lines in cartooning,
what does that really mean? What are the
consequences when we start making these
red lines for cartoonists about what they
can or cannot draw? During the debates
after the Danish Cartoon Controversy, the
main reason given by the critics that cartoons were offensive was that the cartoons
depicted Muhammad and that this was not
allowed within the Islamic religion. Well,
guess what? If you go back in history, there
are plenty of examples of Muhammad being
depicted in art. It is something to think about
when people are throwing things around
about what is allowed and what is not.
say this. That’s blasphemous,” and the free
speech side is saying, “Of course we can say
it. That’s freedom of speech.”
There was a big argument. Garry Trudeau1
stepped into it when he started saying that
the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were getting
close to hate speech and he pleaded for
emotional intelligence. That side of the argument resonates with me. It’s part of the
political correctness argument that we have
been struggling with for a long time. Cartoonists have learned over the last stretch
here to show some emotional intelligence
in terms of the kind of imagery we use. I
don’t think there is anything wrong with
that. I think it’s actually necessary given the
strange magic power that cartoons have.
ItÕs good that we don’t trade in rough ethnic stereotypes. In the case of Charlie Hebdo, they get special dispensation because
of their situation. Je Suis Charlie, I believe
in that firmly. But that doesn’t negate the
necessity to understand the legacy of eth-
nic attacks using crass imagery and stuff
like that. The cartoonists do have some responsibility, I think. We’ve even come a long
way in terms of how we portray women in
cartoons. So I am in favor of emotional intelligence. n
ANN TELNAES:
First of all, I am a free speech absolutist.
When I first thought about offensive images
and cartoons and red lines – that goes back
to the Danish Cartoon Controversy in 2005.
There was widespread protest and condemnation, including by world leaders such as
Bill Clinton, who called the cartoons outrageous.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
called for an investigation against the Danish
Government for racism and disrespect for
belief. Here in the US, the Danish Cartoon
Controversy really started the ball rolling about
the debate what is it that we can draw? Are
there images that we should stay away from?
So, the debate continued after the Danish
Cartoon Controversy. We had the Swedish
artist Lars Vilks draw a dog with a Muhammad head2 and of course that ended up in
threats and more condemnations. In 2012,
there was an incredibly offensive and incredibly bad movie that was made about
Muhammad that also ended up – I guess –
causing the Benghazi attack.
In January 2015, the debate took a very
deadly turn. Two Islamist extremists went
to the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and
attacked and killed five cartoonists. So at
first, most of the world supported Charlie
Hebdo . This was the cartoon I did on that
day. It honestly took me a while to wrap my
head around the fact. In our small community of cartoonists, five cartoonists were a lot.
We were used to threats against cartoonists. A lot of cartoonists have been in prison. American cartoonists don’t tend to have
to deal with that, but overseas, we have a
lot of colleagues who have had to deal with
attacks. To have five of them killed was
27
Freedom of Expression
quite a shock. First, the whole world rallied around Charlie Hebdo and cartoonist
and [WE: expressed]: “Je Suis Charlie ”. But
a couple of weeks later, it started to change.
We had some prominent writers and cartoonists speaking out against what Charlie
Hebdo had done.
Ann Telnaes also showed cartoons that
got her into trouble, including one on how
women are perceived in the U.S. and Saudi
Arabia which resulted in a couple of death
threats (2002), another one on the Boston
Catholic church sexual abuse scandal (2003),
an animation in response to the Gaza bombing (2014), a cartoon on the Christmas video
for the Ted Cruz campaign which triggered
off an avalanche of emails and threats, and
one on sexism over the last 100 years. n
KAL:
J Our job is mainly a negative job. We are
constantly on the attack. We don’t do positive cartoons. We are critics.
One thing we [WE: don’t want to] forget when
we are in this conversation is a recent report
put out by Freedom House, a press watchdog
group, which said that only 15% of the population of the world lives where there is freedom of the press. So our conversation is in
this realm. For the other 85%, there is no
chance of drawing your own head of state
or doing all this other stuff. There is a great
deal of intolerance.
The subject we are dealing with here is mostly about Charlie Hebdo and Islamic extremists. This is a strong subject we need to address. But every time you start to dance in
this minefield, some serious things can happen. And it all can end up like this.
KAL shows examples of big subjects like US
elections, performances of heads of state,
gun violence, religious topics, racial and
ethnic stereotypes, thereby illustrating the
role of stereotypes and national taboos.
Just as Ann pointed out, if you do a subject
on Arab-Israel relations, I guarantee that
you are going to get push back, no matter
what it says. You can get yourself into an
awful lot of trouble. But you still have to
pursue those cartoons.
All societies have their strong taboos. For
example, when you have very strongly accentuated characters, you may cross into
the realm of offensive stereotypes. It’s hard
to say where the line is when you’re in this
business. People get really agitated in culture war areas, such as when it comes to a
topic like religion.
One of the things that worries me most in
America is not the Islamic extremists, like
our friends in Europe are having to deal
with today, but the one guy with the gun
who takes particular offense at a cartoon.
That to me is the most worrying thing.
Another taboo is sex. We live in a society
with family newspapers. We are not going
to draw such graphic imagery in the U.S.
In other countries, like the UK, you can use
a lot more graphic sexual stuff, but this is
much more taboo in the U.S.
[WE: Here is] my homage to our friends
in Paris a year ago. On that day, like Ann,
when we heard the news, it was such a
shocking thing, because we are in a business
of trying to take on intolerance, take on
hate. We use humor, we use pictures, that’s
kind of our mode. But on that day we lost.
On that day, it looked like those people who
could take out a few bodies could take out
a few cartoonists. But they were slightly
mistaken when they did it, because they
thought they could take out satire as well. I
have a feeling they can try and try and try
– but at the end of the day, we will get the
last laugh. n
28
PLENUM:
KAL: How has life changed for Belgian
cartoonists?
Lectrr: Everybody was worried. Paris is really close [WE: Lectrr refers to the terrorist
attacks on November 13, 2015]. It is about
a two hour drive. The [WE: latest] Paris attacks, which didn’t involve any cartoonists,
were done by terrorists who hid in Brussels. That is not a very reassuring thought.
There is also the sentiment that while the
Islamic threats, the fact you cannot portray
anything that you would like to portray any
more, is in the back of our heads, we also
face a lot of other issues that can be more
threatening to cartooning.
We get reminded of it every now and then,
but it also unites us more. This has resulted in a lot of positive developments for us
– like what you showed in your last cartoon. We used to be all individual cartoonists. Now we grouped up, we work together, we have a gallery now. We put things
on the agenda with our newspapers. Before
that, we were just people sitting at home
and drawing cartoons. That was it. We were
just making money. Now, we discuss topics.
We discuss should we draw Muhammad?
What do we do with this [WE: taboo]? We
disagree on this, obviously. Everybody has
a different point of view, but still we are
talking about it. That is the main thing that
changed - we are engaged in a discussion.
But the freedom fighter thing, that is dangerous. We have become celebrities. The
fact that we were anonymous before – we
all had a nom de plume, like Lectrr – is a
way for us to hide from the general public.
That is why we work at home and not in a
TV studio. That is why we normally don’t
do this kind of talk. By becoming celebrities,
by being asked to talk about Charlie Hebdo
on TV and things like that, that takes away
our power as being outsiders. We need to
be not part of the news. We need to be the
ones speaking out so we can say anything
we want. But the moment you are part of it
yourself, you’re no longer being objective.
KAL: You had mentioned some cartoonists
had considered packing it in after the Charlie Hebdo thing.
Lectrr: The Belgian cartoonist community is
not the youngest in the world. These people
are just five or ten years away from retirement. They had the golden years. For them,
it is no longer worth pursuing it in this kind
of situation where you could get killed because of a cartoon you make. Because the
boundaries shift really fast. It started with
drawing Muhammad, all of a sudden some
right-wing nut also considers: if they get offended and can shoot, then if I get offended, I can shoot. A lot of that discussion went
back and forth because a lot of people felt
that it was just not worth doing any longer.
But nobody stopped in the end [WE: making
cartoons].
KAL: In the cartoon community there are
many different opinions. Where do people
fall out generally?
Matt: There are two reactions. One is that a
lot of cartoonists became a little more careful about what they were drawing. There
was maybe more self-censorship. At the
same time, there were other people who
realized that if I do something provocative
here, I can raise my visibility and actually promote my career. So there are people
who opportunistically take advantage of
this, like you mentioned, Lars Vilks in Sweden. He was not the guy who had a legacy
of doing political cartoons. He was a conceptual artist. He took and continues to take
advantage of the situation. The readership
and the public have to be able to stop and
differentiate that way. It is true for cartooning in general.
There are cartoonists whose whole method of operation is provocation for provoca-
tion’s sake, really sticking the finger in the
wound. Because that’s how you get attention and become the focus of the conversation. It is a good tactic in some ways. I am
not sure it actually contributes to the conversation in a constructive way.
I do think that there are red lines, the old
cliché of bringing more light than heat to
a conversation. There is a point where you
are throwing gas on the fire but you are not
elevating the debate.
I don’t think it is a bad thing of to expect
people who are in the public square and
participate in the media to try to elevate
the debate as opposed to just provoking conflict and fights. You can see it on
cable television or cable news shows. It is
a shtick. Part of the paralysis of Washington and American politics is the media is to
be blamed. Because the easy route is: let’s
promote conflict even if it is superficial or
crazy because that attracts eyeballs and attention. And people turn in the money.
KAL: Ann, you had some controversial cartoons. But you are not doing it to attract
eyeballs. Does it sometimes surprise you
how people respond to things?
Ann: I want to be able to have that tool. It is
not just about finding a controversial image
to use to attract eyeballs to my cartoons.
But if I am commenting on a subject matter
that I feel strongly about, I want to be able
to use that harsh image. Because I want to
make a point, and I think there are certain
topics that deserve that.
Now, the whole thing about social media
has definitely changed the landscape for
us. I experienced it personally with the Ted
Cruz cartoons. I have never seen anything
take off so fast, so harshly, as that reaction.
It was a combination of things - it was a
combination of the social media, the quickness of it, the Cruz Campaign, which was
incredibly well organized, my editor’s decision. It was just everything all at once. I
Freedom of Expression
think as cartoonists, we have to realize that
when we are doing a cartoon. We have to
consider what the reaction is going to be
because unfortunately now with social
media, everyone can see it.
As has been discussed about images, different societies have different meanings, and
people take it differently. When you have
a lazy media that does not exactly explain
visual media, visual metaphors, then you
have that as a problem. So there is just
more to consider.
Lectrr: Social media is actually a bigger threat
for cartoons than the Islamic terrorists. The
Islamic threat we can handle. It is a debate.
It is culture. There are always going to be
extremists in every voice. You have extreme right-wingers. These kinds of things
will always be there. But social media has
changed the game completely. There used to
be a media and it was made up of professionals. All these people have ethical codes.
They were thinking about what they were
doing. They were well-educated and part of
the media. They knew what message they
were sending out and what kind of responses there would be.
Nowadays, everybody who buys a smartphone has become the media. So there are
ten billion people out there being media.
And these people are no longer thinking
about what we are broadcasting. We are
just figuring it out as we go along. The result
is that critical voices are being swamped by
this huge tsunami of cat videos and people
falling from stairs and things like that.
When you put out a good and critical cartoon
or a journalistic piece - forty years ago it
would have had serious impact on society –
[WE: now] the possibility is just there that
the moment it was tweeted was [WE: the]
wrong [WE: moment], that some cat did
something funny and the entire critical debate is lost in this huge pile of crap.
29
KAL: You gave a talk last night and you had
a really interesting quote about religion.
Religion in all its different forms has been a
big headbutter with cartoons and images.
Lectrr: Religion is about giving answers, and
cartoons are about asking questions. So it is
obvious that they’re going to be in conflict
all the time. Religion does not want questions, and we don’t want answers. JJ
Ann: I think there is another aspect, especially in the US. I am not going to do a cartoon on a person’s own personal religious
convictions. But the problem is, in the last
several years there are many religious
organizations that want to get into the political debate. They want to have their say in
policies which affect all of us regardless if
we are religious or not. So I feel as though it
has kind of opened it up a little. That is the
added problem. It is not that cartoonists are
just dying to criticize religions. It is part of
the political dialogue now, and that’s what
we do. Now we have an extra layer on it. n
30
PANELISTS:
LECTRR © courtesy artist
© Matt Wuerker
LECTRR (Steven Degryse) is a Belgian cartoonist best known for his daily political
cartoons in De Standaard. Over the past decade he has been published all over Europe,
both as an editorial cartoonist and a syndicated single panel cartoonist, in magazines
such as Helsingsborgs Dagblad (Sweden),
Prospect Magazine (UK), Nieuwe Revu (The
Netherlands), Veronica Magazine (The Netherlands), Kretèn (Hungary) and others. His
work has been published in more than ten
languages and over a dozen books. MATT WUERKER is the staff cartoonist for
POLITICO. Over the past 36 years, his cartoons have been used widely in dailies like
the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post
and The Christian Science Monitor, and in
magazines including Newsweek and The
Nation. In 2010, Wuerker was awarded the
Herblock Prize at the Library of Congress
and the National Press Foundation’s Berryman Award; he received a Pulitzer Prize in
2012.
© Bruce Guthrie
Courtesy KAL
ANN TELNAES is editorial cartoonist for the
Washington Post. Previously she worked for
Walt Disney Imagineering and other studios
in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Taiwan. Her print work was shown in exhibitions in the Library of Congress in 2004 and
also in Paris, Jerusalem, and Lisbon. Her
first book, Humor’s Edge, was published in
2004. She received a Pulitzer Prize in 2001.
KAL (Kevin Kallaugher) is the editorial cartoonist for The Economist and The Baltimore
Sun. Over the past 37 years, he has created
over 8,000 cartoons and 140 magazine covers. His resumé includes six collections of
his published work including Daggers Drawn
(2013). In 2015, KAL was awarded the Grand
Prix for Cartoon of the Year in Europe and
the Herblock Prize for Cartoonist of the Year
in the US, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize in Editorial Cartooning.
Freedom of Expression
31
CAN/MUST GOOD ART
BE POLITICALLY CORRECT?
READING AND DISCUSSION WITH SALMAN RUSHDIE
INTRODUCTION
BY WILFRIED ECKSTEIN
Public torture, beheadings, burnings, mass
rapes of those opposed to the terror groups
(hereafter named Da’esh) took over the
headlines of Western media in 2015. Attacks
in Paris in February and November expanded the terrorists’ war zone into European
capital cities. Any city could become the
next. The effect of 9/11 on the US seemed
to have now arrived in Europe – fear of terrorism and efforts to reduce the likelihood
of attacks. If terrorists’ fire could burn cartoonists, then even a public debate about
provocative results of artistic freedom
could be fuel for an attack. This may explain
the concern in some European embassies in
Washington, which intentionally ignored our
persistent invitations to take part in Iconoclash. It also explains the mood in some public discussions in Germany and elsewhere,
which we took up with the question: Can or
must art be politically correct?
Salman Rushdie gave us the honor of hosting
him for a reading from his latest book,
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight
Nights. The memorable event took place a
week after the disastrous terror attack in
Brussels on March 22, 2016.
The invasion in the capital of the Europeean
Union reminded us that terror attacks are
unpredictable. They fall upon us like bad
spirits and change or destroy our lives within a split second. We may hope with some
statistical probability that we will be among
the lucky ones who aren’t directly impacted.
But there is no security against terror – not
even when we are continuously charged to
observe one another on train stations and
elsewhere with ‘If you see something say
something!’1
Even more dramatic is terror when it turns
all its brutal force against an individual
and calls its name out for annihilation. The
fatwa against Salman Rushdie has been a
death sentence against a writer and against
the universal right and freedom of artistic
expression. Salman Rushdie has lived with
this death threat for over 27 years. Think to
yourself of what has happened in the last
27 years in your life or in world history.
Just to put it into perspective, the Berlin
Wall fell 27 years ago.
Salman Rushdie has been persecuted for the
written word ever since. It started before
fundamentalists turned their wrath against
imagery in film (remember Theo van Gogh),
cartoons (remember Jyllands-Posten 12
years ago and Charlie Hebdo in 2015), journalists and against anyone who would not
follow dogmas in the Middle East for many
years now, and on the European continent
since November 13, 2015.
Salman Rushdie writes about this trauma,
and in the process, seizes freedom and life
for himself each day anew. He has given us
new literary works which speak from his
soul and are anchored in the literary and
cultural contexts of his life.
In addition to his passion and achievement,
we want to praise his steadfastness and sol-
idarity with other artists who have been in
peril. To quote PEN America’s executive
director Suzanne Nossel:
“in spite of the threat under which Rushdie
has lived for the last 27 years, his outspokenness and passionate defence of imperilled writers … stands as an inspiration,
providing a daily reminder of what is at
stake in safeguarding free thought.”2
Salman Rushdie’s book Two Years Eight
Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is about
our time and about the terrorist challenges
we are going through. It enchants with beautiful language, fine humor and complexity of
personae, to address the never ending fight
between good and evil. We turn to literature
and the arts for orientation in our life. This
book does not fail. Salman Rushdie gives a
voice to suffering but also to joy. The beauty of his writing gives us truth about our own
situation and fills us with hope.
Thank you, Mr. Rushdie. We honor you as a
storyteller in the noblest sense of its word,
a creator of imaginary spheres, a wanderer
between the worlds and a defender of the
freedom of expression.
During this event at New York University on
March 30, 2016, Salman Rushdie first read
two passages from his book Two Years
Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, followed by a conversation with Lisa Page and
the audience. Excerpts from the conversation follow.
32
About censorship
Salman Rushdie: I do think the biggest damage done to me by the attack on the Satanic
Verses is that it turned me into the person
with that albatross around my neck. The person with the death threat. I think it actually
puts people off reading books. I think it has
been counterproductive. Some people thought
it was an excellent publicity device, but I
think in many ways it has been harmful because, you know, something nobody ever
said about the Satanic Verses after everything happened is that it is quite funny.
People who read it notice that. A lot of people
who have had opinions about it have not
taken the trouble to read it. I used to worry
about that until I realized that if you look at
the great attacks on works of literature in
the last hundred years or so, they were almost all attacks carried out by people who
had not read the work in question. So, people who accused Joyce’s Ulysses of being
pornography had clearly not read the work
in question. Because while Joyce had many
great talents, I think arousing you sexually
was not one of them. J When people said
of Nabokov’s Lolita that it proved he was a
pedophile, it really showed that they had not
read what is actually a profoundly moral
book. So I took heart from that. Not reading
the book appears to be what you have to do
in order to burn it. At least they bought the
books that they burned. J So that was good.
About his book Two Years Eight Months and
Twenty-Eight Nights, which in part looks
back on our time from a thousand years in
the future.
Rushdie: Anyway, in this book I have actually somehow been allowed by the powers
that be to be declared a funny writer. At the
age of 68 I finally made it - into comedy.
I actually do think it is funny. Many of my
books have elements of humor in them. It is
a book about now, but it is a book that has
quite a large time span. It has a prologue
in 12th century Spain, and it has a kind of
narrative point which is about the narrator,
the ostensible narrator of the book, who is
looking back at our time from a thousand
years in the future, and therefore sees us
as semi-mythological antique beings in the
way that we would think of people from
the year 1,000. The year 1,000 is partly historical because, for example, Charlemagne
etc., and partly mythological because it is
also roughly speaking the period of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. So
you have the strange mixture of reality and
fairy tale. It struck me that if somebody was
looking back at us from a thousand years in
the future, we would be a battle of reality
and fairy tale. So that’s the kind of tone of
voice of the book.
Where do Jinn live?
Rushdie: The Jinn are not be confused with
angels. They are an entirely different order
of thing. They crop up almost everywhere in
the East. They are thought of as belonging
to Islamic culture but they don’t. In India,
for example, the Jinn are still very popular,
and by no means only among the Muslim
communities. At a certain point, a Jinn princess in the 12th century came into the world
and had a love affair with a Spanish-Arab
philosopher, Ibn Rushd Alvarez. They had
a gigantic number of children. The children
populated the world. Hundreds of years later,
in our time, the darker, the more evil Jinn
return to the world and try to conquer and
destroy it. These inheritors – who are a little
bit Jinn - have to fight back with her help.
I grew up with them [Jinn]. In India, they
are still very much alive. People talk about
them. You spill a drink, you can blame the
Jinn for doing it. If your car has a flat tire,
you can say that a Jinn must have done
that. There is actually a ruined temple in
Old Delhi where every Thursday to this day
people go in the early evening with messages for the Jinn. Hundreds and hundreds
of people every Thursday. These messages are sometimes general and sometimes
aimed to a very specific named Jinny. They
ask for things. Usually they ask for small
things. They say: “My husband is an ..hole.
Can you arrange for him to fall over and
bump his nose, but not too hard?” J Like
that. So, these creatures are believed to be
part of everyday life. That was just a good
place to start. I did not have to import them
into the world. They were already there.
They are colossal and enjoyable and so badly behaved, amoral. When you start reading
literature about the Jinn, you will begin to
discover that they are not at all what you
think they are. They don’t actually belong to
an Islamic tradition. Many of the Jinn don’t
believe in God. There is the same degree
of skepticism in fairy land as there is here.
The existence of fairy land does not prove
the existence of paradise. Jinn are just as
skeptical about God as many of us are. They
were ourselves but different. Then I wanted
to make them funny in a way. How do you
interject comedy into extremely powerful,
metamorphic and almost immortal beings?
So, I looked at the art depicting the Jinn. It
is very grand but it is also sort of boring.
There’s no books on any shelves, there’s
no movies to watch, no television sets. All
they have, in fact, is sex. They are inexhaustible about. But once you’ve had inexhaustible sex for several hundred thousand
years, it is sort of boring, too. So when they
come to our world, they have this double
thing about us. On the one hand, they are
contemptuous about us because we are so
feeble, but on the other hand, they are fascinated because we are so interesting, because we do all sorts of things other than
have sex. In fact, most of us don’t have
sex much at all. J So you know, we write
books. J So they have this double feeling towards the human race which is both
fascination and contempt. I thought that
made them very good adversaries. They are
also very lazy, which makes them beatable
despite their enormous power. They suffer from a kind of ADD. They can’t focus on
things for very long. So they have a bit of
Freedom of Expression
a war and then they forget. So that’s their
Achilles’ heel. So this how I wanted them to
be because that’s how the novel can proceed in
terms of how you can defeat them. I wanted
them to be defeated. So you have to find a
way for human beings to rise to the occasion.
Who was Alvarez Ibn Rushd?
Rushdie: Ibn Rushd is a person who really
existed. Alvarez was a great Aristotelian
philosopher. He in his time had a philosophical argument with a Persian philosopher, Al-Ghazali, who actually lived somewhat earlier than him. Ibn Rushd was quite
a progressive voice. He believed in trying
to incorporate Aristotelian ideas of reason
and science into Islamic thought, whereas
Al-Ghazali was a much more conservative
literalist thinker. The battle between them
is a philosophical battle that has been going
on down the centuries and actually goes on
through this book, because their ghosts continue to argue long after they are dead. That
argument is still going on. Al-Ghazali wrote
this book called the Incoherence of the Philosophers, in which he basically said that
philosophers did not know anything. Ibn
Rushd replied with a book with the wonderful title of The Incoherence of the Incoherence. So there is that dispute.
How does the name Ibn Rushd relate to the
surname Rushdie?
Rushdie: At some point my father had decided to change the name of our family to
a more contemporary-sounding surname.
Because of his fondness for the thought of
Alvarez, he used Ibn Rushd, which became
Rushdie. I did not know that as a kid. I just
thought that was our name. Around the time
I was going to college, I was first told this
story. I studied history at Cambridge and so
I became interested in finding out something about him. When I did, I could understand my father’s attraction and see that
he was that very progressive thinker of his
time. His thoughts were quite attractive and
33
he had this extraordinary history of being more influential outside the Arab world
than inside the Arab world. His commentaries of Aristotle, when they were retranslated, gave us back Aristotle’s ethics, politics etc. All came back through Ibn Rushd to
Greek. His commentaries were very influential on Thomas Aquinus. Even the Florentine
humanist philosophers were very affected
by that. So he had this colossal effect on
western thought. In a way, his thought was
rejected in the Arab world, which preferred
the Al-Ghazali version. So he became a very
interesting character and he got persecuted. When I started to become persecuted,
he did that too. He was the court philosopher, he was the court physician to the Sultan in Cordoba. Then he was attacked by
fundamentalists of his time and cast out of
his job and sentenced to exile. His books
got burned, so I thought I know something
about that. So it made him even more interesting to me. I always thought that he would
get into a book of mine somehow. One of
the starting points of this book, the frontispiece of this book, is a very famous etching
by Goya “The sleep of reason brings forth
monsters.” In his commentary on the picture, Goya says something a bit more complicated than that. What he says is “Fantasy
abandoned by reason produces impossible
monsters. United with her, she is the mother
of the arts and the origins of their novels.”
He is saying something more complex than:
fantasy bad – reason good. It is more of a
kind of Yin and Yang argument. You need a
bit of both. I had the idea of that beginning
in which a creature of fantasy unites with
a creature of reason. Through that union,
they produce these beings who are a little
bit of both. That’s the best way to me, the
book argues. There is a lot of Spain in the
book. It begins in Arab Spain and then there
is this inspiration from Goya. There are a lot
of Spanish artists who were influential in
this book, like the Cinema of Bunuel, for example. Anybody who read the book can see
a little bit of Spanish surrealism lurking in
there. They liked it in Spain as a result.
Lisa Page: The theme tonight is: Can / Must
Art Be Politically Correct?
Rushdie: The answer is: “No!” J
Next question.J
Page: Must art be political art?
Rushdie: “No!” I always rather hoped that I
would write a book that wasn’t - and failed.
But I quite envy those writers who do. And
there is no reason no. That’s a temperamental thing. There are some writers who are
drawn towards public subjects and some
who are not. I think you have to leave that
to writers to make up their minds about.
It depends by what you mean by political.
Most literature is about conflict, struggle,
power, etc. So it may not be directly about
political issues that are alive at the time
when the writer is writing, but that does not
mean that they don’t have an application to
public themes. This has changed, I think. If
you go back a couple of hundred years, really, literature was often not at all political.
If you think about Jane Austen, for example.
Jane Austen’s career is exactly contemporary with the Napoleonic Wars. Pride and
Prejudice was written in 1812. Yet they
are not there in the book. The fact that her
country was engaged in that colossal war
just does not come into her pages. The British Army when it shows up in Jane Austen,
which it does - is basically that men wear
uniforms and have cute - parties. Which is
an important function. The war against Napoleon Bonaparte not so much. Then, private life, life that she was writing about,
was so separate from public life that she
could, in fact, completely explain her characters in great depth without needing to
bring in what’s happening in the news because that was far away. Now that gap has
closed so much that it is very hard for us to
explain the lives of individual human beings
without some context of the kind of world
in which they live.
34
For a writer like me, it has become very
difficult to avoid that, because it is a part
of the explanation. Why a person’s life is the
way it is has partly to do with character,
happenstance, chance encounters, love, but
has partly has to do with events that are
beyond their control which impact their
lives. Great economic events, the currency
collapses, you lose your job, or terrorist attacks. So much can now intervene into an
ordinary life that needs explaining in terms
of public affairs.
Salman Rushdie is asked about his November 2, 2001 New York Times article, “Yes,
It is About the Islam”, and what he thinks
about this topic today.
http://nyti.ms/2cC1MlO
Rushdie: I think it is a mistake the President
[Obama] is making not to use the term Islamic Terrorism. Of course, it is not what a
majority of Muslims would think or want.
It is a freakish manifestation that has been
growing up inside the Islam. But to say that
is not about Islam denies what the killers
themselves always say. If you have a group
of murderers who say, all of them, that they
do it in the name of a particular prophet
and a particular ideology, to say that it is
not about that, is just self-evidently evading
truth. The question is, what has happened
inside the Islam to allow that manifestation
to grow up inside it. It is quite clear to me
that the people who suffer most from Islamic terrorism are the Muslims. If you look
at the body count, if you look at what happens in Pakistan every week, its Shia and
Sunni - this particular week it was Christian
children who were under attack- but mostly
it has been Sunni-Shia violence. Similarly, in
Iraq, most of the deaths are Sunnis or Shia
or vice versa. The people who suffered from
the Taliban were the people of Afghanistan.
And so on. Terrorism in the Muslim world
impacts Muslims first and most viciously.
Most Muslims are as hostile to it as most
other communities. All of that is true. But it
is still true that this is something happening
inside Islam and not separate from it. If you
want to defeat it, you must first call it by
its name. To try and avoid that for virtuous
reasons of not wishing to stigmatize a large
number of innocent people with the deeds
of the few, it is just simply not true to avoid
it. One of the things that writers are in the
business of doing is calling things by their
true names. My view, this is about Islam. It
is about a terrible thing that is happening
inside Islam and has been happening inside
Islam. It is because of two things. In the Shia
world, it is because of Khomeini ideology,
in the Sunni world, it is because of the Saudis putting gigantic amounts of oil money
behind the propagation of Wahhabi Salafi
Islam. They are setting up schools across
the world in which Jihadism is taught and
bringing up, in the meantime, more than one
generation of people to believe in that kind
of paranoia and violence that the Jihadist
world view teaches. It comes out of Wahhabism, now sometimes called Salafi Islam.
The biggest mistake the West ever made
was to put the Saudis on the oil and allow
them to use that oil to propagate this. So
the reasons why that thing has been growing up in the Muslim world, there are Muslim reasons. It is not all because the West is
wrong. It is not all because of the bad things
that the West has done for which this is the
blowback. It is actually also because of the
things that have been happening in the
Muslim world. We need to look at that.
We need to call it by its name.
Salman Rushdie about Free Speech
Rushdie: When people say “I believe in free
speech but” – the answer then is that you
don’t believe in free speech. The point about
free speech is that it upsets people. It is
very easy to defend the right to speak of
people that you agree with or that you are
indifferent to. The defense of free speech
begins and does not end when somebody
says something which you don’t like. And it’s
get more difficult as the dislike increases.
In terms of Charlie Hebdo, people have simply been misrepresenting what that magazine was about. There was a survey done
by Le Monde after the murders of ten years
of Charlie Hebdo covers. 528 or something
covers. Of them, the grand total of seven
were about Islam. Twice as many were
about the pope, three times as many were
about Israel, and hundreds were about the
racist French Front National and hundreds
more were attacking Sarkozy. You have a
magazine whose main thrust was to be
anti-state and anti-racist. Which made
many more jokes about Catholics and Jews
than it did about Muslims, which is now
being characterized as being anti-Muslim. .…
Most of the people criticizing it [Charlie
Hebdo], including writers criticizing it at
PEN last year, have never been to France,
don’t speak French, neither seen a copy of
the magazine. One of them actually said so
on the record to a journalist. “No, I have
never seen the magazine and even if I did
it would be no good because I do not speak
good enough French.” And he is a writer,
you know! …
Everybody knows who is in this game
that if you are a writer with any degree of
prominence, you are constantly asked to
take up positions about this or that cause
and you know that you will be asked to defend those positions. So, don’t do it without
doing your homework…Here clearly were
people who were criticizing something they
did not fully grasp…
If you take the specifics of this magazine,
that’s not what it was doing. It was characterized as doing something which in fact it
was not doing.
Salman Rushdie about Free Speech and
Religion
I have to say that it is ok to be rude about
religion. To use a locution that Christopher
Hadrians might have used: Just because
Freedom of Expression
people are sensitive about the non-existence of the sky god does not mean that I
have to listen to that sensitivity. If you believe the world is flat, I should be able to
say to you “You are a moron” J without
your being offended being part of the problem. It is because you are moron. If you believe in the non-existence of sky god and I
say your sky god is non-existent and you
say that is offensive to me, I don’t care. Because guess what, you are wrong. Two and
two is four and not five. ….. In a free, open
society it must be possible to attack each
other’s ideas. What you have to do is to
distinguish between attacking ideas and attacking people. What happens quite often in
this particular area is that that gets blurred.
There are attacks on Muslim communities
which are not just about the criticism of
ideas, and that has to be put under control
and stopped ….
Salman Rushdie about the First Amendment
Rushdie: The First Amendment is the most
important document in this country. Remember the First Amendment was really
written to protect religious freedom…..So
the things go together and they go together at the foundation of this country. On
the one hand, freedom of religious expression, and on the other, freedom of all other
expressions. That’s the bedrock of America.
If we start losing sight of that, something
very bad happens to this country. Donald
Trump happens. Donald Trump happens
when you forget what America is. n
35
Courtesy Lisa Page
© Bruce Guthrie
LISA PAGE is on the board of the PEN/
Faulkner Foundation, which promotes the
love of reading and a connection to writing
through public events. She has been Professor of English Literature at George Washington University since 2005, where she
directs the Creative Writing Program. She
is a writer in her own right in the genres of
fiction and fact, and has been a regular on
NPR’s Readers Review. Lisa Page acted as
moderator of the conversation with Salman
Rushdie.
SALMAN RUSHDIE grew up in Bombay, a
city which has been a melting pot of many
communities and cultures for several thousand years. He went to school and university in England. The world’s most renowned
writer, he is the author of twelve novels
and other literary works. His books have
been translated into over forty languages. His most recent novel, Two Years Eight
Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, was published simultaneously around the world in
the English language in September 2015.
A Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Rushdie has received numerous
honors, among them the European Union’s
Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the
Year prizes in both Britain and Germany
and the Crossword Book Award in India. He
holds the rank of Commandeur des Arts et
des Lettres, France’s highest artistic honor,
and honorary doctorates and fellowships at
six European and six American universities.
He is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T., and University Distinguished
Professor at Emory University. Rushdie was
President of PEN American Center from
2004-2006, and Chairman for ten years of
the PEN World Voices International Literary
Festival, which he helped to create.
36
CULTURAL
HERITAGE
37
PROTECTING CULTURAL HERITAGE
AGAINST ILLICIT TRADE OF
ART TRAFFICKING
BY TASOULA GEORGIOU HADJITOFI
INTRODUCTION:
It is a human tendency to preserve the tangible and intangible world for future generations. The diverse histories of the ancient
development of settlements, principalities,
and cities which resulted in the plurality
of cultures offer an element of hope in a
world of crises and wars. Yet they are being systematically attacked and destroyed
by extremists. The devastation is intentional, ideologically motivated, and portrayed
by the perpetrators as a holy war against
established hegemonies and “deviant” cultures. We contend that their acts of destruction are directed against a common interest
in peaceful coexistence despite religious or
ideological differences.
Numerous historic events precede the current confrontation with the Islamic State
(IS). We theorized perhaps we could find
some reason for optimism by looking at
past cultural and political crises which bear
some parallels from which we can perhaps
glean solutions for resolving some current
crises. We started our exploration by reflecting on a military occupation forty years
ago and the resulting cultural desecrations.
TASOULA GEORGIOU
HADJITOFI:
As we gather here in historic Washington,
D.C. and acknowledge the cultural heritage
of this city that symbolizes what freedom is
Kanakaria mosaics-missing for sale. Courtesy Tasoula Georgiou Hadjitofi
to the world, millions of refugees and displaced people are fleeing areas in conflict.
This is having an extraordinary impact on
Europe as people head into the heart of the
Continent from zones of conflict and chaos
in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or North Africa.
Many have fled hoping to find safety and a
better future for their children. In Germany,
whose language and culture are celebrated
in this Institute, they expect to take in 1.5
million migrants this year alone. Many of
these refugees had hellish experiences witnessing their place of origin, often centers
of ancient civilization, reduced to bombedout shells. They have suffered the destruction not only of their homes and businesses,
but of the monuments, places of worship
and historic sites, which gave meaning to
their lives and connected them with their
forebears. Now they must make a new life,
uncertain of the welcome they will receive
and disconnected from those ancient sources
of meaning.
For some refugees, there will be an extra
twist to their pain. Even as they grieve for
the precious cultural heritage which their
communities have lost (sacred and historical), they may very well see antiquities or
art objects looted from their countries of
origin that are being sold openly to wealthy
people in their new homelands by auction
houses or art dealers. Imagine, for example,
being a migrant to Europe from the city of
Timbuktu in Mali, an UNESCO World Heritage site which was once the spiritual capital of a vast region. How would you feel, as
a displaced Malian, if you saw ancient manuscripts or parts of a recently vandalized
historic shrine from your home city being
38
The eyes of saints had been gouged out and
some were decapitated. There were pictures
of mosaics from the 6th century Kanakaria
church in the northeast of Cyprus, one of
the world’s oldest places of Christian worship, ripped from the walls. Hundreds of
pieces of glass and stone fitted together
to create images of Jesus Christ and his
apostles that held great significance for
Orthodox and all Christian people around
the world were drilled out of the ceiling
and cut into bits.
Virgin with scratched eyes. Courtesy Tasoula Georgiou Hadjitofi
sold for profit to wealthy European collectors? The same implies if you are an immigrant or refugee from Egypt. Or put yourself
in the shoes of a refugee who had somehow reached London or Paris from one of
the towns in northern Iraq where since last
year, the fighters of Islamic State have been
terrorizing religious minorities and wrecking
the monuments they hold dear. How would
that refugee feel about seeing religious artifacts from his faith being traded by art galleries? I know this is true because I am a
refugee.
I was born on the island of Cyprus, a country
located in the eastern Mediterranean which
has a rich and turbulent history that dates
back to the earliest days of civilization and
Christianity. I grew up in Famagusta, a city
by the sea once known for having 365
churches in its region, one to worship each
day of the year. The Turkish Invasion of
Cyprus in 1974 destroyed all but five of
these ancient churches and monasteries
that played an important role in the lives
of the Greek Orthodox. I lost my carefree
existence as the child of an ordinary Greek
Orthodox family whose life was defined
by the Christian Orthodox faith, Christmas
feasts, Easter barbecues and family pilgrimages to cool stone chapels in remote
mountainous areas. These chapels were all
covered from floor to ceiling with ancient
beautiful frescoes, mosaics or icons that focused our prayers. I was 14 when that world
came to a violent end and we had to flee
westward along the coast for our lives. To
lose one’s identity and freedom shakes the
core of who you are as a human being. I was
no longer known as Tasoula Georgiou. They
called me Refugee.
As a young Consul in 1988, just weeks on the
job, I was targeted by a mysterious Dutch
art dealer who wanted to sell information
about looted religious artifacts from Cyprus
in exchange for cash. He revealed shocking
photographs showing me proof of the cultural cleansing that took place in the occupied area. I saw Byzantine icons of the kind
that my family and I had venerated and
loved, brutally damaged.
Whoever committed those terrible acts of
vandalism was trying to destroy all trace of
our collective existence. The looters were
not just trying to wipe away our past; they
were trying to rewrite history to erase the
fact that the Greek Orthodox culture ever
existed. The following short video I am
about to play speaks for what the sacred
treasures looted from Cyprus mean to the
Christian Orthodox people.
As a young Consul in The Hague, I became
involved in a landmark court case that was
taking place in the United States involving
four Kanakaria mosaics depicting Jesus
Christ, an archangel and the apostles Matthew and James. With the support of the
Cyprus government, the Church of Cyprus
waged a challenging legal battle for the restitution of the four pieces led by attorney
Thomas Kline, who is with us today. The 6th
century mosaics were purchased by an art
dealer in Indiana who was proposing to resell them to the Getty Museum for $20 million. In the course of this difficult battle, I
learned who the players were in the shadowy underworld of art trafficking, and how
they played their game. They were experts
at finding the loopholes that existed in the
law to avoid prosecution. I learned the difference between the law in the United
States, and in most European countries. In
American law, it is a fundamental principle
that a thief cannot pass on good title. So
a person who acquires stolen goods may
lose those goods, even if he claims that
Cultural Heritage
39
Kanakaria mosaics-Goldberg case. Courtesy Tasoula Georgiou Hadjitofi
the acquisition was made in good faith.
That is a very sound moral principle and it
has been a great help to campaigners for
the restitution of stolen cultural treasures.
BRAVO AMERICA. In most European countries,
the law tends to favor the possessor, and it
makes it possible to legitimize the acquisition of ill-gotten gains once a certain period
has passed. There are statutes of limitations,
but in my opinion there should be none when
it comes to cultural heritage. During my tenure
as Honorary Consul, and a Representative of
the Church of Cyprus, I was responsible for
the repatriation of millions of dollars worth
of stolen artifacts. In 1997, I orchestrated
what became known as the Munich Operation, which led to the arrest of the Turkish
mastermind behind the looting of Cyprus
churches in the occupied area. This art sting
recovered over $ 60 million of stolen artifacts from Cyprus and around the world.
With thirty years of experience, there were
many lessons learned. I created an NGO, Walk
of Truth, to bring these lessons learned to
the rest of the world. Walk of Truth is
• An online platform for reporting crimes
against cultural heritage worldwide during
conflict
• A smart advocacy and lobbying mechanism
• A digital archive comprising 30 years of
data on recovering antiquities
During a Walk of Truth debate held at the
Peace Palace in The Hague involving a round
table of experts from around the world, we
analyzed the trade and restitution of stolen
artifacts with real examples from Afghanistan
and Cyprus. These were the major conclusions from our debate.
• There is no integrated approach to combatting art trafficking, despite very good
work being done by individual organizations and stakeholders.
• There is no vehicle for the public to protect cultural heritage which could multiply
resources overnight.
• Legal battles take years to be resolved
and the artifacts are kept in warehouses
away from the public eye. There is a need
for a “temporary home for homeless arts”.
Where do we go from here? A new brand of
terrorism has emerged, from the Islamic State
to the fundamentalist fighters of North and
West Africa. They have half-destroyed the
ancient city of Palmyra in Syria, one of the
best-preserved sites of the classical world,
and used bulldozers to wreck the Assyrian
archaeological site of Nimrud. In Yemen, irreplaceable parts of the world’s religious and
cultural heritage are being destroyed in a civil
war, not by terrorists but by well-organized
armies, sometimes using weapons that they
have received from western governments.
Either our governments will rise to this
challenge, or each country will try to solve
its problems at the expense of its neighbor.
Walk of Truth believes that the battle to
protect cultural heritage can only be won by
engaging the help of global citizens, refugees and migrants, giving them an opportunity to fight back as peaceful warriors using their knowledge of the monuments, art
treasures and antiquities which are so close
to their hearts and working alongside the
authorities. We are proposing to establish
a digital platform, Cultural Crime Watchers
Worldwide, which will make it easy for people to offer tips about trafficked antiquities,
with a guarantee of absolute anonymity for
the information provider.
By establishing Culture Crime Watchers
Worldwide, we hope to turn those who feel
Protecting Culture Heritage, continued on page 43
40
REFORMATTING SPACE:
THE SELF-PROCLAIMED “ISLAMIC STATE’S”
STRATEGY OF DESTROYING CULTURAL
HERITAGE AND COMMITTING GENOCIDE1
BY NICO PRUCHA
INTRODUCTION:
The strategic destruction of UNESCO World
Heritage Sites by Al-Qaeda, IS and similar
jihadist armies prompted us to look for a
way to contextualize the destruction of
cultural heritage in that region. We asked
about the historical context and the aim of
destruction. What is of cultural value and
for whom? Who are the driving forces behind destruction, looting and trafficking?
One insight that stood out for us as an example of the aim to construct a type of political order came through a story about
Tadmur, the local name for the district
which we refer to as Palmyra. Tadmur is
also synonymous with one of the most vicious and brutal prisons in the area. A relict
of colonialism, it was known for harsh conditions, extensive human rights abuse, torture and summary executions. We learned
that when it was captured and destroyed
by IS in May 2015, this accomplishment was
comparable to the liberation symbolized
by the Storming of the Bastille during the
French Revolution.
NICO PRUCHA:
The self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (IS) is
driven by a coherent and tightly defined
ideology, claiming absolute hegemony to be
the only valid representatives of Sunni Islam.
The current fight in the Middle East is increasingly along the lines of sectarianism,
a war between Sunni and Shi’a Islam. IS, as
much as al-Qaeda, considers itself as a protection force for Sunni Muslims while ideologically enforcing the denial of any space for
Shiites, Alawites, Christians, Jews, Druze,
Yezidis, homosexuals, seculars or any other
group in the region. A denial of space means
to destroy non-Sunni places of worship and
the annihilation of those who attend these
public sites. This constitutes a genocide in
which the respective memory, cultural heritage sites, holy places, sites of veneration,
such as graveyards, tombs of holy men (awliya’),
mosques, churches, or even trees (“tree of
Moses”) that hold a spiritual meaning for local communities are systematically wiped
out by the self-defined “Islamic State.”
The sites of veneration had been public places,
protected by regimes that claimed to be somewhat secular, despite local sectarian policies
such as the empowerment of Sunnis in Iraq under
the rule of Saddam Hussein or the exclusion
of Christians and Kurds in al-Asad’s Syria.
Any territory conquered by IS is systematically cleansed of non-Sunni holy sites,
destroying not only non-Muslim communities, but anything deemed as non-Sunni by
IS standards – subsequently, Shiite mosques
and tombs of “holy men” or “saints” (awliya’)
are demolished and literally blown to obliteration. According to the worldview of IS, the
“Caliphate” can only manifest in its true form
when the conquered territory is purged of
anyone and anything that violates the “oneness of God,” or tawhid in Arabic, which is
the ultimate ratio of jihadist ideology.
This reformatting of territory in Syria and Iraq,
but also in Libya, Yemen, parts of Africa and
elsewhere, is the perhaps irreversible destruction of heterogeneous religious communities and the end of pluralism and tolerance, in
particular within the greater Middle East.
Translating al-Qaeda doctrine (texts) into
action of the “Islamic State” (videos). The
al-Qaeda (AQ) ideology has provided the
theoretical framework that IS employs and
exercises. While AQ has been pledging for
decades to erode the borders of the SykesPicot Agreement, IS was able to do so within
few months – with proper tabloid-styled
reporting of the event for their electronic
English language magazine “Dabiq” as well
as several videos in Arabic, English, Spanish
and other languages. One may thus argue,
the AQ ideology cannot be separated from
IS, rather, IS is the recent evolution thereof.
With the consolidation of territory within
Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, local
Arab traditions are subjected or forced to
adapt to the application of its “state” ideology – based mainly on AQ ideologues and
their rich theological corpus (mainly writings).
This “theology of violence,” as Rüdiger Lohlker
terms it, prescribes three conditions:
Cultural Heritage
1. Propagation and implementation of
“tawhid”, or “oneness of god”, whereas “there
is no god but god” as set in the Islamic creed.
Jihadists hijack this principle by claiming to
be the only ones professing the “oneness of
god”. The raised right index finger symbolizes the “one god” and is used by Islamists
and jihadists alike worldwide. The oneness of
God is the fundamental monotheistic principle
to not only establish a rule by God’s divine
commandment, but rather set an identity as a
muwahhid, who professes the worship and
proper rituals for the one God as outlined in
the Islamic creed and set by the flag of the
Islamic State.
2. Thus, the jihadists define themselves as
muwahhidin, exercising the tawhid principle, in
contradiction to the mushrikin, who neglect
the monotheistic belief set and are rather
loyal servants of dictatorial, secular or monarchist governments where individual leaders are hailed and praised in a similar fashion as God. Shirk (polytheism or associating
partners next to god) defines anyone not
adhering to the strict parameters of IS and
specifically targets Alawites, Christians, Shiites and anyone else who violates the tawhid
principle, including Sunni Muslims who are
defined as “apostates” or “misguided.”
3. IS, however, is a smart - and primary Arab movement that invites Sunni Muslims
to “revert,” thus repent (tawba), to true Sunni
Islam by its definition. In Sunni areas of Iraq
and Syria, IS announces public repentance for
any Sunni Muslim who has been misguided
into serving as a policeman or soldier for the
respective regime. This form of inclusion and
social cohesion is a crucial factor for understanding IS’ ability to consolidate territory
while ‘purifying’ the “Caliphate” by the systematic destruction of any space for nonSunni Muslims and the removal of cultural
heritage sites to claim absolute hegemony.
41
Images provided courtesy Nico Prucha.
THEOLOGICAL DIMENSION
testimony to “expel the mushrikin from the
Arab Peninsula.” Almost a decade later, the
self-proclaimed “Islamic State” in Syria and
elsewhere invests great lengths to document
and showcase the destruction of museums
in Hatra (Iraq), the demolition of temples in
Palmyra (Tadmur, Syria) or the bulldozing of
Shiite and Sufi sites in Derna (Libya) by using
the same scriptures employed by al-Qaeda
before.
The first generation of al-Qaeda on the Arab
Peninsula, at the time mainly in Saudi Arabia, legitimized the killing of non-Muslims
as fulfilling prophet Muhammad’s alleged
The foremost definition of the mushrikin is
as described by the jihadist ideologue Abu
Ahmad ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Masri in his 2009
treatise “Stance on the Positions regarding
Expelling the mushrikin from the Arab Peninsula” (Waqfat ma al-waqfat hawla “ikhraj
al-mushrikin min jazirat al-’arab”):
“What is the intention with the mushrikin?
They are not Muslims. That is what the prophet
– peace and blessing be upon him – said just
as Omar – may God be pleased with him –
bequeathed:
“To expel the Jews and Christians from the
Arab Peninsula until only Muslims are there!
(Muslim 3313; Abu Dawud 2635; al-Tirmidhi
1532). And likewise what he said in the haReformatting Space, continued on page 43
42
RUINS ALONG THE NILE
BY MONICA HANNA
The rate of cultural heritage desecration occurring in Egypt post the political events of
2011 is increasing. The gold fever of finding artifacts is affecting many archaeological sites, which once raided are left to the
land mafia to take over for unplanned construction. Despite the fact that Egypt does
not have Daesh on its land destroying its
cultural heritage like in other parts in the
Middle East, looting is achieving something comparable in terms of the destruction of the archaeological context. Complete
archaeological sites are raided and emptied
of their objects, leaving behind meaningless
dirt. It will take years of salvage archaeology to reconstruct the history. For example,
the noble cemetery of King Amenemhat III
in Dahshur in the Memphis Necropolis – a
World Heritage Site – has been completely
emptied of its objects and much of its archaeological context has been destroyed.
World history will no longer know of these
important officials and what they had in
their tombs and wrote on their sarcophagi,
or how they embalmed their dead. This is
just a minor example. Hundreds more sites
have faced the same fate. The amount of
heritage lost is irreversible, not only in the
intellectual knowledge of world history, but
also in terms of the livelihood of future generations of Egyptians, who have lost the
potential for site management and tourism
perspectives.
The loss affects not only material culture
and economic prospects; it extends to the
lives of children in Egypt. In the village of
Abusir el-Malek, twenty-five children who
were employed by professional looting
gangs or who went with the rest of the villagers to loot have lost their lives. These
children were forced to go on ropes down
deep shafts without any safety or security measures to dig for any objects they
could find, and were asphyxiated by the
sand. This has also happened in the villages
of Manshiyet Dahshur, Sheikh Ibada, Deir
Abu Hennes, and many others that have not
been documented. These children and their
parents are given a very small cut of the
loot found. For example, for an ushabti statue being sold for $500 on eBay, the child’s
family would get paid around $10 for the
work the child did over several days to find
it. Many children employed by looters risk
their lives every day and many more will
lose their lives or live with disabilities for
a few dollars. Many objects arrive on the
art market undocumented, or with falsified
papers carry with them an ethical parameter that very few think about when they
hit the buy button on eBay or another auction site. Instead of these children coming
to learn about archaeology, cultural heritage
and history on organized excavations where
they can find meaning and connect with
their culture, they are becoming trained illegal diggers whose lives hold little value.
Illegal excavation on Egyptian archaeological
sites is causing a massive desecration along
the Nile. Many of the organized gangs
come on site to raid specific tombs related
to certain periods. They usually come with
four-wheeled-drive cars, machine guns and
geo-sonars. The equipment that the regular
site guards possess is no match to this. The
gangs usually leave behind empty lunchboxes, ropes, and meaningless rubble. Many
of these organized gangs have some archaeological knowledge and know exactly what
they want to find. However, they careless of
site protection and preservation; they come
with bulldozers, hoes and heavy machinery
that completely destroy the archaeological
site. All they care about are the objects they
can sell on the market. Many of these gangs
seem to work for specific collectors, as they
come looking for specific objects. For example, the pre-Dynastic sites are heavily
raided, as well as those dating to the Amarna Period. Weirdly enough, when the Cairo
Museum was attacked on January 28, 2011,
the objects that were mostly stolen were
also from the Amarna Period. Ancient Egyptian jewelry is on high demand as well.
Many mummies and human remains are
ripped through in search for amulets and
jewelry to sell. Parchment and papyri is also
on high demand, particularly those dating to
the Coptic Period. Several Biblical institutes
worldwide are buying everything that arises from the market, not knowing how this
is causing severe damage to holy and monastic archaeological sites such as the ones
in Deir Abu Hennes and Ansina al-Qibliya.
Islamic objects are sought after; many inlaid doors and door knobs are stolen from
mosques and sold. Five lanterns that were
on Sotheby’s in London were stolen from
the National Museum of Civilization (NMEC)
and have just been repatriated. Many stolen and looted objects pouring into the market with inaccurate or purposefully falsified
documentation.
The illegal digging, looting and thefts are
leaving Egypt’s rich cultural heritage in ruins.
It is becoming a pandemic that Egypt alone
cannot face. The way to stop such a drain of
material culture is through proper, wellcoordinated international efforts. n
Cultural Heritage
Courtesy Monica Hanna
MONICA HANNA, Egyptologist, participated
via Internet in the April 7, 2016 discussion
“Looting and Trafficking of Antiquities in the
Middle East” at the Wilson Center. She holds
a PhD in Archaeology from the University
of Pisa and completed post-doctoral studies
at Humboldt University, Berlin. Hanna became a leader in exposing the rampant looting of Egyptian antiquities following Egypt’s
2011 revolution. She visits sites to document
the looting as it is occurring and appears in
the Egyptian media to confront government
officials. In 2014 Hanna received the SAFE
(Saving Antiquities for Everyone) Award for
her work to raise public awareness of this
problem.
43
Protecting Culture Heritage, continued from page 39
Reformatting Space, continued from page 41
helpless about witnessing the demise of their
cultural heritage into agents of positive change
and into people who can fight back against
the destroyers and looters of their homelands
as instruments of peace and reconciliation.
dith of A’isha – may God be pleased with her:
“Do not permit two religions on the Arab
Peninsula” (Ahmad 25148; al-Tabari fi
l-awsat 1116).”
Join me. Become a Cultural Crime Watcher in
whatever way you can. Help us to reverse
the vicious cycle of fanaticism and greed
which is destroying the world’s heritage.
Let me leave you with the thought that you
have the power to make a positive difference
in this world. I invite you to take action and
walk with me. n
Courtesy Tasoula Hadjitofi
The “Islamic State” is reformatting the Middle East and parts of North Africa. The systematic genocide against non-Sunnis and the
wiping out of the respective cultural heritage
sites and holy places is nothing but a consequent removal of religious pluralism and
tolerance. Syria had been the most tolerant
country with the most heterogeneous society in the entire MENA region. The loss of
Syria and the fortification of IS in Iraq and
Syria with thriving franchises in Egypt and
Libya, to name a few, will haunt the world
for decades – if not more.2 n
Courtesy Nico Prucha
TASOULA GEORGIOU HADJITOFI is considered one of the most prominent voices
in the world combatting cultural trafficking. She was born in Famagusta, and fled
from Cyprus due to the Turkish invasion in
1974. Following this invasion, thousands
of artifacts and religious frescos, mosaics
and ecclesiastic murals, were destroyed or
smuggled out of the occupied area of the
island, ending up on the international art
market, in auction houses and in the hands
of art collectors. Since the 1980s, Hadjitofi
has been fighting to save cultural, religious
and artistic treasures that have been looted.
She is founder and CEO of the NGO Walk
of Truth, an online platform for reporting
crimes against cultural heritage worldwide.
It serves also as a digital archive comprising
thirty years of data on recovering antiquities. http://walkoftruth.com
NICO PRUCHA is Research Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College London. He
holds a PhD in Arabic Language and Literature and Terrorism from the University of
Vienna, Austria. He analyzes Arabic-language
jihadist propaganda. This extends to the
blend of languages and visual elements employed in social media strategies, the Sharia
law interpretation of hostage-taking and executions, and how videos as well as social
media outlets convey these acts.
44
LOOTED GOODS FROM THE NEAR EAST:
ATTACKS ON THE CULTURAL HERITAGE
OF HUMANITY
BY IRIS GERLACH
Illegal excavations, the plunder of museums,
destruction through military conflicts, religiously- motivated eradication of entire sites:
our cultural heritage is now experiencing
a time in which national structures are increasingly collapsing through war and terror. Ineffective central mechanisms of control in the distressed countries of the Near
East – Syria, Iraq and Yemen – are not only
greatly endangered, but are threatened with
complete devastation. The end of this catastrophic development is not in sight; on the
contrary, the destruction does not seem to
have reached its zenith.
Aghast, the global public looks on at the almost daily shocking news of cultural vandalism which is being inflicted in ever greater
dimensions by the terror organization ISIS
(Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the Arabian
acronym: ‘daesh’), Al-Qaida and other radical Islamic groups. Planned with a strategically diabolic deliberateness, the culture of
entire regions is being annihilated through the
destruction of monuments such as those in
Palmyra, Nimrud and Hatra, and the looting
and ruin of objects in museums like Mosul.
Religious fanaticism has led to the blowing up
and complete demolition of religious sites:
not only ancient temples and Jewish and
Christian places of worship, but also monuments of other Islamic religious institutions
such as shrines of holy persons and Shiite
mosques.
CATASTROPHIC DESTRUCTION IS TAKING
PLACE IN SYRIA, IRAQ AND YEMEN
In the face of this horror scenario, the news
that we receive from Yemen, the country on
the southernmost end of the Arabian Peninsula, becomes ever more indistinct. In antiquity, the legendarily-rich region was named
Arabia Felix, or Felicitous Arabia; in the Quran
and the Bible it is referred to as the land of
the famous Queen of Sheba.
Today, little is left of this legendary wealth.
Yemen is the poorest country of the Arabian
Peninsula. The absence of natural resources
and few profitable economic ventures, combined with extreme corruption, inadequate
educational possibilities and an uncontrolled
birth rate, have hindered all attempts at development in the past decades.
War has been underway in Yemen for almost
a year now, a war that has been forgotten by
the world press. The military offensive that
started in March 2015 by nine Arabian states
under the leadership of Saudi Arabia is intended to repress the Houthi rebels, a Zaidi
Shiite group in the northern part of the country which spread its rule over large parts of
Yemen and seeks to reinstate the power of
the Yemeni president, Abed Rabbo Mansur.
The conflicts continue to escalate, and an
end to the war grows increasingly distant.
Individual independent tribes, the terror organization Al-Qaida in Yemen (AQAP), the
Islamic States (IS) and jihadist groups – as in
Syria and Iraq – make use of the power vacuum to establish their own territorial rule in
Yemen. The victims are – as usual – the local
people. The United Nations has reported
several thousand deaths thus far, and almost
80% of the population suffers from a lack of
food and drinking water, and from insufficient
or lacking medical care.
Moreover, Yemen’s unique cultural treasures
are being severely affected by this war.
Whether or not some places have been the
target of premeditated destruction in heavy
conflicts cannot be verified, but the collateral
damage alone is immense. Reports about
the plunder of museums in areas controlled
by Al-Qaida are increasing, and systematic
illicit diggings have taken on alarming dimensions. These as well as illegal trade in cultural goods were already a great problem
prior to the crisis, but now they are expanding with the increasing anarchy throughout
the country. It is difficult to estimate the
full measure of this plunder, looting and destruction, as comprehensive information is
lacking due to limited accessibility. The hitherto confirmed cases, however, testify to a
catastrophic situation.
It is quite evident that the Saudi Arabian
military coalition knowingly takes the destruction of cultural goods into account in
order to attain their political aims. In this
tactic, several residential buildings in the
Old City of Sana’a which had been designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites were
completely destroyed and the inhabitants
Cultural Heritage
killed during presumably misdirected air attacks. The center of the Houthi movement
in northern Yemen, the city of Saada, which
appears on UNESCO’s World Heritage Tentative List, has been under constant fire since
the beginning of the attacks. According to
unconfirmed reports, the old city is almost
completely destroyed.
Museums in the towns of Taiz and Dhamar
in the central Yemeni highlands have been
hit by air attacks too. In Dhamar, the 12,500
objects in the museum’s collection were demolished by a single air attack. Aside from
medieval towns, many other monuments at
ancient sites in the once-renowned land of
the Queen of Sheba have been flattened
to the ground by air attacks of the SaudiArabian coalition.
ILLICIT DIGGINGS AND ILLEGAL TRADE IN
ANCIENT GOODS
Aside from the plunder of cultural goods, the
unstable political situation in Syria, Iraq and
Yemen has resulted in an often systematic, organized business of illicit diggings: one site
after the other has been pillaged, in some
cases systematically ploughed with bulldozers, leaving behind what looks like a pitted
battlefield. Once taken out of the country,
the looted objects land on the international antiquities market for private collectors.
Only a very few items are offered for sale
publicly in auction houses; most are sold
directly to interested persons via unknown
channels.
All of this has kindled anew the international
debate about the illegal trade in antiquities
and the handling of ancient goods that are
without any definitive provenience. As a
result, sometimes emotional discussions take
place between the various interested groups
like antique dealers, museums, collectors,
archaeological institutes, etc. - issues which
on the one hand reflect the dilemma of how
to deal with finds of indistinct origins, and
on the other express the concern of many
who seek an effective solution for combatting illegal trade.
45
Germany is currently planning an amendment
to its law on cultural goods. Among other
restrictions, the import of cultural goods to
Germany requires the specific permission
of the respective land of origin to export
the object(s). The trade in antiquities must
be restricted to objects of clear and legal
origin. Yet not all cultural goods that are
no longer in their land of origin should be
viewed as per se looted articles. It depends
solely on the legitimacy of their acquisition.
in the Near East. The export of antiquities
from these countries has long been prohibited by laws and international agreements,
but nonetheless, new objects – often with
forged certificates of origin – are constantly
appearing on the market. The argument that
dealers and collectors are ‘saving’ these antiquities from the cultural vandalism of the
“Islamic State” is false. Quite the contrary:
They are building up the base for an illegal
antiquities market.
One hundred years ago, it was common
practice to have an official agreement between archaeological excavations in countries
of the Near East and the respective state
office concerning the division of finds recovered from the excavations. In this way,
many objects found their way into the large
museums of the world. Today, following
guidelines set up by a number of reputable
organizations, and in contrast to just a few
years ago, as a rule museums do not buy
any object whose origin is not wholly verified. Similarly, public museums accept fewer
and fewer donations from private collections whose origins cannot be clearly verified.
Stricter legislation might help to curb the trade
in antiquities. But the gradual change in
awareness that has taken place in the past
years regarding the acquisition of cultural
goods with vague origins must continue to
be raised, not only on a national but also on
an international level.
Illicit excavations are not limited to the Near
East; indeed, they are a worldwide problem.
The objects, valuable in a material sense,
are wrenched from the ground without any
scientific excavation. With that the context
of the find and its cultural association are
lost, as are other archaeological artefacts
and important contexts in the vicinity of the
looted material which the looters presumed
were of no value. Yet for scientific study they
too are invaluable and important pieces of
a puzzle, with which the past culture can be
reconstructed. Thus, illicit diggings always
signify an immeasurable and irreplaceable
loss for the history of the respective country, and also for the mutual cultural heritage
of humankind.
Illegal trade in cultural goods is organized
criminality! Moreover, information is becoming available that such trade is being used to finance terrorism, particularly
To be clear, the issue at stake here is nothing
less than the preservation of humanity’s
cultural heritage! n
Courtesy Iris Gerlach
IRIS GERLACH is head of the Sanaa Branch
of the Oriental Department at the German
Archaeological Institute. She has a DPhil
from the University of Munich in Near Eastern and Classical Archaeology and Assyriology. Her research interests are South Arabian and Pre-Aksumite Archaeology. She was
director of archaeological projects in Yemen,
Ethiopia and Qatar. Since 2011 she has led
monitoring and awareness raising projects
dealing with looting of museums, illegal excavations of archaeological sites and other
destruction of cultural heritage in Yemen.
46
THINKING ON POLICIES
BY NEIL BRODIE
In September 2015, the US State Department
announced a reward of up to $5 million for
information leading to the disruption of any
trade in antiquities (and/or oil) that is benefiting ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant. Will such a reward be money well
spent? What will be the benefit of disrupting
the trade in Syria’s and Iraq’s archaeological
heritage, and how financially damaging will
it be for extremists? Answers to these questions are forthcoming from documents released into the public domain the same day
by Andrew Keller, Deputy Assistant Secretary
for Counter Threat Finance and Sanctions,
Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs,
at a meeting hosted by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. The documents had been
seized in May 2015, during a US Special
Forces raid on the Syrian compound of Abu
Sayyaf, the head of ISIL’s antiquities division.
They include a book of 11 receipts purporting
to show profits made by ISIL though taxing
the antiquities trade.
The authenticity of these receipts has been
questioned. They seem to be too convenient,
providing as they do for a US and indeed
international audience clear, material confirmation of previously unfounded media
reporting that ISIL is profiting significantly
from taxing the antiquities trade in areas
under its control. It is convenient, for example, that the sums of money received are
expressed numerically using “European”
Arabic numerals so that they are immediately comprehensible to an American or
European reader rather than, as would be
expected in a handwritten Arabic document,
“Arabic” Arabic numerals. Why would ISIL
do such a thing for internal accounting purposes? But leaving doubts as to the authen-
ticity of the receipts aside, and accepting
them as genuine, what do they tell us about
the potential impact of the rewards offer on
archaeological heritage protection and financing of extremism?
The 11 receipts together show that between
December 2014 and March 2015, ISIL collected $265,000 through a 20% tax, suggesting a total monetary value for the taxed antiquities trade of approximately $1.3 million
for four months. Multiplying up, that would
be $4 million per annum. $4 million in Syria
would pay for a lot of antiquities, yet very
few have been identified on the destination
market. Perhaps, as is sometimes claimed,
they are being warehoused in Syria or abroad,
but if that is the case, some people are paying out millions of dollars (the money taxed
by ISIL) for commodities that can only be
stockpiled in warehouses in the hope of a
profit in an uncertain commercial future. Regardless, it could be they really are arriving
on the destination market, filtering through
it and being sold with falsified paperwork
and invented provenances. After all, who
is really looking?
Would disrupting ISIL’s control of the antiquities trade save archaeological sites from
further depredation? The receipts illustrated
by Keller in his presentation all relate to
Deir az-Zor province in eastern Syria, about
18% of the country’s total land area. Deir
az-Zor province has been largely under ISIL
control since July 2014. According to the US
Department of State’s map of Syrian archaeological heritage sites at risk, Deir az-Zor is
one of the archaeologically-poorer areas of
Syria. The more archaeologically-rich western
areas of the country remain under the con-
trol of forces loyal to Assad or of the nonjihadi opposition. Media reports, now backed
up by Jesse Casana’s careful analysis of satellite imagery recently published in the academic journal Near Eastern Archaeology (vol.
78, no. 3, 2015), demonstrate that both of
these groups have also engaged in and profited from archaeological looting. It appears
to not be as damaging as that conducted by
ISIL, but is damaging nevertheless. Geography alone would suggest that material flowing through Lebanon is derived from those
sources. Thus both Assad and the non-jihadi opposition are also likely to be profiting
from the antiquities trade. Eliminating ISIL
from the trade would still leave the most
archaeologically-rich areas of Syria vulnerable to looting, and when ISIL is rolled back
from Deir az-Zor by its opponents, looting
there will most likely be ameliorated but
not eliminated.
How important for ISIL is the money derived
from taxing the antiquities trade? On October
5th, 2015, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi published
on the website Jihadology some ISIL documentation recording its financial ministry’s
accounting of Deir az-Zor province for one
month within the period covered by the tax
receipts. (And notice that these ISIL records
do utilize “Arabic” Arabic numerals). The total income for one month was recorded as
$8,438,000. The receipts record a monthly
tax revenue from antiquities sales of approximately $66,000. Thus the receipts suggest
that the antiquities tax accounts for only
a small proportion (0.8%) of ISIL’s total income. This figure accords well with the US
Department of the Treasury’s seemingly low
estimation of the antiquities trade’s financial
importance, behind oil, kidnapping and
Cultural Heritage
general extortion. Eliminating this income
stream would therefore do little to degrade
ISIL’s operational capacity.
The intention of this comparative analysis
is not to nit-pick. It is to make a serious point
about appropriate policy. There is an opinion
within the archaeological community that
highlighting the financial importance to ISIL
of the antiquities trade will make it an issue
of national security and ensure a strong
government response. The danger with this
line of reasoning is that the response might
be an inappropriate one, aimed more at disabling ISIL and less at protecting archaeological heritage. This seems to be exactly
what has happened. Disrupting ISIL’s control
of the antiquities trade will not offer secure,
long-term protection to Syrian archaeological heritage from the threat of looting, nor
will it deal a fatal blow to ISIL financing.
At the end of his talk at the Metropolitan,
Keller had this to say: “Given that they control thousands of archaeological sites, limiting the supply of antiquities to the marketplace will be difficult. We must focus and
work together to eliminate the demand”. He
was absolutely right. Archaeological looting
in Syria and other countries of the world
and the profits made by ISIL and other militia groups from the antiquities trade will
only be disrupted by serious and sustained
measures aimed at preventing the sale of
antiquities on the destination market. But
the implementation and maintenance of
effective strategies of demand reduction
will require time and effort, which is another way of saying that they will cost money.
$5 million might just about do it. n
47
Courtesy Neil Brodie
NEIL BRODIE is Senior Research Fellow in the
Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research
at the University of Glasgow. He is an archaeologist by training. He was co-author of
several reports on trade in illicit antiquities
such as Stealing History, commissioned by
the Museums Association and ICOM-UK to
advise upon the illicit trade in cultural material. He continues to work on archaeological projects in the United Kingdom, Greece
and Jordan. For further information, visit
his blog “Market of Mass Destruction” at
www.marketmassdesctruction.com.
48
TRAFFICKING CULTURAL MATERIALS –
APPROPRIATION OF MANKIND’S
PROPERTY
PANEL DISCUSSION WITH TESS DAVIS, IRIS GERLACH,
DOUGLAS BOIN AND ALEXANDER NAGEL
The idea for this panel was inspired by a
conversation we had with Alexander Nagel,
moderator of this discussion. He praised an
Iraqi legal provision from 1926 which declared all cultural heritage to be the property of mankind. Accordingly, such sites and
artifacts were placed under the authority
of the state. Antiquities were protected not
as national treasures but as treasures of all
mankind. This historic reminiscence reminds
us that archaeology has been and is conducted
as a service to all mankind. Archaeologist
and artifacts require international protection to ensure we can continue learning
about the history and diversity of mankind.
Archaeology helps mankind learn about itself.
For archaeologists, the object of their studies
is the Commons – something which belongs
to everybody and yet nobody in particular. It
is the property of all mankind – this is true for
the Buddhas of Bamyian, the manuscripts of
Timbuktu, the tombs of religious leaders or
saints from various religions – pre-Islamic
or of our time. Illegal appropriation and the
trafficking of antiquities to private or public
collectors violates the universal right of all
mankind to learn about our history and
identity. This infringement encompasses
both ends of the market forces – those on
the supply side, whether trying to make a
living in difficult circumstances or part of
criminal organizations making a profit, and
those on the demand side, often collectors
and investors who can afford and legitimate
their particular interests.
This panel discussion took place at New York
University on April 7, 2016, and was supported
by the Goethe-Institut, the Italian Cultural
Institute and the Middle East Institute.
TESS DAVIS:
COLLECTORS ARE THE
REAL LOOTERS
Today the global hotspot of trafficking cultural
materials is what once was Mesopotamia
and is now Syria. But forty years ago it was
Indochina. It was Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia.
In Cambodia, which is internationally celebrated for its 12th century temples of Angkor
Wat, fighting erupted between government
forces and the Khmer Rouge in 1970 and
would not end till 1998 with the death of
Pol Pot and the subsequent surrender of
his remaining forces. During these decades
there was civil war, there was genocide.
There was a decade of occupation by Vietnam.
One of the true tragedies of the 20th century.
This Cambodia civil war triggered, as we are
seeing today in Iraq and Syria, organized antiquities looting and trafficking. This helped
to further bankroll violence. This cultural
racketeering went hand-in-hand with cultural cleansing, which is the deliberate and
systematic destruction of a group and their
cultural heritage with the intention of not
just wiping out a people but wiping out all
evidence of them.
But sadly, this is not just history. This tragedy is being repeated today in the cradle
of civilization, as Da’esh is launching an unrelenting assault on the people of Iraq and
Syria and their rich cultural heritage.
I want to talk about the case study comparing the culture of Cambodia during the civil
war with what we are seeing today. Hopefully this does pose some lessons and a
warning of consequences if we don’t take
this seriously.
Just a few words of background on Cambodia.
Cambodia was the heart of the ancient
Khmer Empire, which at one point was the
most powerful force in Southeast Asia.
During the Angkorian period from the 9th
to the 15th century, it stretched over an
area which nowadays covers Cambodia but
also Thailand, parts of Vietnam, parts of
Laos, parts of Burma. By the 20th century,
Cambodia was not a Cambodia of greatness
but one of colonialism, hardship and chaos,
as the country shattered from being a French
protectorate to a French colony through independence and eventually through civil war
and decades of war.
The conflict started in 1970, when the Vietnam
War spilled into Cambodia. The ill-equipped
and untested Cambodian army was no match
for the communist forces, who by this point
had fought for themselves for quite a long
time in VN. By the end of 1970, just months
Cultural Heritage
after the war began, the gunfire was right
outside the temple of Angkor Wat. When
Phnom Penh finally fell to the Khmer Rouge
on April 17, 1975, this was the beginning of
one of the darkest periods not only in the
country’s history but in the history of the
20th century that we today call the (WE:
Choeung Ek) Killing Fields. The Khmer Rouge
were fanatically devoted to the pursuit of a
communist agrarian state. They immediately
evacuated the country’s urban center, Phnom
Penh. They forced the inhabitants into the
countryside. They abolished education, banks,
money, religion. They approached those who
were not only associated with the Cambodian
government but also those associated with
the West. Being associated with the West
could be something as simple as wearing
eyeglasses.
By 1979, when the Vietnamese drove the
Khmer Rouge from power, two million people were dead - that of a country of eight
million people. Imagine, in a matter of years,
a fourth of the population was gone to starvation, disease, and outright murder. After
this tragedy, the war would continue for another fifteen years.
The human toll of this conflict was absolutely immeasurable. But the Cambodian people
were not the only victims. For three decades, their cultural heritage was victim not
just of neglect, not just of indiscriminate attacks, not just of collateral damage, but of
intentional targeted and multifaceted sustained attack. The Khmer Rouge declared an
outright war on Cambodian culture. All the
new religious and secular, tangible and intangible were victims of this attack that was
both practical and ideological. The Khmer
Rouge sought to obliterate the traditional
Cambodian culture with their new revolutionary culture. They said they were returning to year zero. But in doing so, they were
also looking back. What they were looking
back to was Angkor Wat, to a time when the
Khmer people was the most powerful force
in Southeast Asia.
49
They used Angkor Wat as a symbol to popularize their belief and to link themselves to
the myths of a proud history.
Despite this, there was a lot of looting and
trafficking going on during those years. On
the one hand, you would think that they
were protecting Angkor, because it was a
symbol of their image, and indeed they did.
When the Khmer rouge actually controlled
the state for three and a half years, the
time we call the Killing Fields, Angkor was
very well protected. When you tried to loot
you were put to death, but you were put
to death for just about anything. But this
changed when Cambodia was invaded by the
Vietnamese in 1979. They went from being
a state to being a guerilla force. As word of
their atrocities spread, they needed money
because they lost key international backers
like Thailand and eventually even China. In
their need for money, they turned to the resources they had with them.
There is a quote from Pol Pot from around
this time period: “As a state that does not
have sufficient capital either to expand its
strength or to enlarge the army, the resources we have absolutely must be utilized as
assets.” This included the trafficking across
the Thai border of all kinds of antiquities.
The Khmer Rouge did thorough work. Before
the conflict ended in 1998, the temples had
been wholly plundered. Their sacred artworks were smuggled out of the country
and sold to the highest bidder. Temples
that had stood for a thousand years largely
intact until this war in 1970. We know that.
We have photographs and tons of documentation from the 1960s of these sites wholly
intact. I have spent a great deal of time on
Cambodia and I have never been to a single
site that has not been not only looted but
extensively looted. All that happened in a
matter of years.
Organized looting and trafficking went
hand-in-hand with this cultural cleansing.
Creative Commons Cambodia
The cultural sites that the Khmer Rouge
could not use for profit or propaganda they
destroyed. Not accidentally, not recklessly,
but destruction of these sites was the objective. There were signs that this would
happen before the country fell. When the
Khmer Rouge would move into an area, they
would destroy the local pagodas, they would
kill the monks, they would kill the Cham, who
would often be Muslim and Vietnamese,
who were often Catholic.
When the country, fell the damage got much
worse. An intense damage was inflicted on
the mosques of the Cham people. About a
hundred and thirty of these were destroyed.
These communities had a very hard time of
coming back because they were targeted as
part of the genocide. Every single Christian
place of worship in the country – and there
were quite a few because Vietnamese are
often Christian – was destroyed. They even
took apart the cathedral of Phnom Penh Cathedral stone by stone. Buddhism was not
spared this destruction as part of their systematic attack on it. They desecrated or destroyed most of Cambodia’s 3,300 pagodas.
One of the reasons was that the monks
were very often involved in politics. They
had been involved in the independence
movement, for example.
Once you have destroyed what is sacred to
the people, the next step is to destroy the
people themselves. First the Khmer Rouge
came for the Wats, the mosques, the church-
50
es, then they came for the Buddhists, Muslims,
and the Catholics. They wanted to re-create
Cambodian culture, so they came for the
cultural bearers, the dancers, the artists,
the singers, and they wanted to rewrite history. And when you want to rewrite history,
you have to kill the historians, you have to
kill the archaeologists. I was told that of the
many archaeologists in the country, only four
survived who stayed. The destruction of
monuments and religious buildings, site and
archives, this is an atrocity of itself, but as it
was in Cambodia, as it was in Armenia, as it
was in Warsaw, as it was in the Balkans,
it was a sign of worse atrocities to come.
It was the destruction of culture that made
the rebuilding of society after the war so
difficult. As one of the top experts of the
genocide, Youk Chhang, expressed: ‘The
cultural devastation left Cambodians deepening their suffering from the loss of their
loved ones and significantly complicating
their attempts to reconstruct society.’
We all recognize the pattern. Attacks on culture are an issue of global security and human rights. We see the parallels to Da’esh,
starting with the misuse of history to gain
legitimacy for their illegitimate cause, the
targeted destruction of history as a precursor to genocide, and the organized looting
and trafficking to finance the type of violence that is going on. Genocide is always
what follows the destruction of history. You
cannot wipe out history without wiping out
the people who go with it.
Let me close on a note of optimism by saying that today Cambodia – for all that they
have gone through – is a thriving, optimistic and hopeful country that is rebuilding,
welcoming millions of tourists every years
and now launching a campaign to recover
some of the pieces that were stolen during
the war and having much success with that.
I want to end with a few words that were
said by the Secretary of State of Cambodia,
who is actually handling a lot of these statue
negotiations. At an event the Antiquities
Coalition hosted in New York, he reached
out to the Iraqi Foreign Minister who was
there. He said, “We know what you are going through. There is light at the end of the
tunnel. One day you will be at peace, your
country will be at peace, and you will bring
these masterpieces home.” I think we are all
looking very much forward to that day happening. n
IRIS GERLACH:
LOOTED GOODS FROM
THE NEAR EAST ATTACKS ON THE
CULTURAL HERITAGE
OF HUMANITY
War and an increasingly unstable political
situation in the Near East, above all in the
countries of Syria, Iraq and Yemen, have led
to devastating collateral damage to cultural
material and the plunder of museums, and
also to a religiously-motivated destruction
of entire cultural, archaeological sites, both
pre-Islamic and Islamic ones.
Moreover, increasingly professional organized looting is blossoming, especially in regions where the central government no longer has control. One site after the other has
been pillaged, in some cases systematically
ploughed with bulldozers and plundered,
leaving behind what looks like a pitted battlefield. Once taken out of the country, the
looted objects land on the international antiquities market for private collectors. Very
few items are offered for sale publicly in
auction houses; most are sold directly to interested persons via unknown channels. The
question of the provenience of the objects
does not play any role at all, or is of minor
interest.
The Orient Department of the German Archaeological Institute in Sanaa is working
closely with the German Federal Criminal
Police and with Interpol against the theft
German Archaological Institute building, Sanaa.
Photo: Irmgard Wagner
© German Archaeological Institute
and ruin of cultural goods and art in Yemen.
But this is only – so to say – “a drop of water in the bucket.” Nevertheless, in addition
to false documents, we can identify objects
that clearly derive from illegal excavations,
as well as many other falsifications.
We are helping the International Council of
Museums set up the ‘Emergency Red List
of Yemeni Cultural Objects at Risk’ which,
comparable to lists created for instance
for Syria and Iraq, depicts objects which illustrate the categories or types of cultural goods that are most likely to be illegally
traded. The list is not only for the customs
officers. Museums, auction houses, art dealers and collectors are encouraged not to acquire such objects without having carefully
researched their origin and all the relevant
legal documentation.
We all know that unfortunately “Wish and
Reality” lie far apart. However, all of these
actions and consultations, like this one today, do contribute towards revealing the
facts to the public and sensitizing people
about the illicit traffic in cultural objects,
and to promoting an awareness of or a
change in attitude.
However, illicit excavations are not limited
to the countries of the Near East; indeed,
they are a worldwide problem. The objects,
valuable in a material sense, are wrenched
Cultural Heritage
51
The pre-Islamic temple in Sirwah (Yemen)
before being damaged by war.
Photo: Irmgard Wagner
© German Archaeological Institute
Discoveries of the German Archaeological Museum from the dig in Marib (Yemen). A number of
similar objects can be found in the art trade. © German Archaeological Institute
from the ground without any scientific excavation. With that the context of the find
and its cultural association are lost, as are
other archaeological artifacts and important
contexts in the vicinity of the looted material which the looters presumed were of no
value. Yet for scientific study, they too are
invaluable and important pieces of a puzzle,
with which the past culture can be reconstructed. Thus, illicit diggings always signify
an immeasurable and irreplaceable loss for
the history of the respective country, and also
for the mutual cultural heritage of humankind.
Illegal trade in cultural goods counts therefore as organized criminality! The argument
that dealers and collectors are ‘saving’ these
antiquities from the cultural vandalism of the
“Islamic State” is false. Quite the contrary:
They are building up the base for an illegal
antiquities market.
How do all our present-day norms to protect
cultural property correspond with the illegal
trade in cultural goods, and to what extent
are we also responsible? The demand for
antiquities was and still is strong. Especially in times of economic recession, cultural items are viewed as secure investments,
with which the owners can increase their
prestige as well. Increasingly unstable political conditions in the Near East have
formed the – so to say –‘ideal conditions’
for the exploitation of cultural resources.
Offered on the antiquities market at auctions, and correspondingly exhibited very
aesthetically, the objects present no clues to
their source from illegal diggings. Nothing
refers to the irreparable damage and loss of
cultural heritage caused to the lands of origin and ultimately the entire world, not to
mention the loss for research due to the object’s missing context.
The same applies to all scientific discourse
and also public lectures that pertain to objects of unsure origin which are sold on the
art market. Scientific studies of such objects
not only increment the items’ value, thereby
sanctioning illegal deals in antiquities, but
they also foster the vicious circle of supplyand-demand! Therefore, the editors of all
publications of the German Archaeological
Institute must observe the regulation that
no artifacts – neither those in private possessions nor those in public collections –
may be published until their legal origin has
been definitively certified.
Furthermore, the German government is
currently planning an amendment to its
regulation on cultural goods. Among other
restrictions, the import of cultural goods to
Germany requires the specific permission of
the respective land of origin to export the
object(s). The trade in antiquities must be
restricted to objects of clear acquisition and
legal origin. Yet not all cultural goods that are
no longer in their land of origin should be
viewed as per se looted articles. It depends
solely upon the legitimacy of their acquisition.
In closing, let us look at the situation in
Yemen, where war has been underway for
more than a year now. The victims are the
local people. Moreover, Yemen’s unique cultural treasures are being severely affected
by this war. Whether or not some places
have been the target of premeditated destruction in heavy conflicts cannot be verified, but the collateral damage alone is immense. I do not hold a political position in
this conflict, but it is quite evident that the
52
Baraqish Nakrah Temple (Yemen) before its
destruction.
Photo: Alexandro de Maigret © MAIRY
Baraqish Nakrah Temple (Yemen) after its
destruction during airstrikes by the Saudi
Arabian coalition.
Photo: Mohanned al-Sayani © GOAM
Saudi Arabian military coalition knowingly
takes the destruction of cultural goods into
account in order to attain their political aims.
responsibility in this concern and is carrying
out numerous projects within the field of
“Capacity Building” in Iraq, Syria and Yemen,
in support of the treatment of cultural heritage in different areas. Together with the
Museum of Islamic Art, the German Archaeological Institute has set up a database on
existing images and research information
about Syrian cultural resources in the Syrian
Heritage Archive Project. A similar project
is being launched by my institute for Yemen.
This is of special importance for measures
towards protecting and reconstructing in the
future. The German Archaeological Institute
is also a partner in the UNESCO campaign
#UNITE4HERITAGE. Thereby the focus is on
sharpening public awareness of the connection between the destruction of cultural
goods and illegal trade in antiquities. Also
an action like the Yemeni Heritage Week –
Museums United for Yemen at the end of
this April helps to raise awareness for the
situation in Yemen.
In addition, reports about the plunder of
museums in areas controlled by Al-Qaida are
increasing, and systematic illicit diggings
have taken on alarming dimensions.
Due to war, no regular excavations and archaeological field work are being conducted
in Yemen. Yet nevertheless, the number of
objects being offered on international art
markets has steadily increased! These artistic
objects are declared to be “from old collections” and thus may be traded legally. So,
here the question arises as to how these objects could be taken out of Yemen at such
an early time. Namely, scientific research in
Yemen first began only as late as the 1980s,
with a few exceptions such as excavations
by the American Foundation for the Study
of Man at the beginning of the 1950s. Thus,
all of the objects from “older collections”
could not have derived from scientific field
work; quite the opposite, they must have
come from illegal diggings, and nowadays
also from looting museums.
We, the international community in a close
network, must actively support the affected
countries in protecting and preserving their
cultural monuments and sites. The German
Archaeological Institute is well aware of its
There is still much to be accomplished in
order to protect cultural resources more
effectively worldwide. Stricter and more
stringent legislation might help to curb the
trade in antiquities. However, the gradual
change in awareness that has taken place
in the past years regarding the acquisition
of cultural goods with vague origins must
continue to be increased, not only on a national but also on an international level. As
Restoration and capacity-building measures in
Yemen. Photo: Irmgard Wagner
© German Archaeological Institute.
the saying goes: it is five minutes before
midnight. And the uncontrolled dealings in
antiquities and the devastation of cultural
heritage have taken on a new and alarming
professional form – also due to the growing supply-and-demand. So, in addition to
programs to enhance an awareness of this
vicious circle and on-site support, stricter
laws against illegal dealers as well as customers of illicit cultural goods must be enforced.
To be clear, the issue at stake here is nothing less than the preservation of humanity’s
cultural heritage – we cannot allow ourselves to give up! n
Cultural Heritage
DOUGLAS BOIN:
ARCHAEOLOGY
LOOTING AND THE
BIBLE: WHY IT
MATTERS WHERE
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
SCHOLARS GET THEIR
EVIDENCE FROM
All that has mattered so far is the treasure,
the search for the Holy Grail no one has
seen or the text that no one has read in a
thousand years. What no one has really yet
done in this race to find new documents is
given any thought to the ethical conversation of who might have owned these objects
or how and when and where this material
might have come from. No one has asked
these questions until now.
I want to give you an overview of some objects that have been found that have made
the news quite recently as very famous discoveries, to show you behind the scenes the
conversation that needs to take place both
inside the academy and outside the academy
about where these objects have come from.
What I would like to address is to show you
that the market for this material is much closer than you think. The market is actually in
this city and is being built right on the Mall.
Many of you will remember the names of
some of these pieces. There was the Gospel
of Jesus’ Wife which appeared in 2013 and
a poem by the famous Greek writer Sappho,
which also made the headlines. “Mrs. Jesus”
was found on a scrap of papyrus. That was
announced at a conference in Rome in 2012
and has become a cause celeb in the academic popular community. The text where
Jesus speaks about his wife is not larger
than the size of an iPhone. But it is written on
papyrus and no one knows where it came
from. This has not stopped the media from
sensationalizing important discoveries that
have texts or anything to do with writing
on them. The issue here is “just show the
53
object” because that’s the thing, that’s the
treasure.
These types of written objects have been
found all over the late antique world.
Ai Khanoum (NE of Afghanistan) is the site
of the discovery of an incredibly important
written text. In the remains of a theater discovered by the French team (Paul Bernard) in
the middle of the 20th century they found a
fragment of Sophocles.
For you to imagine being a citizen of Ai
Khanoum and being able to go to the theater
and hear the performance of something that
would link you to the culture taking place in
Athens is a remarkable amount of work that
this papyrus fragment does for us.
There are other reasons why papyrus fragments are very beneficial for seeing. These
are some of them. This is a parchment piece
that was found in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
It was written in Bactrian, a language related to Armenian and Greek. It is a legal contract and part of a whole host of contracts
found in Afghanistan that tell us about the
customs of the region during the third through
the ninth century C.E. It is a remarkable find
because part of the analysis shows that the
legal culture of Afghanistan in the third to
ninth century C.E. sounds and looks remarkably similar to the Roman legal culture of
the Mediterranean during this time. So we
can start to see some currents of cultural
exchange, currents that are happening because we have these texts. This text itself
would not have been known to scholars had
it not surfaced at the antiquities market in
the 1990s, when it was purchased without
provenance by a private philanthropist
who is committed to making them open for
study. That is why it has come to the attention of the public.
The ethical question of acquiring these
objects is what we are addressing today.
Should we put things like that back in the
desert? Should we put these things back
where they were clandestinely found? Or do
we learn something so fundamentally new
that it is important we go out and find them
regardless of how it is they come to us?
The site of Dura Europus in Syria is the last
of the examples I want to show you, in part
because of the devastations during the war.
The eastern city of the Roman Empire was
famous for having a large Jewish community … We would not know as much of the
Jewish community in Dura were it not for
the discovery of several parchment fragments that were written in Hebrew and
found at the site. All these parchment fragments are now in Yale. They show us a little
bit more in depth about the people and the
culture of ancient Syria.
For that reason SAFE (Saving Antiquities for
Everyone) wanted to honor the work of the
archaeologist in Syria like Dr. Khaled al-Asaad
(killed in Palmyra by Da’esh) for his work in
Palmyra in particular in protecting what it is
what the Syrian people have in the middle
of this war.
The idea that parchment or papyrus, objects
with texts on them, are an important part of
cultural heritage protection is not something
that immediately springs to mind when start
talking about preserving cultural objects or
standing up against moments of iconoclasm.
Yet papyrus fragments and many of these
texts specifically are vital to understanding
the history of the Christian movement and
the Jewish community in antiquity - even to
the extent that we might see things on them
that no other archaeological excavation has
testified to yet. (Douglas Boin refers to P75
from the Bodmer Collection, P. Bodmer 14,
fragment of the Gospel of Luke 14.26-15.03,
details of 14.27). This example, for instance,
may preserve - if scholars are correct - the
earliest example of the crucifixion in its
lines. These interpretations are debated, but
what we are seeing here is that the search
for texts is vital for people who want to tell
their faith history whether it is in the Chris-
54
tian community or the Muslim community
(refers to Birmingham Quran manuscript).
These extraordinary finds have led to a
scenario in which people want to play the
game at home now. One university (WE:
Baylor) is involved in taking ancient mummy masks from Egypt, washing them with
palm olive soap in the sinks of the labs and
trying to find ancient texts that are underneath the mummy masks so they can study
them because they might be related to the
Judeo-Christian story.
The ethical issue related to the discovery of
objects that are foundational for the history
of religion is something that the academic
community has only now begun to address.
I serve on a panel and committee from the
Society of Biblical Literature that has recently begun to articulate a new set of standards by which members of the group can
present and are allowed to present new archaeological discoveries. Our goal is to have
a better indication where material is coming
from and how people have acquired it.
These questions are going to be vital for people on the street to ask - not just for people
in the scholarly community - so that we all
become morally outraged about things like
the Museum of the Bible, which is opening
on 4th Street. The Museum of the Bible is
itself going to be the display case for the
Green Collection of ancient religious manuscripts including papyri, Torah and bibles
that have been discovered all over the
world. What I am interested in helping to
promote is a greater public awareness for
asking where these objects have come from
and to tell the story of how they have been
acquired for the collection. n
Question from the Audience for Tess Davis:
What is the role of the market, the role of
collectors and auction houses?
This is a demand-driven crime. I have talked
to looters in Cambodia. When you ask them
what can be done to stop this problem, they
say, “Nothing. As long as someone is willing to pay money for an antiquity, we find a
way to steal it.’
It does not matter how well the sites are
protected. You cannot protect a whole country. In the US, we have a lot of archaeological sites, and many of them are terribly looted probably at this moment. If we,
with our resources, cannot do it, how can
we expect a country in a war zone to do the
same?
There is still a demand for looted art. If
there was not this demand, we would not
be seeing looting so extensive that it is literally visible from space. These objects are
going somewhere. We might not have an
object we can point to in the newspaper
and say this was an object looted by Da’esh
and which profited Da’esh, but we are seeing thousands of holes in the ground – that
is tens of thousands objects. They are going
somewhere. Collectors do drive the demand.
Museums have improved a great deal in recent years, but some museums are still driving the demand and some auction houses
are still driving the demand. A lot of people
are complicit in this trade.
Think of an ancient piece that goes on auction. Someone has to conserve it, someone has to photograph it, someone has to
appraise it, someone has to do a write-up
about it in the catalogue where it came from
and how. That are a lot of different professionals and a lot of people, most likely with
PhDs. Someone is shopping on eBay and
does not know this is an issue? Someone
who has a PhD in art history certainly does.
Where are those people and who are the
people who are doing this? A lot of people,
and it doesn’t stop with the collectors, and
that is one of the reasons why such a multifaceted approach is needed and, I think, increased criminal prosecution as well.
ALEXANDER NAGEL:
EPILOGUE
When Wilfried Eckstein asked me to join
Iconoclash for this particular aspect on trafficking cultural heritage materials, I knew
there would be important voices I wanted
to bring. Tasoula Hadjitofi was well represented by US lawyers in the past, but had
never spoken herself in this city. Her warmness and infectious enthusiasm to create
and engage in a dialogue and forum, and
her personal story and humanity, appeals
to a wide audience that continues to be inspired by “heroes” and “monuments (wo)
men.” Here in D.C., she spoke from the perspective of a refugee, and her speech came
at an important moment in European history. It is clear that we need more Cultural Crime Watchers Worldwide. The German
Archaeological Institute, on the other hand,
presenting a very different and rather deep
institutional history of being involved in
Middle Eastern archaeology and cultural
politics, brought another valuable perspective into our conversation. I am grateful for
the important work Dr. Iris Gerlach and her
team does in raising awareness, particularly
on the situation in Yemen.1 In June 2016,
the German Bundestag authorized new
laws in preventing the illicit trade of cultural materials which erases and separates
histories and identities from populations
around the world.
Cemeteries, buildings and their interiors are
neglected all over the world. Members of
the Washington, D.C. Historic Preservation
Office try their best to preserve what is left
of the hundreds of generations who lived
by the Potomac River.2 As anyone witnesses who lives in Washington, D.C., there
Cultural Heritage
are cultures and values that need to be preserved for future agendas; they are preserved when voices have a platform, which
sparks dialogue and offers hope and practical solutions.
I listened carefully to the many conversations and dialogues while simultaneously
viewing from afar the destruction of entire
museums in Yemen. Whose cultures are preserved? Whose interests are served, whose
agendas, ideological and ethical, and what
discourses will be advanced, once a group
of European institutions and their partners
have addressed aspects of the trafficking
of cultural materials in a public forum held
in Washington, D.C. in 2015 and 2016? What
role do we play as being part of the media,
and how can we read and understand the
narratives created in such a public forum a
few blocks away from the White House?
Almost exactly 85 years ago in September
1931 at Hotel Navarra in the beautiful European city of Bruges in Belgium, a great
many voices came together for a conference on what would later develop into the
Roerich Pact. As Nicolas Roerich (1874-1947)
stated: “Not only should we take every effort to protect our cultural heritage, which
brings together the best achievements of
humanity, but we must also value it very
highly and remember how it elevates the
human spirit every time we come into contact with it.” In hindsight one may now ask
how successful this Roerich Pact was once
it was signed in 1935 by many parties and
governments around the world. I would say
it was successful, as we continue to engage
individuals passionate in the discourse and
to listen to one another. n
55
PANELISTS:
Courtesy Douglas R.Boin
Courtesy Tess Davis
TESS DAVIS is Executive Director of the
Antiquities Coalition and a lawyer and archaeologist by training. She has been a legal
consultant for the Cambodian and US governments and works with both the art world
and law enforcement to keep looted antiquities off the market. In 2015, the Royal Government of Cambodia knighted Tess Davis for
her work to recover the country’s plundered
treasures, awarding her the rank of Commander in the Royal Order of the Sahametrei.
DOUGLAS BOIN is currently an Assistant
Professor of History at Saint Louis University and president of the board of Saving
Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE). Previously
he taught in Georgetown University’s Department of Classics. He is the author of two
critically acclaimed books, Ostia in Late Antiquity (2013) and Coming Out Christian in
the Roman World (2015), as well as numerous academic articles.
Courtesy Alexander.Nagel
Courtesy Iris Gerlach
IRIS GERLACH is head of the Sanaa Branch
of the Oriental Department at the German
Archaeological Institute. She has a DPhil
from the University of Munich in Near Eastern and Classical Archaeology and Assyriology. Her research interests are South Arabian and Pre-Aksumite Archaeology. She was
director of archaeological projects in Yemen,
Ethiopia and Qatar. Since 2011 she has led
monitoring and awareness raising projects
dealing with looting of museums, illegal excavations of archaeological sites and other
destruction of cultural heritage in Yemen.
ALEXANDER NAGEL is a Research Associate
at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and former Assistant
Curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the
Freer|Sackler. He received an MA from Humboldt-University Berlin in 2003, and a PhD
from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in
2010. His academic interest is in the exploration of the polychromy of ancient monuments. He has lectured on aspects of heritage preservation in Yemen, Greece, Iran and
the Middle East worldwide. He is also
supporting the work of communities who
preserve heritage sites and document the
illicit trade in antiquities. He was adviser
for the Cultural Heritage component of the
ICONOCLASH series, and served as moderator of panel discussions such as this one.
56
PICTURE POLICY
Picture Policy
57
INTRODUCTION
BY WILFRIED ECKSTEIN
Images and texts are integral to propaganda.
Their production by Da’esh during the last
three years has displayed bewildering resilience to counterterrorist information efforts. Their spread through social media has
produced a new dimension of immediacy of
crime, ostentation and mobilization. Electronic jihad has intruded into our conversations and emotions. It is a product of
terrorist control of territory and organized
communication. This is different from terrorism against the West in 2001, when they
influenced but didn’t directly control the
imagery of world news.
9/11 is remembered with the image of the
Twin Towers, with black smoke billowing
out of one and the other engulfed by a red
fireball. Photos from the destruction of the
two high-rises have become icons for the
transformation of an international conflict
and the role civilian life and citizens have
involuntarily come to play therein. The
strife for political influence no longer takes
place solely within distinct territories where
locals fight against foreign occupation. Terrorists target symbolic representations of
Western power or retaliate against what the
West calls collateral damage, the death of
civilians in the path of armed conflict.
The attacks in 2001 were directed against
symbols of Western power in trade, military
and politics. Terrorists attacked visible signs
of global structural inequity and Western
dominance. The date they chose for the attack, the American telephone number for
emergency calls, became a date of national
humiliation.
The place of destruction has become a memorial with two reflecting pools. A stone’s
throw away from the site, a new One World
Trade Center, initially named Freedom Tower, has been erected. Its design by Daniel
Libeskind is inspired by the Statue of Liberty across the Hudson River. The reconstruction of other office towers surrounding
Ground Zero will be arranged in such an order as to create a Stonehenge of our time.
The architecture ensemble of the place with
its granite ponds on the plaza and the surrounding buildings as a cultic site does not,
however, erase the trauma but instead elevates it into a distinct point of reference for
present and future generations. It is a place
where dignity is being restored.
What followed this terrorist attack was a
decade of American military retaliation.
Pictures from Abu Ghraib (2003) and Guantanamo (since 2002) documented the suspension of international law and personal honor
towards prisoners of war. Pictures of men
in orange jumpsuits became the icons of
a country taking revenge. The euphemism
“collateral damage” was used to indicate
that targeting terrorist headquarters hadn’t
avoided civilian casualties.
Jihadist Islamists, Da’esh in particular, paid
back with pictures of Western journalists,
aid workers, Christian civilians, a Jordanian
pilot, all of them in orange jumpsuits and
humiliated and tortured and eventually
slaughtered or burned in front of our eyes.
Such acts of murder were purposefully
staged and posted online so that no one,
whether a social media user or the editorial
staff of mass media, could ignore or hide
these image acts. We all became witnesses
of and entangled in the outreach of propaganda.
Most of the pictures that came onto our
screens showed fighters with their bodies
shrouded in black, faces masked, and hands
and knives striking out to slaughter. Sometimes, as in the context of the destruction
of antiquities in Mosul or the burning of the
pilot, spoken and written texts informed us
about what they thought was a legitimate
reason to destroy and murder. The black
flag as backdrop absolved the perpetrators
of personal responsibility and declared their
acts as part of a holy war.
These pictures are propaganda. As propaganda – this is hard and uncomfortable to
believe – they transport ideas correcting
injustice and restoring a life in dignity. The
acts seem sick to us and inhumane. But
there is a cultural acceptance going along on
their side, which is disturbing. It seems that
if it were not for the American initiatives
to fight jihadist terrorism on their territories, we would hardly have heard the outcry
among the governments in the Middle East
against the terrorists and for the safety of
civilians in those territories. Why is there
complacency or even sympathy for terrorists? What is the cultural context which
enables their acts to be so accepted and
successful? As professionals in the field of
culture, we would like to better understand
our task and role in this conflict. How can
we contribute to peaceful neighborhoods in
our global village? n
58
9/11 AND AFTER:
OLD PICTORIAL PATTERNS AND
NEW CHALLENGES
BY CHARLOTTE KLONK
The terror attack on New York’s World Trade
Center on the morning of 9/11 is doubtless
one of the most memorable historical disasters in contemporary history. Yet in terms
of the images it generated, the assault was
hardly unprecedented. The spectacular
pictures that were released on the day and
in the aftermath of the event are misleading
in this respect. Since the beginning of the
age of modern terror at the end of the nineteenth century, the impact of an attack has
largely depended on its dramatic visualization in the media. By targeting symbolic
buildings, central traffic junctions and
densely populated locations like coffee
houses, theatres and railway stations, perpetrators have always made sure that their
acts of violence would be so shocking that
the visual evidence would be disseminated
widely. Seeing pictures of the 1883 bomb
explosions in the London underground must
have been as traumatic as viewing images
of the New York airplane crashes in 2001.
Even the fact that the 9/11 attack was captured live on television cannot explain the
sense of singularity that most people associate with the event. However, this also was
not unprecedented. When the Palestinian
group Black September took eleven Israeli
team members hostage during the Summer
Olympics in Munich in 1972, it knew that the
assault would receive maximum media attention, for the games were the first to be
broadcast live around the world.
It is true that the attacks of 9/11 were the
bloodiest and most horrific acts of violence
ever on U.S. soil, and it is also true that they
resulted in the trauma of a misguided war
in Iraq and a questionable military engagement in Afghanistan. Yet in terms of the
visual imagery that they generated, the assaults remain squarely within the known
patterns of modern terror as effected through
pictures. In retrospect, it is astonishing to
note how homogenous the Visual memory
of the event has become.
One picture more than any other is now
predominantly associated with the attack:
Spencer Platt’s photograph of the World
Trade Center, showing one tower already
enveloped in black smoke and the other engulfed by an orangey-red fireball, the day’s
deep blue September morning sky in the
background. An astonishing number of picture editors chose this precise photograph
for their newspapers in the hours after the
attack. It appeared on at least twelve title
pages, including the British Daily Telegraph,
the Sydney Morning Herald and the Republican-American. The photograph shows the
horror of the moment in a deceptively arrested mode of vision. With the Twin Towers still standing, their subsequent collapse
and the drama on the streets below is eerily
absent. In consequence, an almost abstract
form and color composition became the vehicle with which news of the disaster was
communicated around the world.
Western media reporting on terror attacks
has always sought to document assiduously the results of destruction while blocking out as much of the victims’ suffering as
possible. The visual coverage of 9/11 is no
exception to this rule. As the tragedy of the
events unfolding on the streets of Lower
Manhattan eventually entered the public
view, the imagery concentrated on the heroic efforts of the rescue teams as they aided the survivors. Although many hundreds
of people threw themselves out of the windows of the burning buildings in desperate
attempts to escape their fate, to this day
images of the falling bodies cannot easily
be shown or seen in the United States. As
always, the media tacitly adhere to an old
rule of war photography: The dead bodies
of the enemy can be shown, while those of
one’s own people are taboo.
The same unwritten norms were also observed for the most part in the visual coverage of a more recent assault, the terror
attack on the editorial team of the French
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January
7, 2015 in Paris. Yet significantly, the most
powerful and memorable picture that was
released on that day fell outside this pattern. What it depicted and how it reached
the public marks an alarming new departure
in pictorial communication and thus forces
us, for the first time since the emergence of
modern terror at the end of the nineteenth
century, to reconsider our own role in the
orchestration, consumption and circulation
Picture Policy
of images. The Parisian police officer Ahmed
Merabet tragically found himself in the path
of the two assassins on the run after their
frantic killing spree in the offices of Charlie
Hebdo. After firing at Merabet from their
car, the Kouachi brothers returned on foot
to kill their helpless victim with a shot to
the head. A local resident had heard shouting and saw the commotion on the street
below his apartment, but instead of pressing
the emergency call button of his telephone,
he recorded the scene with his video camera. Rather than handing the material over
to the police, he posted it in the heat of the
moment on Facebook. Within fifteen minutes, it found its way to YouTube and from
there to a French television channel, whose
broadcast was picked up by newsroom editors around the world. The amateur filmmaker has since apologized to the family
of the police officer, but pictures like these
cannot be undone once they have been released. They burn themselves into our memory as horrific icons of terror and symbols
of a fundamental loss of human dignity.
The new role of amateur images within acts
of terror first became apparent two years
earlier, when on May 22, 2013 one of the
radical Islamist assassins of a British soldier
in London asked a passer-by to film him after his deed. While the victim lay unaided
behind him in the street, the bloodstained
killer, still holding his brutal murder weapon, a cleaver, used this moment to claim
responsibility for the killing and to declare
himself a Jihadist acting in the name of
God. The video, taken neither under threat
of death nor in response to the suffering of
the victim, fulfilled only one aim: the selfaggrandizement of the perpetrator, which is
a powerful element of the logic of terror. At
the same time, it confirmed the stereotype
of a wild fanatic behaving barbarically. The
video later appeared as an exclusive in an
ITV news broadcast, so that we can even assume that money changed hands.
59
In the face of these new developments, it
seems paramount that we return with renewed vigor to a discourse on the ethical
implications of photographs. Although the
circulation and consumption of images of
terror has always born the danger of serving the interests of the perpetrators, today
we are no mere consumers: we produce
these images, circulate and interconnect
them. In short, we are fully active participants in image operations where life and
death is at stake, and we thereby potentially collaborate in, reiterate and prolong
the pain of others at a most abject moment
in their life. It is therefore important that
we realize the full extent of our actions in
advance of an event, so that, if necessary,
we are able to refuse to collaborate in image operations that function as an important incentive in a violent battle that knows
no winners. Today it will not suffice to react
to the production, consumption and circulation of images on mere impulse. We must
understand in advance the frames in which
they operate, recognize ourselves as participants, and consider the ethical implications
that our actions might have for the lives
and deaths of others. Only thus will we be
prepared for situations that otherwise might
propel us into actions that we might later
deeply regret. n
Courtesy Charlotte Klonk
CHARLOTTE KLONK is Professor of Art History
and New Media at the Institute of Art and
Visual History, Humboldt University in Berlin. Previously, she was a Research Fellow
at Christ Church Oxford and lecturer at the
University of Warwick. She has been a Fellow
at the Max Planck Institute for the History
of Science, the Institute of Advanced Studies in
Berlin and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. She has published four books.
Most recently, she co-edited with Jens Eder
Image Operations: Still and Moving Pictures
in Political Conflicts (forthcoming).
60
TERRORIST IMAGERY MEETS THE
MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS
BY CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN
There is a bitter irony to be found in the
spread of terrorist imagery. In order for politically motivated acts of violence to have
the desired effect, maximum exposure is
needed. In other words, mainstream media
exposure. And therein lies the irony: that
the institutions so often held up (often by
themselves) as the guardians of democracy
are used as distribution platforms for the
spread of imagery intended to spread fear
and instability. The common refrain from
editors and journalists has been “newsworthiness”: over the years, how could a news
organization not cover Oklahoma City, Munich, Entebbe or Brighton? We should not
be naïve, however, about the relationship
between these types of news events and
the political economy of journalism. Not
only are these spectacular events “newsworthy,” but they also attract viewers and
readers, thus neatly dove-tailing with the
profit drive of commercial media organizations. Of course, in all of these cases the
instigators of violence understood the importance of spectacle: in order to gain coverage, the targets had to be high profile and
the attacks spectacular in nature. Critically, however, news editors still held a gatekeeper position, with the ability to censor
images, cut away from live feeds, by-pass
particularly violent imagery and provide
commentary to the events that (potentially)
undermined the political aims of the political organization in question.
With the rise of groups such as ISIS, however, we have seen a shift in not only gatekeeping power, but also a shift in debate
from journalistic ethics and responsibil-
ity to broader questions of free speech and
corporate control of information. When ISIS
posted still and video images purporting to
show the beheading of US hostage James
Foley, the spread of these images across
social media platforms was swift and unrelenting. Gone were the days when major
news organizations had power to decide
which images would be shown to a mass
audience, and which would not. The role of
gatekeeper – at least in theory – had now
been transferred to the individual social
media user who could decide whether or
not images would be relayed to their respective followers.
What followed the release of the Foley
video (and the now infamous still image of
Foley, in an orange jumpsuit, kneeling before a knife-wielding ISIS member) was a
debate about the rights of individual social
media users to spread such violent imagery. With the sheer brutality of the images
produced, it is easy to lose sight of the fact
that ISIS proved itself to be very savvy in
its understanding of dramaturgy, voyeurism and social media dynamics. Twitter, for
example, is a waterfall of information, and
even if 95% of the people you follow did not
tweet the images in question, it was almost
impossible to avoid them flowing across
your screen. Those who chose to relay these
pictures offered a fairly uniform set of explanations, including the argument that this
was a free speech issue, and that the images and videos served as a reminder of the
brutality of ISIS. In response, many on Twitter called upon fellow users to refrain from
re-posting (as it simply served the interests
of the killers), while others were more aggressive, calling for an outright ban and for
violators to face the suspension or closure
of their accounts. While the CEO of Twitter,
Dick Costello, has famously claimed that the
company represents, “the free speech wing
of the free speech party,” the argument that
the ability to circulate violent imagery such
as the material produced by ISIS is a “free
speech” issue hinges upon the problematic
assumption that commercial platforms such
as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube offer the
same protected speech rights as those offered to someone writing a book or making a film. Thus, violent imagery such as the
Foley beheading posed (and will continue
to pose) problems for platforms that tout
their free speech credentials, while in reality having to answer to commercial pressure
from users, governments and the families of
those killed.
In a piece for Forbes, journalist Jeff Bercovici summarized the quandary the terrorist
images pose for social media platform owners: For a group like ISIS, a video showing
the beheading of an American captive is a
twisted sort of win-win: Either it succeeds
in turning the world’s most powerful and
admired tech firms into distribution partners for a message of violent extremism,
or those firms clamp down on the content,
betraying their stated commitment to the
American principle of free speech. The response of social media platforms to the ISIS
videos was consistent. YouTube, where the
Foley video was originally posted (and then
removed), made it clear that these terrorist
videos were in violation of “Community
Picture Policy
Guidelines” that restrict violent, hateful or
criminal content. After an initial period of
uncertainty, Twitter took the aggressive
position of not only deactivating accounts
it considered to be linked to ISIS, but also
suspending Twitter users who spread images of the Foley killing. In addition, Twitter amended their content policies, allowing families (under certain circumstances)
to request the “removal of images or video
of deceased individuals, from when critical
injury occurs to the moments before or after death.” Twitter, however, still reserved
the right to consider the “newsworthiness”
of the content and to refuse such requests.
In response to Twitter’s take-down of accounts, ISIS released a statement telling the
organization that “your virtual war on us
will cause a real war on you,” and called on
followers to murder Twitter staff.
The production and spread of videos such
as the one showing the murder of James
Foley forces us to consider the presence of
terrorist imagery in a restructured media
environment, where users and privatelyowned technology corporations determine,
at least to a certain extent, the degree to
which such imagery can flow. (Even with the
efforts of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube,
however, the Foley material is still easy to
find.) In this new environment, mainstream
editorial news control and journalistic ethics
no longer dictate when and how such images will be made available, and this shift
has had a clear impact upon the types of
images selected by terrorist organizations
for dissemination. Single acts of carefully
staged violence, which 10 years ago would
likely never have seen the light of day, are
now fodder for going viral. This virality is
not simply a function of sympathetic viewers passing the clips on to their followers,
but is also the result of “ordinary” users who
– for reasons of newsworthiness, a macabre
fascination or pure voyeurism – decide to
share the violent scenes. And, in addition,
many of these “ordinary” users lean upon a
libertarian rationale to spread such images:
61
a belief that the internet should be a space
free of all censorship and/or restrictions, be
it state or corporate. In the marketplace of
ideas, large technology corporations are unlikely to take the financial risk of allowing
such an unfettered spread to take place (in
case users and advertisers revolt), but the
very fact that it is they, and not news organizations, who now make those decisions
marks an important shift in how we need to
think about the impact and future direction
of such iconography. n
Courtesy Christian Christensen
CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN is Professor of
Journalism in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He obtained his
PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.
His research focuses upon the relationship
between media and power. This includes the
use of social media during times of warfare,
as well as how governments and activist organizations such as WikiLeaks have begun
to harness tools such as Twitter for the purposes of information distribution.
62
PORNOGRAPHIC ICONOCLASM
IN TERRORIST PROPAGANDA:
ISLAMIC STATE CINEMA AND
AUDIENCE REACTIONS
BY SAMUEL ANDREW HARDY
Although it may appear tacky and repulsive
to viewers outside its Islamist audience, the
Islamic State’s propaganda is extremely sophisticated, and is unparalleled by counterextremist propaganda. Indeed, one measure
of the propaganda’s sophistication is the reaction of its global audience, who have responded far more forcefully to the Islamic
State’s willfully visualized butchery than the
Assad regime’s far more numerous but unadvertised atrocities.
Frames from the Islamic State’s murder videos echo iconic moments from popular culture. For example, its long-distance execution by bazooka recalls a scene from Grand
Theft Auto IV, which itself encapsulates a
standard showpiece in action movies. GTA
IV exploded into gaming culture in 2008,
when IS’s potential recruits would have
been GTA’s target market.
The Islamic State’s execution of a jointly
tethered group by exploding necklace recalls both historic images of enslaved subjects and a totemic punishment for resistance and escape in the horror film Battle
Royale, which has remained an outstanding
depiction of totalitarian power since its release in 2000.
And one of the Islamic State’s most recent
murders uses a forced confession of the war
crime of mutilating dead bodies to excuse
the commission of a mirror execution of an
Assadist regime soldier. In a scene that resembles a morbid wish fulfillment of the
Tank Man’s protest against the Communist
regime in China in 1989, the Islamic State
crushes its victim alive.
IS’s pornographic iconoclasm likewise borrows the techniques of action movie cinematography. When IS attacked the Palace
of Ashurnasirpal II in Nimrud, the resultant
video showed the fighters entering the palace by drilling through its walls. It is a technique of urban warfare, deployed to minimize combatants’ exposure to snipers and
other enemy fire. But the palace was undefended, deserted. The interior of a room
was shown before the fighters had entered
and, breaking through the “fourth wall” of
television, when the fighters opened up
their supposed access point, their second
team of cameramen was visible on the other side. They had obviously walked in and
set up their shot, then doubled back to perform the stunt.
Then, inside, they took sledgehammers to
the palace’s iconic walls; and, outside, they
used a rubble-and-earth-moving vehicle to
dispose of entire panels. “Ramping” alternation between slow motion and fast footage
built tension, then provided relief to jihadist
fanboys. Even these seemingly superfluous
scenes of cultural overkill – iconoclasm by
hand preceding iconoclasm by improvised
explosive device (IED) – were calculated to
embody the Islamic State’s claim in Nineveh
that ‘if God has ordered [their] removal, they
[become] worthless to us even if they are
worth billions of dollars [to the antiquities
market]’. The enormous explosion and videoed
wreckage lent credibility to that absolutist
rhetoric.
Nonetheless, the video also revealed that
part of the palace remained standing, practically untouched. Moreover, the panels that
were so pointedly prized out, carried away
and piled up were actually preserved by being removed from the blast zone. This hints
at a hypocritical practice that has been documented elsewhere – plunder under cover
of iconoclasm. The Islamic State does destroy some objects that it could sell. But it
also preserves some objects that it “should”
destroy. When U.S. forces raided Islamic
State resource manager Abu Sayyaf’s base
in Syria, they recovered an iconic figurine
and an iconic ivory furniture plaque, which
had been secretly looted from Mosul Museum before other pieces were vandalized in
a publicized performance of iconoclasm.
Propaganda about iconoclasm by the Islamic
State has withered in the face of propaganda by the Islamic State about iconoclasm,
which is too professional for provocateurs
to imitate and based on violence too mas-
Picture Policy
sive in scale for provocateurs to claim with
credibility. Still, it should be acknowledged,
because it exists, because it harms civilian
communities and because the contrast highlights details of the Islamic State’s interdependent but distinct campaigns of iconoclasm and propaganda.
As the Islamic State gained ground in 2014,
unevidenced reports of destruction spread,
then apparently documented reports appeared. Yet the images tended to show
destruction during previous episodes of
violence in Iraq, such as the bombing of a
church in Kirkuk in 2011, the bombing of a
church in Mosul in 2009 or the bombing of
a church in Mosul in 2004. And they were
all knowingly and demonstrably misrepresented images from social media.
One powerful scene, images of which were
repeatedly misrepresented as those of
churches in Iraq, was the burning of the
Coptic Church of Saint Tadros in Egypt in
2013. Activists, ranging from Kurds in Iraq
to Christians in the diaspora, used the images to try to raise international awareness or
provoke (further) international intervention.
Long preceding the Islamic State’s destruction of Jonah’s attributed grave in Mosul,
the Shia Post had associated a video of the
sledgehammering of tombs with Iraqi state
reports of the grave’s destruction. Yet Alghadeer, the television channel of the Badr
Organisation paramilitary wing of the Shia
Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, had earlier
presented the video as evidence of the Islamic State’s destruction of the tombs of the
companions of Mohammed in Raqqa, Syria.
And Iranian state-aligned Press TV had even
earlier presented the video as evidence of
anti-Assad rebels’ destruction of Jewish
graves in Tadouf, Syria.
As Yassin Musharbash has argued, the Islamic
State is dependent upon credibility for fundraising and recruitment, so it tends not to
lie about its attacks and tends not to leave
any serious doubt about its responsibility for
those attacks. As Fakir Bey observes, “If ISIL
63
destroyed it, there would be video. If they
go to the toilet, they video it.”
Nevertheless, the Islamic State does lie and
obscure when convenient. It did not claim
responsibility for the bombing of the Armenian Genocide Martyrs’ Memorial Church
in Deir ez-Zor. Since it bombed the building on the 23rd anniversary of the independence of Armenia and near the anniversary and centennial of the genocide, it
seemingly sought to worsen tension within
Turkey by implicating Turkish nationalists
in the attack. Meanwhile, activists for the
Islamic State, as well as for Al-Qaeda in the
Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) and other jihadist groups, attributed the destruction to U.S.
air strikes.
Furthermore, IS forgoes opportunities for
iconoclasm, propaganda and profit when
beneficial. For example, Turkey had warned
of retaliation for any violation of the Tomb
of Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the
founder of the Ottoman Empire. So, having surrounded the Tomb of Suleyman Shah,
and having outnumbered and outgunned the
Turkish exclave’s soldiers, IS held back. After months of trepidation and negotiation,
Turkey invaded Syria through the western
Kurdistani territory of Rojava, exhumed Suleyman Shah’s remains, destroyed the mausoleum to prevent its exploitation by IS and
removed the remains to safety. Immediately
after the conclusion of that deal, the Islamic
State released the video of its iconoclasm
(but not its plunder) at Mosul Museum and
the Nergal Gate Museum in Nineveh.
The Islamic State is genuinely committed
to genocidal and urbicidal violence, to the
systematic eradication of ideologically unacceptable materials as embodiments of
non-conformist communities and alternative possibilities. Graves, tombs, shrines
and mausoleums; temples; chapels, churches, monasteries and nunneries; masjids and
mosques; if it finds an opportunity, synagogues; symbolic artifacts... Property of
Muslim Kaka’is, Shabaks, Shias, Sufis, Sunnis
and Turkmens; Baha’is; Kaka’is; Yezidis;
Mandaeans; Christians, such as Armenians,
Assyrians and Chaldeans; Jews... Anything
that is supposedly idolatrous, polytheistic,
innovative or otherwise deviant is at risk.
At the same time, the Islamic State is sufficiently sophisticated to appreciate the strategic benefits of iconoclasm – displacement,
terror and torment. Some of its targets flee,
which makes territories easier to conquer,
and which drains the resources and divides
the communities of its enemies. Some of its
remaining subjects fall silent, which makes
its territories easier to rule. And some of its
enemies are provoked into reactions that
propel its global recruitment drive.
Ömür Harmanşah has explained to Bible
History Daily that the Islamic State’s pornographic iconoclasm is ‘like a reality show,
where the show is the primary goal for the
production, and the depicted events are the
consequence of it.’ After all, if the destruction itself had been the primary goal, Mosul
Museum would have been attacked immediately, not months after its conquest.
Yet, as IS seeks to incite donations and service from Islamists around the world, it focuses its advertising campaign on spectacular obliteration of cultural heritage sites and
comparatively functional demolition of Shia
religious sites – with sledgehammers and
bulldozers as well as bombs – which manifest its impunity. More quietly, it maintains
its less profitable campaigns against the
smaller communities with whom its sponsors and fighters are less familiar – notably
the Yezidi community, whose religion reconciles Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other traditions.
While the international community has recognized minorities’ persecution, it has not
reacted to genocidal destruction of living
religions’ cultural property in the same way
that it has reacted to iconoclastic demolition of UNESCO World Heritage sites. The
Pornographic Iconoclasm, continued on page 67
64
REWIRING THE ISLAMIC NET: CREATING
AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE ONLINE
PROPAGANDA OF IS1
BY RÜDIGER LOHLKER
The Islamic State (IS) is (in)famous for its
professional propaganda on the Web. Attempts to create narratives to counter IS
narratives continue to completely fail. The
Vienna Observatory of Applied Research on
Extremism and Terrorism (VORTEX) intends
to construct an alternative hegemony restricting the online space of IS and its claim
to be the sole representative of Islam.
IS has emerged as an important player in
contemporary propaganda warfare online.
The expert production of videos, graphic
files and propaganda magazines represents
a new stage of jihadi propaganda. The professional feeling of this propaganda entices
an audience raised in the new visual culture
of the entertainment industry, be it television, films, gaming or the Web, generating
an interest that results in some individuals
migrating to Syria or Iraq to join IS, and others becoming fans of IS and supporting the
fan culture that has emerged since 2014.
IS online propaganda has proved to be resilient to any attempts to close it down. For
example, closing down Twitter accounts created two related movements of IS propaganda: the creation of new accounts with
user names not related to concepts used
before (caliphate, muhajir etc.) and the migration to new platforms, e.g., telegram,
shortwiki and others.
Behind the visual aspect of IS propaganda,
an intense discussion of Islamic religious is-
sues is taking place. IS is trying to create a
discourse fostering a new brand of Islam
strongly linked to the idea that violence
is the only means for the revival of Islam
nowadays and the way to make (IS-)Islam
dominant globally. This religious discourse
is to a large extent immunized against external critique. It is highly flexible and resilient, and can only be limited in its attractiveness by the existence of alternative
representations of Islam not affected by any
relation to IS theology. This dimension of
IS propaganda has been largely ignored by
any study of the IS phenomenon.
Leaving aside the usual understanding of
IS propaganda as networked online activity that may be disturbed by paralyzing as
many nodes of the network as possible, another new approach may be helpful to understand the resilience of IS online.
Magnus Ranstorp assessed that networks
shifted into a “polymorphic structure or
design with multiplicity of nods or pods
swarming towards a mission or resurrecting shortly before or after an operation.
More fundamentally, it allows survivability
through a constant virtual presence with no
real or tangible physical centres of gravity
and in constant stealth mode and ideological motion. Having simply an online presence confers a certain degree of legitimacy which they otherwise would not have. It
also allows them to resurrect and reconfigure at any time.”2
Recent research revealed the importance of
“so-called ‘disseminator’ accounts, which are
run by sympathetic individuals who sometimes lend moral and political support to
those in the conflict.”3
The role and strategic importance of these
sympathizers is crucial for the resilience
of IS. Such sympathizers are usually called
media mujahideen. These supporters of jihadist groups who disseminate propaganda
content online operate through a dispersed
network of accounts which constantly reconfigure much like the way a swarm of
bees or flock of birds constantly reorganizes
in mid-flight. This marks a shift away from
the broadcast models of mass communication which characterize radio and television
broadcasting, to a new dispersed and resilient form (inspired by ‘peer-to-peer’ sharing); the user-curated “Swarmcast.”4
“Interpreting the production, distribution
and dispersal of Jihadist digital content as
an emergent element of netwar provides a
conceptual framework through which strategic and system-wide assessments of Jihadist
digital activities can be developed. Specifically, it can explain how the actions of individual members of the media mujahideen
aggregate into system-wide structures and
behaviours for the purpose of content distribution. […] This ability to act without explicit direction is also the reason why the
Swarmcast can survive the loss of prominent
nodes and accounts by constantly reorganising, just as a flock of birds reorganises in
light if attacked by a predator.
Picture Policy
65
(Archaeology as work of those who pray to the devil). © telegram.me
The notion of Swarmcast combines the understanding of emergent properties of complex
systems observed in nature with an emphasis
on information-age technology with the irregularisation of conflict, alternate operational
structures, and the connection between
physical and Internet based battlefields. In
the Swarmcast model there is no longer a
clear division between the audience and a
content producer in control of the means
through which to broadcast content to that
audience. Instead, once content is produced
and released, it is often the distributing network of media mujahideen, rather than the
original producer, that ensures continuing
content availability.” [Fisher 2015: 6]
The resilience of IS has emerged over the
last two years as jihadist groups have
moved from broadcasting content via a few
‘official’ accounts to a dispersed network
of media mujahideen who have been able
to ensure that jihadist content maintains a
persistent online presence. The resilience of
the swarmcast originates from the interconnected nature of the social media accounts.”
[Fisher 2015]
The evolution of the dispersed swarmcast
structure is not limited to follower/following
relationships on social media, but can also
be observed in the content sharing behaviors of social media users. A case study of
Twitter activity between January and March
2013 provided evidence of the emergence
of new jihadist social media strategies and
the dispersed networks distributing content.
This study has demonstrated how Jabhat alNusra (JaN), a Syrian jihadi group opposing
IS, used Twitter to disseminate content, and
the type of content they shared. The analysis of a JaN hashtag in 2013 provided two
specific findings: first, social media provided a means for “official” channels to engage
in active communication with sympathizers,
and, second, the study concluded that ‘Twitter functions as a beacon for sharing shortlinks to content dispersed across numerous
digital platforms ... Today’s social media
zeitgeist facilitates emergent behavior producing complex information-sharing networks
in which influence flows through multiple
hubs in multiple directions.” Network analysis of tweets containing the same tag, [...]
during spring 2014 showed that users have
continued to interact using the tag and that
the network has remained distributed and
resilient.“ [Fisher 2015] This applies to IS’
use of Twitter accounts, too.
66
Destroying a statue by hand. © telegram.me
Speed is another crucial element of Jihadi
online activities, as is agility: “For example,
trailers for the ISIS-released Flames of War
video could easily be found on YouTube. A
single posting of the trailer was watched
over 750,000 times, and the average duration was over one minute for the 1 minute
27 second trailer. The full version was also
easily available via the agile, multiplatform
release. For example, a version of Flames of
War with Russian subtitles was posted on
Vimeo and played over 13,000 times, while
another version available on LiveLeak has
been viewed 5,500 times. At least two versions of the full HD download were available
on Gulfup and had been downloaded 21,550
and 5,600 times respectively. Another version of the video was hidden in the e-books
section of Archive.org and had been downloaded over 12,000 times. Further versions
were also available from 180upload.com
and Mediafire.com, while references to the
film are still shared on Twitter using both
Arabic [...] and English […] tags.“ [Fisher 2015]
not have a lasting impact. Attempts to flood
hashtags created by IS accounts celebrating
the Paris attacks with anti-IS-messaged
hashtags had only a limited impact.
Although the variety of platforms used by
the propaganda of IS has increased and new
ones have emerged, the overall structure of
the jihadi swarmcast is still discernable. Any
new channel used to disseminate IS material
is instantly distributed across the already
existing swarm of accounts.
Recent research by the research group Human
Cognition is able to show that even after
the intense online reactions to the Paris attacks in November 2015, IS communication
run by the media mujahideen demonstrates
its ongoing speed and resilience. IS clusters
were not paralyzed at all, still being able
due to its dispersed structure to reach out
to other clusters. Anti-IS activity did not affect the IS clusters. So anti-IS activism of
this kind may have a positive ‘we are acting’-effect on the users producing this content but no effect related to IS.
Attempts to counter this propaganda by, for
example, producing video content telling the
viewers that IS is representing a perversion
of Islam or Islam is to be seen and practiced
in a peaceful way have largely failed. The
online campaigns run by part of Anonymous
also give ample proof that these attacks do
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67
Pornographic Iconoclasm, continued from page 63
demolition of archaeological sites has invited appeals to the United Nations Security
Council and the International Criminal Court
and plans for peacekeepers at historic sites
but not, apparently, at civilian centers. Such
precisely provoked responses fuel the Islamic State propaganda machine by providing evidence of negligence of communities
and fetishization of stones.
Destroying a statue in a church. © telegram.me
Museum in Mossul. © telegram.me
The IS video clusters demonstrate this noneeffect: the first IS video (Kirkuk ‘province’
of IS) praising the Paris attacks was published November 16. Twelve more in Arabic, partially subtitled in French, have been
published since then. A November 25 video
calls on the U.S. to send ground troops and
praises the size of the caliphate. A close
video dissemination analysis shows that
different users are important at different
times – but crucially – that the information
is shared via a morphing group characterized by an ongoing churn of users joining
the group and then drifting away over time.
© Rüdiger Lohlker
Taking into account this failure of any attempts to counter IS propaganda directly,
a new strategy seems to be necessary. The
“Vienna Observatory of Applied Research on
Extremism and Terrorism” (VORTEX) aims at
doing this. n
The international community has not even
reacted to stage-managed massacres in historic places in the same way. In 2014, the
Islamic State murdered at least fifteen civilians by entombing them in the Yezidi Mausoleum of Sheikh Mend in Jadala, Iraq, then
blowing them up. In 2015, IS murdered three
civilians by binding them to Roman columns
in Palmyra, Syria, then blowing them up.
Only one of those was headline news. And
one of the responses that it prompted was
‘ISIS blows up more Palmyra antiquities,
with civilians attached’. n
Courtesy Samuel Andrew Hardy
RÜDIGER LOHLKER is Professor of Islamic Studies in the Oriental Institute at the
University of Vienna, Austria. He is fluent
in twelve languages. His research looks at
the history of Islamic ideas, Islam and the
Arab world online, modern Islamic movements, Jihadism and Islamic law. He focuses
on Arab and Islamic websites and contemporary Islamic movements (Jihadism and
Salafism in particular) in a comparative perspective. He maintains several blogs about
Islam and Arabian culture, critique of antiMuslim discourses and Arab hacker culture.
SAMUEL ANDREW HARDY is Adjunct Professor at the American University of Rome
and Research Associate at the University
College London. Hardy specializes in the
trade in illicit antiquities and the destruction of community and cultural property.
68
ICONOCLASH:
IT’S THE CLASH, STUPID
BY BEN O’LOUGHLIN
From 9/11 to the most treasured temple in
Palmyra, Islamist destruction reminds us
that we have objects and values we hold as
untouchable and inviolable. It also makes
us question whether we have a strategy
to save them. This iconoclash has cycled
through the angry pointing cleric clip, the
beheading video, the burning man in a cage
gif, the vandalism montage, the full-on terrorist attack. It is a clash through the exchange of icons and images, and each ‘side’
in the war on terror has shown trophies of
valuable dead people, objects, targets destroyed or being destroyed, a tit-for-tat of
shock and awe. We will match your orange
Guantanamo jumpsuit with our orange hostage jumpsuit. Yet if we are to properly respond to this iconoclasm, we must understand why it is happening.
It is happening in part because of Islamists’
drive to restore pride and dignity and
avenge historical humiliation by creating a
game of equals. However, this iconoclash is
ultimately driven by geopolitical strategy.
For Islamic State, the clash is about winning
that game on Islamic State’s terms.
At first glance, the ongoing iconoclash illustrates Islamists’ efforts to show our cultural
interpenetration and equivalence with them.
It is about showing we share the same visual
regime and thus the same space, now. It
is not a clash of spaces but a clash within
a single global media ecology. It is about
changing how we think of the terrain within
which the clash plays out.
In establishing that sense of co-existence,
the production and destruction of imagery
by Islamic extremists proceeds through an
ever-escalating series of transactions. Islamists use their knowledge of what we say
we find valuable in order to lure us into
feeling, lure us into acting, and even lure us
into believing: believing in their belief, their
steadfast belief that gives them eternal fortitude and indefatigable resolve. They remind
us we are entangled with them: their objects
are our objects, their media circulations are
enmeshed with ours, and we are chained together, in struggle, as equals. Al-Qaeda and
Islamic State have forced us to restore our
faith in our own faith in visual totems: we
value the Twin Towers and the Temple of
Bel in Palmyra because they signify what we
hold dear, in this case, respectively, nationalism and the freedom to shop, and global
culture and heritage.
They use images to speak to us in a way that
changes how we think of ourselves and
them – to make ourselves presences in each
other’s lives such that we must find a way
to accommodate one another on new terms.
They are reaching out to people in the region, people who may feel Islamic State is
about to conquer their territory, or people
who may wish to join and support them.
They may be showing fellow Sunnis that
only they, Islamic State, are the true Muslims; showing Shia that they have backed
the wrong interpretation and should recant
or die. But whether the audience is near or
far, they are establishing that they are what
is happening to us.
What new terms are Islamic State offering
through the iconoclash? They seek to replace
the state system and imperialism with a caliphate. Anyone outside the caliphate is welcome to join and live on those terms or live
on their own terms and die violently. It is not
about whose projected afterlife is better. It
is about using imagery to change feelings and
behavior in the present. It is about a new
political arrangement now. The truth of any
image is secondary to this strategy. Icons
are a means to make and win the clash.
This clash of icons is a means to winning the
strategic endgame. Islamic State play on our
belief that they really believe that certain
statues come from the divine. We are all too
ready to credit a naive religiosity to them.
Their rhetoric plays up to this. We must understand that while Islamic State wish to
create and maintain a certain religious community – a caliphate – they can use nonreligious means to get there. Their strategic
documents draw on non-Islamic thinkers like
Sun Tsu, Clausewitz and Paul Kennedy because
this strategic game is a means to an end.
That the truth of any image is secondary
to strategy for Islamic State can be seen in
their pragmatic approach to both politics
and iconography. Their selective destruction of idols shows they don’t truly, madly
believe. In February 2015, Islamic State allowed Turkish troops to come and pick up
an Ottoman shrine, the tomb of Suleyman
Shah, from an area Islamic State had taken.
Why did they not destroy this idolatrous
object? Were the monotheists succumbing
to polytheism, jihadist rivals asked?
Picture Policy
The reason was realpolitik: at the time, it
suited the leaders of Turkey and Islamic
State to ensure the two sides avoided any
violent conflict. Thus, Islamic State can swap
the chains of obligation to a deity to chains
of obligation to a nation-state like Turkey as
it suits. In oscillating between rhetorics of
modernity and barbarism, Islamic State exasperate Sunni extremist rivals who find it
hypocritical to do deals with devilish statesystem leaders. They also confound their
modern enemies who expect Islamic State
to stay true to their divine chains. How can
Islamic State talk of the eternal and transcendent, of the caliphate as the realization of
prophecy, and then muddy themselves in
the profanity of statecraft?
They present themselves as true believers,
and they show themselves destroying things
to prove it. Seeing is believing: we see them
believing and we believe they believe. However, while Islamic State captured the Syrian
city of Palmyra in May 2015, rather than destroy the iconic temple and artifacts, they
used them as a stage setting for beheading
videos. The temple became a globally-witnessed backdrop for us to see them perform
their belief. But if these icons were so idolatrous, why not destroy them? Why give them
further attention by putting them in digital
clips with an infinite afterlife? Again, Islamic
State put religiosity beneath political interests. Recruit, intimidate, now. As we hear the
journalist’s solemn voiceover as the murders
are reported, we are told that authorities
were powerless to prevent this; that Islamic
State have total control. Icons are a means to
project the appearance of power. It was only
at the end of August that demolition began.
The priority of political strategy is also evident in Islamic State’s approach to iconography. It is reasonable to ask, why do those
opposed to icons seem so eager to make
them? Islamic extremists make images to
circulate in multiple formats and domains.
They are crafted to produce an inner feeling of the soul for the individual in front of
69
their private screen, an awakening of piety
and anger that triggers an outward debate
about justice and belonging for the family
around the TV screen. These images don’t
“send a message” to anyone except those
looking for messages - the UFOologists of
our foreign ministries and security think
tanks who fret about Islamic State’s powerful brand. The images produce a feeling, a
rhythm, a ritual of attraction or repulsion,
of social affirmation or consternation that
ripples through our social networks. No single
image has effects here. No icon changes the
meaning of everything. Rather, the tactic
is to build chains of amplification and immersion that make us feel that we are in
this crisis together and only they have the
strength to win out.
And yet still: how dare they produce images? The answer is pragmatism, interests,
and strategy. These images are tokens in a
global exchange economy; in no way sacred,
their value is immediate and imminent, in
the action they can provoke now. Islamic
State show other Muslims, visually, just how
Islamic they are, chopping off hands and
heads as they enact Sharia law more strictly
than anyone else dare. When they suffer a
military defeat, a quick, shocking video of
an atrocity elsewhere can distract attention.
And, in the final analysis, images are not
even needed. Rumor and reputation can stir
the blood. Audiences can react to the very
idea that Islamic State might be destroying something, just as some Muslims have
rioted after hearing stories of US soldiers
flushing a Koran down a toilet. Now that
each ‘side’ has expectations of the other and
is ready to hear the worst, this cycle of hostility can operate as an iconoclash without
icons.
We need to stop believing that while they
believe, we are more enlightened, distanced
and reasonable. They don’t all believe, particularly those at the top, hence they don’t
destroy idols and idolators immediately or
consistently, but only when it suits. Their
rhetoric can be deflated. Despite their premodern rituals and post-modern embrace of
simulation, they desire the modern goals of
authority within territory: an Islamic state.
To win the iconoclash, we must show they
are as grounded in the politics of interests
as anyone else.
Acknowledgements: I am indebted to Mina
Al-Lami for sharing her thoughts on this
topic, and to the writing of Faisal Devji,
Bruno Latour and Will McCants. n
Courtesy Ben O’Loughlin
BEN O’LOUGHLIN is Professor of International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. O’Loughlin’s expertise is in
the field of international political communication. He is Specialist Adviser to the UK
House of Lords Select Committee on Soft
Power and UK Influence. The committee aims
to understand how power and influence are
changing in a transformed global media and
geopolitical landscape and how the UK can
most effectively exercise power within that
landscape. O’Loughlin joined Royal Holloway
in 2006 after completing a DPhil Politics at
the University of Oxford in October 2005.
From 2004-2006 he was Research Associate
on the Economic and Social Research Council project Shifting Securities: News Cultures
Before and Beyond Iraq War 2003, for which
he was based at the University of Wales Swansea and King’s College London.
70
DESTRUCTION AS IMAGE-ACT
- REMAPPING HISTORY
PANEL DISCUSSION WITH HONEY AL-SAYED, CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN,
NADIA OWEIDAT, AND RÜDIGER LOHLKER
This panel discussion took place at New York
University on March 17, 2016, and was supported by the British Council.
HONEY AL-SAYED:
I am going to talk about culture from a Syrian
perspective. This is not to say that I represent Syria. This is just from my own perspective. I am starting out with a quote from
Mark Twain. He once wrote that the Syrian
capital Damascus “has seen all that ever has
occurred on earth and still she lives. She has
looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires and will see the tombs of a thousand
more before she dies.” There are other claims
that the name Old Damascus is the eternal
city. And that is how I feel about Syria.
Syria is a cradle of civilizations with a history
of human settlements that go back five
thousand years during which Babylonians,
Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyad’s,
Ottomans have lived. Where histories have
been and continue to be interwoven. Where
the ‘us’ and ‘them’ is a blurred line I would
call humanity. However Syria, the cradle of
civilizations, has witnessed a revolution, an
armed conflict, the use of chemical weapons
and the domination of a proxy-war and Islamist radicals over diplomatic and political
narratives. Syrians have been robbed from
their freedom, dignity and their lives. War
has resulted in considerable damage not
only to Syrian souls but also destruction,
looting and illicit trade to Syria’s heritage
and so robbing Syrians of their identity too.
History is the foundation of Syria’s diversity, economy and culture. It is our heri-
tage that tells our human story - a tale that
has been told universally through platforms
we all familiar with, to name a few: graffiti,
fashion, food, poetry, film, theater, art, music, and in our age social media and technology. All the variety of platforms represent
and form our social and our self-identities
as well as our ideas. Throughout the world
cultural heritage is our stronghold of existence. And when our heritage is destroyed,
so is our identity. As human beings without
our past we have no future. Then again, knowing Syria’s culture, it is a culture of resilience.
Also throughout history, when conflicts
arose – and this is a fact – media and the
arts flourished with them. Sometimes as
transformers of social behaviors and reality, other times as fuels that drive wars. In
fact during the past six years alone in Syria
and in the diaspora over a hundred media
outlets emerged. Thousands of civil society,
arts and culture initiatives emerged. Finding
their limited space to just express themselves, shouting out for help, documenting
humanitarian violations and with it their
cultural heritage all this in the face of media
and political narratives dehumanizing and
demonizing Syrians. This brings me to mention the non-profit independent radio that
I helped co-found, SouriaLi. SouriaLi is a
double meaning and it means surreal as in
how we feel how about what is happening
in Syria today, it also means Syria is mine
which is ownership. SouriaLi was launched
in October 2012. I arrived in January 2012,
forced to leave Syria after over a decade
of having my own radio show back home
called Good Morning Syria which was inspired from Good Morning Vietnam’s Robin
Williams, bless his soul.
There are two things that come to mind
when you are forced to arrive in a new
country and that is one’s survival to the
guilt of survival. So I connected with a few
friends of mine who had the same feelings
and who were forced to also leave Syria. I
had a couple in France and one in Germany, myself here in the US and after months
hours days over Skype we created SouriaLi
and launched it. SouriaLi is focused on advancing the level of awareness of Syrians
on concepts that are new to us: What is democracy? What is rule of law? What is transitional justice and so on? Today SouriaLi
has twenty Syrians working virtually from
all over the world and inside Syria. They
all come from a rich mosaic of backgrounds
just like Syria and with 50 percent women
representation.
By implying media and imagery and the
art of storytelling and satire which you will
be hearing from out panelists today, radio
SouriaLi is also focusing on peacebuilding
psycho-social development, cultural preservation and advocacy.
Finally, nothing is impossible where people
power is at play. Nothing is impossible
when we as people of this world collectively persevere for sustainable solutions,
for justice and peace and also banishing the
misconceptions and type-casting. To build
strong cultural bridges between the MENA
region and international communities. It is a
challenging but worthwhile journey. n
Picture Policy
CHRISTIAN
CHRISTENSEN:
My role here is to discuss the relationship
between some of the propaganda we see on
social media and thinking about questions
of media themselves, about journalism and
about free speech in relationship to what
we might broadly term terrorist imagery.
I am not coming here as an expert on the
Middle East. I come here as someone who
has spent a fair amount of his life looking
at representations of warfare, representations of conflict, but also as someone who
has spent the last several years of my career
looking at social media in terms of mainstream
politics, radical transparency politics and
the use of social media by organizations.
What I would like to do is start off the conversation today by contextualizing the way
in which we think about images. Because I
think over the last two or three years, very
often social media, be it YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, these have
been the platforms through which we have
seen a fair number of these extremely violent images and these acts of destruction.
Some of you may have heard that Twitter
is facing a lawsuit in San Francisco fought
by the wife of an American worker in Jordan
who was killed who – I believe – was training the police department in Jordan. She
is suing Twitter. The basis of the lawsuit is
that Twitter’s platform had enabled terrorist
organizations to communicate with each
other and that in part had a direct relationship to her husband’s death. So, while Twitter itself is quite confident that it will win
this case, it is interesting as a point of departure to think about the fact that Twitter
is seen as a platform for this kind of information distribution and it is also a little bit
the starting point for thinking about social
media and this violent imagery. Twitter
itself says that there is absolutely no relationship between the crime and the platform. ‘We have a platform of information
that is used by hundreds of millions of
71
people and so we have absolutely no responsibility for this act.’ The family, on the
other hand, and the attorney say there is a
responsibility because there was not sufficient effort put in to stopping terrorist organizations from using Twitter.
As a starting point, it is worth thinking about
the traditional representation of terrorism
that we had before social media, when we
had newspapers and television. The amount
of editorial power that went into decisionmaking of what images we saw and how
terrorism was represented. It is also very
important to think about this as a beginning
point to think about social media, the notions of the spectacular, the requirements
that events were of a particularly spectacular nature in order to garner the attention of
the mass media. Think also about the relationship between these kinds of events and
the nature of commercial media itself and
the demands of commercial media to make
money, gather the attention of people and
the knowledge on the part of terrorist organizations of this is what is required.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram have
all been very active in the deletion of accounts. At Twitter 125,000 ISIS-related accounts
have been actually deleted.1
These organizations, such as with commercial
organizations and news organizations, are
commercial ventures. They have their own
interest in terms of free speech. When we
begin to think about free speech, we cannot
see these as value-neutral platforms that
simply exist for the spread of information.
These are companies with bottom lines,
with investors, who have interests. And
when these accounts were suspended, death
threats were issued against several leading members of the Twitter management
team. When they were confronted about
this, members of the management team said
this just goes along with the territory. What
I am getting at is this is a transference of
the gatekeeper function of traditional mass
media in terms of terrorist images to social
media. And this is a very big difference. We
have gone away from an editorial position
where newspaper editors make decisions
on how to frame events, what to show and
what not to show, to a situation where we
see users spreading information outside of
the control of any kind of editorial system,
which is different. And we saw this in many
cases over the last six months to a year,
for example with the beheading of James
Foley and the discussion about the ethics of
showing this material.
It is not as clear-cut as it seems. One of the
reasons why it is not clear-cut is that we
are the arbiters about what is put up, and
we are the arbiters of what is taken down
also. It is not simply a question of terrorists
sharing information. We are sharing that
very information that the terrorists put out
as well. This became the free speech issue
(in particular Twitter) around the Foley video and around other ISIS material. But Twitter cannot just wipe out ISIS online. We are
talking about a multi-headed monster here,
which is not simply under the control of a
centralized organization. It is not as if you
wipe out one or two people and you can
wipe out everything. We are sharing.
Then the question becomes: what is our
responsibility in this spread of information? How does the newsworthiness come
into our discussion about this information?
When the Foley video came out, it was not
simply ISIS members who were banned
or cut. It was actually regular non-terrorist users whose accounts were suspended
for a number of months simply for sharing the video. And what happens then? We
have the accusation of censorship. To me
as a media scholar, what becomes interesting here is conceptually where the lines are,
where we censor, when we censor but also
who we censor and why.
So I think the discussion about social media
and terrorism and social media should not
be limited to who posts the material but
who spreads it afterwards.
72
Another issue related to terrorism is the
relation between the government and the
restriction on free speech and the ways in
which government has been actively engaging with social media organizations to stop
or at least try to rid ourselves of some of
the material shared online.
For me, this is a question of consistency.
I think we can all agree that crime online,
that the beheading of a family member is
outrageous and should be blocked, but then
the question is where the line is drawn in
terms of criminal activity. What other terrorist organizations internationally will also
be blocked? Or are we simply bracketing
off a certain group but not thinking more
broadly? This is also a question of surveillance. To what point does the emphasis on
terrorism become a question of surveillance?
Here is a list from the meeting between
leaders of Silicon Valley and the US government about the issues that they consider to
be important:
• How can we make it harder for Terrorists
to leveraging the internet to recruit, radicalize and mobilize followers to violence?
• How can we help others to create, publish
and amplify alternative content that would
undercut ISIS?
• In what ways can we use technology to
help disrupt paths to radicalization towards
violence, identify recruitment patterns, and
provide metrics to help measure our efforts
to counter radicalization to violence?
• How can we make it harder for terrorists
to use the internet to mobilize, facilitate,
and operationalize attacks, and make it easier for law enforcement and the intelligence
community to identify terrorist operatives
and prevent attacks?
We look at this list and think rationally in a
democratic society that these are perfectly acceptable discussions to have. But what
are the potential byproducts of this list that
go beyond ISIS and go into other organizations
and society?
My last slide is Facebook’s stock value. We
should not forget about this when we talk
about the relationship between terrorist imagery, free speech and censorship online.
Facebook, for example, is a company that is
stock-owned, it went public. It does not answer to Zuckerberg the same way that it did
before this line started. It is answering to a
multitude of people whose interest might lie
outside to free speech. It might lie outside
something we consider to be important. It
might be simply a question of expedience
and profit margin – which you would expect
from investors. This is the same discussion
that we have been having within media and
communications studies about newspapers
for a hundred years. There is nothing new
here. The problem from my perspective is
that the political economy has often been
drained from the discussion. We look at
these [Facebook, Twitter …] as neutral platforms, as if they were tools for the people,
value-neutral, not that Facebook was collecting data on anybody, not that Twitter
could be monitored.
Which country in the world has had the
most Twitter take-down request accounts
granted? Turkey! An increasingly authoritarian government that is using social media for monitoring. It is actively punishing
people for posting material online. If you
follow news from Turkey, you know that
journalists, politicians and individuals are
charged with insulting the president, which
is against the law in Turkey. And Twitter
has complied. Twitter now has changed its
rules. They used to operate under the general rule that there is free speech. Now they
operate on a country-by-country basis. So if
you violate the laws of the country in which
you are located, your material can be taken
down upon request. Facebook operates under very different circumstances and it is
often not transparent at all what on Facebook is taken down and what does not get
taken down.
This is no longer the New York Times and
the Washington Post and the BBC that are
anchored in nation states. These are now
multinational, international corporations,
stock-owned companies operating across
the globe under very different legal regimes
with very different rules about free speech.
How do we handle that new, complicated
situation? n
NADIA OWEIDAT:
I will talk about the context of what is happening in the Middle East and also about the
solution. Talking about the region, I prefer
to talk about “Arabic-speaking” because it
is a very diverse region. It includes Kurds,
Circassians and many more people who are
not Arabs. So “Arabic-speaking” is a more
respectful term for these diverse people.
The Arabic-speaking world constitutes half
a billion people. 400 million are living in the
Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
The Arab world has the highest birthrate in
the world. 80% of the population is under
40 years old, 50% is between 15 and 25
years old. Illiteracy is practically 0% among
the younger half of the Arabs.
At the same time, the Middle East is home
to the biggest unemployment rate in the world.
The younger generation is so different from
its parents. There is actually a massive gap
between this young generation and the generation of their parents. The skills of their
parents are not transferable to the younger generation in many ways. A lot of the
younger generation live in big cities where
there is a lot of interaction with other
young people. For them, world news is like
local news. Another phenomenon is that the
young generation today is mostly teaching
themselves online.
To provide a context for Islamic extremism, we note that for a long time, since the
beginning of Internet, Islamic material has
been extensively published. Islamists actually monopolized the media outreach space.
Picture Policy
They were better funded (for example, AlJihad magazine) and tacitly supported by
religious establishment and many governments. They claimed the need for a caliphate and for a renewed jihad. They were
viewed as authentic and harmless; their
violence was believed to be only rhetorical/
theoretical. Let me remind you that even
President Ronald Reagan invited the Taliban
to the White House as freedom fighters.
They were seen as very benign. They received a lot of financial support and were
seen as authentic. They had practically no
competition in terms of how much support
they received compared to liberals, who
had harder times to attain funding and support. Their material has been the foundation
for extremism.
Today, the young people are quite hungry for
information. We can learn this from their
use of social media. One of the highest rates
of Facebook users worldwide is in the Arab
world. The highest share of downloaders of
educational material on YouTube are in the
Arab world. There is a phenomenal appetite to learn about the world. This is coupled
with an education system that is practically obsolete. If you want to learn something,
you go to YouTube. Actually, women are the
biggest downloaders of educational material
because with the internet, you can learn
from home. The use of the internet for education has become rampant.
During the Arab Spring, there were more
tweets in Arabic than in any other language.
Digitalization changes a lot of things fundamentally, the wiring of the region and its
citizens. Smartphone penetration is rising. It
actually changes somebody’s life to have an
iPhone. This provides access to all sorts of
information they would not have without.
In 2017, one out of every two persons had
access to Wi-Fi.
All this changes a lot of things. When you
create your own Facebook page, especially
as a woman, you are creating your own au-
73
tonomy. This autonomy is not really part of
our tradition and culture, which are focused
on tribalism and family. But the internet is
about individualism. When you hold your
iPhone in your hand, you decide where you
go. You follow your own curiosity. You have
the remote control. Out of this incredible
rewiring there are a lot of healthy phenomena taking place such as citizen journalism. Young men and women not only cover
events but also train others on storytelling
and investigative journalism; for example,
the group 7iber in Jordan. Another change
is the decentralization of power and authority. The Arab Spring amplified this and unleashed creativity unprecedented for the region –for both extremist and liberal values.
Thirdly, there is development of the individual voice exercising autonomy.
What do Arab speakers watch most on
YouTube or Facebook? What forum attracts more people than others? The mostwatched YouTube channels all over the Arab
world – and this is true for Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, Iraq, Morocco, everywhere - are of
people who are the equivalent of Jon Stewart, people use humor and satire to mark
political, religious and social authoritarianism.
This is a beautiful terrain that practically
nobody is paying attention to. Secular Facebook pages enjoy the highest following.
There is a lot of creativity everywhere. The
top 150 most followed Facebook pages are
not religious content. The Muslim Brotherhood, the largest political Islamist party in
the Arab world, has fewer than two million
followers. Compare this with the page of Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi, one of
the best-selling authors in the Arab world.
Her Facebook page has over 8 million followers. We share a common language and
the tradition of authoritarianism, and her
novels are about the authoritarianism of
both the Islamist and the secular regimes,
and how they both could not care less about
the people. If she posts something, 100,000
people are commenting or sharing.
The Muslim Brotherhood some time ago attempted to attract young recruits to use
their version of Facebook. It looks exactly
like Facebook, the same color, everything.
But it was monitored and it flunked. Nobody
watched it, nobody engaged with it.
There is a phenomenal opportunity here. A
lot of people use their agency to educate
one another, to root the very human values
that gave birth to universal human rights.
Their vision for the society is refreshing and
based on non-violent communication. It is
a vision where coercion, intimidation and
violence are not OK mechanisms of exerting
influence.
Peer learning is a big phenomenon. Young
people – in their twenties and thirties –
are more likely to learn from one another
than from schools and teachers, and they
prefer to watch news online rather than to
watch state media or spend time with their
families. This is activating curiosity and is
very promising. One of the leading forums
is www.ahewar.org (“civilized debate” or
“modern discussion”). It seems very disorganized. There are twenty-five thousand writers. They range from academics, professors,
thinkers, philosophers, to people who are
intellectuals or young men and women who
are educating themselves on issues such as
culture, religion, history. The number one issue is the separation of religion and politics.
There is a genuine voice seeking secularism
in the context of the Middle East where religion is not used to abuse people’s rights.
They have three million people debating.
We sometimes forget that there is another
side that needs some help.
Talking about the unleashing of creativity, I
want to share some cartoons because cartoons can tell a story in one picture. I want
to emphasize that this revolution, this creativity spring, is taking place everywhere
in Yemen, Sudan. It is really amazing to see
the places and the creativity that exist.
74
Oweidat shows cartoons indicating freedom
of speech, for example by cartoonist Khalid
Albaih (@Khalidalbaih).
It is not only cartoons but it is also videos
which testify to the rise of creativity. Oweidat presents Hamza Namira: Esmaani.2 This
video, which has been viewed over seven
million times, expresses the sentiments of
a whole generation. Oweidat presents Hisham Fageeh’s video “No Woman No Drive” 3
, which has had more than 13 million views
and Farah Chamma’s Word Play “How Must
I Believe”4 . n
RÜDIGER LOHLKER:
I think I should talk about ISIS and jihadism,
and especially cultural heritage and the destruction of cultural heritage.
When we talk about ISIS, we often forget
that ISIS is living and acting in the framework of colonialism. What ISIS is doing is a
kind of “imagining itself”. And it is the one
and only actor who is fighting colonialism.
Nobody else is doing this. Not the Arab regimes who have been saying for decades, “We
are fighting colonialism.” Now ISIS is saying,
“They never did. We are doing it.” There is a
post-colonial situation in the Arab world.
ISIS is part of the old system of the Arab
world. It is not the future, it is the past that
is trying to survive. Symbolically, we may
think of the discussion about the Sykes-Picot Treaty, the abolishment of the borders
between Iraq, Syria etc.
ISIS is built on the ruins of the former nationalist regimes, such as the Ba’aht regimes. In Syria it still partly exists, in Iraq it
does not exist anymore. All these nationalist
regimes created the idea of a pure national identity constituted in the combat with
the West, whatever this is. It is going back
to that time. They are built on the idea of a
homogenous Islam going back to the modernism of the 19th century. They created the
idea of a transnational, international, homogenous Islam that is standing against the
West, that is different from the West. And
we have to build it up as a force globally.
And they are built upon the idea of fighting
colonialism, even if they are not doing it.
Even with Wahhabism, we might not think
of a nationalist regime or anti- colonial regime, but it are also built on the experience of 19th century colonialism in Western
Africa and South Asia and not in the Arab
World, in the Arab Peninsula. The Wahhabist
scholars were learning from West African
scholars; they were learning from South
Asian scholars.
We do not really know what is happening
now and we are certainly not good scholars
concerning Islamic disciplines.
There is another misconception that we often hear in the debate about ISIS, which is
about modernity. It is true, they are fighting modernity but they are doing it in terms
of modernity. This is quite a paradox. ISIS,
Al Qaeda etc. are fighting Western modernities, but they are living in a form of modernity. Maybe a barren one, but modernity as
we know has had and still has its dark sides.
They are not appropriating modernity thanks to Christian Christensen. They would
introduce a kind of dichotomy between us
who created this beautiful modernity and
these guys trying to rob us from our modernity – no. They are living in a kind of modernity, a cruder form, sure, they are mirroring the West in certain ways.
If we look at the films – not only the [James
Wright] Foley videos – but all videos produced by ISIS, you might see there are many
parts of Hollywood films, Eastern films etc.
are cut into it. There are other elements of
Westernized and Easternized popular culture in it. So, it is quite a modern way of
looking at the world. And they are doing
it practically, not only symbolically. There
are some videos out now by ISIS where we
see videos from the perspective of a drone
circulating above certain locations to be attacked, zooming in and then everything is
blown up. All of you know the images of
drone attacks, but ISIS is using it.
The third misconception is that ISIS is to an
extent not Islamic, nor religious, it is nihilistic or whatever. I think if we are following
the sources, we may say that ISIS is busy
creating their own version of Islam, a variety of Islam, an ISIS Islam. They are putting
enormous efforts into producing this kind
of Islam. Megabytes and megabytes. I just
checked some telegram accounts and it was
some 25,000 posts in the last three days. So
imagine the energy of producing this kind
of Islam. They are writing theological tracts,
fatwas, short texts on every Islamic issue
you may think of. They are adopting it in
form of videos, public meetings, newsletters, even simple slogans, trying to convey
the idea in a very coherent form that there
is a pure Islam emerging now and ‘we’ are
bringing it to life. That is behind it.
If we hear what ISIS is producing, we hear
many names. Many Saudi scholars, many
Salafist scholars, it is not only Ibn Taymiyya, there are many more. If you are reading fatwas from ISIS or if you are reading
fatwas from any scholar from Egypt or Saudi Arabia, it is very difficult to see a difference. It is quite the same modern style of
religious discussion that is happening. We
may call this appropriation, what is being
used by ISIS. And if we are looking beyond
the Arab world, I do not see anybody else
except the Indonesian saying, “They are using our religion. We have a problem and we
have to solve that.”
If we are following ISIS, reading ISIS or listening to it, we are observing an organization of what is a kind of textual archaeology. They are digging into the Islamic
traditions, trying to find every instance that
justifies their idea that Islam has to be violent. This is what they are preaching and
what they are showing us, that Islam and
violence have to go together.
Picture Policy
75
ate a purer Islam. A true Islam and the only
one who defends it, is ISIS.
To show as a contrast we may look at the
video “The Divine Grace of Islam Nusantara”
(Cholil) as another form of Islam beyond the
Arab world. We have to look at Islam from
a global perspective. We have introduced a
new point of view. Islam Nusantara is represented by the largest single organization
of Islam worldwide, the Nahdlatul Ulama
with more than 50 million people and certainly of some influence.
“Turn him into little pieces!” Notice the cameraman on the right.
Image © telegram.me
So we have to talk about theology for sure
in this context. If we look into the acts of
vandalism and the destruction of cultural
heritage, ISIS and other groups such as AlQaeda are doing it, al-Shabaab in Somalia,
groups in Sudan destroying graves, Al-Qaeda in Yemen destroyed graves. But it is ISIS
that is famous for it. If we look into these
acts of vandalism, we will easily detect all
the elements that I mentioned before: ISIS
is not attacking human heritage in general
but they are destroying Palmyra (Tadmur),
Hatra, etc. for sure. But what they are doing much more is destroying other sites.
They are blowing up Shiite mosques, graves,
pilgrimage locations, etc. Shrines that are
venerated by Shiites in Iraq, in Syria are destroyed all over. Do the media talk about it?
The Western media? Not really. There are
some exceptions.
We heard a lot about the destruction of Palmyra. But did you hear about the blowing
up of a very famous site close to Palmyra in
Tadmur called al-Mazar, a location to be visited to get some baraka (blessings) from it.
I am afraid nobody heard about it. Nobody
is talking about it. It reminds me that nobody talks about the hundreds of thousands
of Muslims being killed by ISIS. If a European or an American is killed – that is news. If
thousands of Arabs are killed – no! Why?
Even today, who is talking about the Tadmur prison camp? Do you know about it?
In the literature emerging from the Tadmur
prisoners held in detention over there – it
is depressing. But again, nobody is talking
about it. Why? And ISIS destroyed the prison
camp. That’s a message.
This is what ISIS is building upon. They are
saying, “We have destroyed this prison camp.
We, nobody else.” Not the West bombing
Syria. They were not interested.
To some extent, we are playing into the
hands of ISIS. We don’t remember that in
Mosul some shrines of prophets were destroyed in 2014: Prophet Yjunus (Jonah),
prophet Jirjis (Saint George). And we don’t
know that ISIS published a short tract justifying it, giving an Islamic legitimation to
it, saying that Islamic scholars invented
these shrines and invented the positive effects expected from praying there in order
to make money from it. So ISIS says these
shrines must be destroyed in order to cre-
I want to finish by talking as a white European man. I am not allowed to teach Islam.
Orientalists are infamous for telling Muslims
how to believe in Islam. There is one thing
left to us, and that’s why I’m joining Nadia
in accepting the agency of Arabs, of Muslims
globally, supporting it, not trying to dominate
it. It is quite obvious that Muslims are trying
to create an alternative to extremist Islam,
from political Islam, to Jihadism, and this
kind of alternative Islam has to be based
in its own history. That is what the Indonesians are doing. And to end with a certain
optimistic view, our Indonesia colleagues
are teaching us: we are not accepting any
more these white men telling us what we
have to do. We are trying to create a new
global dialogue which tries to overcome
this colonial situation. Only overcoming this
colonial situation will help us to fight ISIS.
When the colonial situation disappears, they
will disappear. That is what happened in
2011. Al-Qaeda was silent …. Not even talking
about Egypt. Maybe the best weapon against
extremism is to listen and try to support, not
try to dominate - and to build a new heritage of common understanding. n
Destruction, continued on page 85
76
PEACEBUILDING
77
INTRODUCTION
BY WILFRIED ECKSTEIN
On the day of this panel, the Washington
Post reported that a B-52 Stratofortress
bomber “has dropped its first bombs on the
Islamic State. It is the bomber’s first deployment to the Middle East since the Persian
Gulf War. The huge aircraft is an iconic symbol of American air power, and its presence
over Islamic State-held territory will be a
boost for Iraqi and Kurdish forces preparing
to take back one of the Islamic State’s biggest
strongholds in Iraq.”1 Since August 2014,
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s
(ISIL) frontlines in much of northern and
central Iraq and northern Syria have been
pushed back. Their net territorial losses translate into approximately 40 percent in Iraq and
11 percent in Syria.2 Those figures suggest
that the “caliphate is shrinking,” but its expansion and success in recruiting new followers,
some of whom are asked to stay in their
countries and act outside of the battle zone,
raise doubts about a near end of the violent
danger.3
In our final panel, “Countering Violent Extremism – A New Era of Peacebuilding,” we looked
back at experiences gained in countering
extremism since 9/11 and reflected on our
military and media capabilities to defend
liberalism at home and abroad against the
challenges of terror. We shared our approaches to building trust and understanding
with the Muslim world in the Middle East
and at home. We wanted to determine where
we stand and how we can build a dialogue
that incorporates culture and the arts with
other countries on an equal footing.
For those following the previous panels, it came
as no surprise that the panelists shared a
consensus that those implementing foreign
policies have to improve their skills of listening and respecting the other side as an equal
counterpart. The two speakers agreed that
there is a need for cultural outposts with
an easy access to the public mouth and ear,
unobstructed by security measures, and
authorizing the other side to speak up not
only against their own regimes but against
structural global inequality.
Especially noteworthy was a distinction Ben
O’Loughlin made between former and present superpowers like the U.K. and the U.S.,
and middle-size countries like contemporary
Germany with respect to their capabilities
to build dialogue on eye-level with countries
outside Europe and North America. Since
listening to the other side would imply acknowledging the repressive legacy of colonialism and imperialism, a superpower cannot do this because it would cast doubt on
its status as a superpower. Confronting this
legacy of supremacy would mean facing demands to restore dignity and pride or even
compensation for historical humiliation.
With its stain of the Holocaust and WWII,
Germany has accepted the role of history’s
scapegoat and can restart its position with
lighter historical luggage. That is an interesting view which sheds new light on to the
potential role of Germany as a fair arbitrator in international conflicts. It also supports
the Goethe-Institut’s focus on seeking dialogue and international cooperation on equal
footing with artists from host countries
and to eventually promote artistic expression for the sake of the truth of the arts.
But aside from this beneficial glimpse at the
role of a small cultural organization, this view
on the restricted capability of old and re-
cent superpowers to restore the lost dignity
of the Other leaves unanswered the major
questions of how we can successfully restore
peaceful neighborhoods in a global village.
With respect to the limits of the superpowers to acknowledge wrongdoing as expressed in this paradigm, some of the audience criticized the inability of the U.S.
to acknowledged wrongdoing such as with
the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of
the state. Instead, they demanded that the
U.S. should aspire to become a role model.
But the present reality of the U.S.’s political interaction with the rest of the world is
best described by an old saying of Thomas
Jefferson which was initially attributed to
Roman Emperor Tiberius: “But, as it is, we
have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither
hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is
in one scale, and self-preservation in the
other.”4
President Barack Obama meant to start
a new era of peacebuilding.5 His famous
Cairo speech on June 4, 2009 signaled to
the countries in the Middle East a restart.
Six years later, in the tradition of the 52nd
anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s famous
speech on nuclear disarmament and world
peace, President Obama prepared ground
for the Iran deal, which reduced the fear of
nuclear war in the Middle East and in particular between Iran and Israel. Similarly,
Obama’s presidency enlarged the capabilities of armed forces through cyber technology and drones paired with a strong will to
stand up for values around the world, such
as in the battle against ISIS.
Introduction, continued on page 85
78
COUNTERING VIOLENT EXTREMISM –
A NEW ERA OF PEACEBUILDING
PANEL DISCUSSION WITH COURTNEY A. BEALE AND BEN O’LOUGHLIN
COURTNEY A. BEALE:
I think today our biggest global threat
comes from violent non-state actors and the
inability of fragile states to respectively respond to them. So first and foremost when
we look at solutions, we need a strong policy framework to strengthen fragile states
and communities while also defeating terrorist groups on and off the battle field. Public
diplomacy plays an important role. Tonight
I’d like to address how we use in the American government cultural programs, exchanges, network building, communications
and social media towards these goals.
And because some of you are practitioners
or one day will be practitioners, I’ll try to
give you a couple examples from US government public diplomacy programs as well.
But before I talk about that, I want to first
define some terms. It looks like many of
you are students, and I am reminded of my
university days when my professor told me
that you always have to be very careful to
define your terms. So when I saw the topic
of tonight’s panel, I thought as though interacting with Islamic fundamentalism as referenced in the panel topic is very different
than countering violent extremism. Public
diplomacy is crucial for both, but the tools,
the content and the messengers that we use
in our public diplomacy are very different.
For me, the distinction between the two is
that Islamic fundamentalists don’t necessarily condone violence. We may not agree
with Islamic fundamentalists and all their
beliefs, but we don’t denounce a group unless
they resort to violence. American values don’t
reject a religious group for beliefs even if
they may be fundamentalists as long as
they do not employ or advocate violence.
This is an important distinction because
there are many Muslim communities around
the world that are being told that we are
waging war on the religion of Islam or that
we do not accept Muslims. Fifteen years after 9/11, we know about language matters.
As the President has said: “We are not at
war with Islam. We are at war with a group
that perverts the ideology of Islam, the religion of Islam.”
So to improve ties with Muslim communities, even fundamentalist communities, we
use public diplomacy tools to build understanding and dialogue between the United
States and a country, and the American
people with Muslim communities around
the world. On the other hand, when a group
does resort to violence, then we are compelled to denounce them. Terrorist organizations such as ISIL or Al-Shabat manipulate religious ideology to advance violence,
prey on vulnerable communities, and create falsehoods and propaganda to support
their violent mission. But the threat from
the violent extremists requires a different approach to public diplomacy. When
we look at communities that are prone to
radicalization, we know that governments,
the U.S. government, is not the best messenger. Imams, peers, teachers, social media
influencers have much greater impact. So,
we need to build partnerships with these
groups to give them information, training
and support, project their own positive narratives, discredit the narratives of violent
extremism, and ultimately reduce radicalization. Before discussing how we counter
violent extremism through public diplomacy
in more detail, I’ll talk through a few ways
that we use public diplomacy to improve
relationships with Muslim communities
around the world.
First is through the communications that we
employ as a government. There is massive
misinformation in the media. Most connected communities around the world actually
have too many information sources rather
than too few. In a recent speech, Secretary
of State John Kerry remarked that, “Today
we live in a global fishbowl where truth
does battle with myths everywhere and
competing myths fight against one another.”
He emphasized, “It is absolutely vital that
the truth emerge and facts be known because otherwise people just make up stuff
to feed whatever propaganda they want.”
The U.S. government supports journalism
training around the world, with some of
our largest programs in Muslim countries.
We strive for transparency in communicating our own policies and we are very careful about the language that we use. Just
one example: President Obama does not
call violent extremism “radical Islamic terrorism,” because the ideology of terrorist
groups does not comport with mainstream
Islamic thought, and we don’t want to fuel
the narrative that the U.S. is at war with a
religion. Although I will acknowledge that
the election seasons here don’t make that
any easier.
Peacebuilding
Programmatically, we focus on areas of mutual interest such as arts, culture, development, entrepreneurship, academics to build
trust between Muslim communities and the
United States. To dispel misinformation and
better understand the U.S. and the American
people, there is really no substitute for
bringing people here to our country. Most
of our largest exchanges programs are with
Muslim countries. We look for audiences for
these programs who are government and
non-governmental leaders today, as well as
the emerging group of leaders for tomorrow.
So just to give a few examples. A year or
so ago, we brought a group of Iraqi imams
from important parts of the country over
to the United States so that they could see
firsthand how Americans feel about Islam.
So that they could meet imams in the US,
so that they could better understand the
United States of America and how we think
about Islam, Iraq, countering ISIL, community safety and policing. And we wanted them
to able to go back and share with their communities their perspective after having been
here in the US. Another example from my
time in Pakistan is that we brought a hiphop
group that had a massive social media following to the US to perform and share their
music for Americans. After they went back,
they were able to tell about their experiences in America to hundreds of thousands
of Pakistanis to help reduce misinformation
and dispel the stereotypes that youth and
Pakistani had about our values and our culture. So these are just two anecdotes. But
we hope that when we multiply them by the
tens of thousands of people who participate in US public diplomacy programs every year, we can overcome the gaps of trust
and build dialogue with Muslim communities around the world.
Building ties with moderate Muslim communities is exceptionally important, but I
think the bigger challenge is how to actively
counter the threat from violent extremism.
Public diplomacy plays a role in three areas, first: understanding radicalization and
79
narratives, second: empowering influencers that can discredit those narratives and
prevent radicalization, and third: amplifying
positive alternatives to violent extremism.
The first step in any public diplomacy process is to listen and to understand your audience. This requires giving our practitioners access to research on radicalization in
narratives as well as intelligence and data
on how it is influencing vulnerable communities. The US launched a network of researchers from around the world collaborating on ways to counter and prevent violent
extremism last year at the U.S. Institute of
Peace. The network, called Researching Solutions to Violent Extremism (RESOLVE) is
building knowledge on violent extremism in
local contexts and strategies for opposing it.
But we also need to understand the narratives that ISIL and other terrorist groups
project. How these narrative interact with
local grievances to fuel radicalization
and the methods to spread their message
through traditional and social media and
individualized interaction. Intelligence and
data tell us that this is very different in every context, and there is no one-size-fits-all
approach. Through research and experience,
we have learned that both the message
and the messenger are very important. And
when it comes to individuals and risk of
radicalization, the US government is NOT
the right messenger. So the second step is
to identify and empower influencers that
can discredit narratives and prevent radicalization. The good news is that there are
religious leaders, youth activists, civil society organizations and educators that are
stepping up to do just this. They are credible voices in their community, and whether
it’s online networks of Mothers Against ISIL
or defectors speaking out about why they
left terrorist groups, we do best by supporting their efforts. The context for terrorist
recruitment in Northern Nigeria and Molenbeek are different, but these local groups
know what positive alternative narratives
will resonate best in their community. But
usually they need support: grants, training,
networks, and, giving the growing influence
of online propaganda, many need support to
take their messages and movements online
as well. So public diplomacy tools can help
both online and offline.
Let me share a few examples. Last year we
built a network of women working to fight
extremism in their own communities because we understand the pivotal role that
women play in countering extremism and
bringing stability to communities. These
women were able to learn from peers in the
US as well as from each other, find additional ways in order to support each other’s
work across borders and learn about best
practices in community safety and outreach,
relations, and community organizing.
Another program that the US government
and the State Department work on is called
the Peer-to-Peer: Challenging Extremism
project. This takes university students from
around the world to work through a semester-long program to better understand violent extremism and create and amplify their
own online CVE [Countering Violent Extremism] projects. Through an international competition that is co-sponsored by Facebook,
the best projects then receive additional
support. One of last year’s winners, 195.
com, runs social media and in-person education campaigns about CVE and gives young
people the tools to connect across borders,
cultures and religions.
The final example I’ll share is the culmination of many lessons learned in this area. In
January, the US government launched the
Global Engagement Center to replace the
Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications at the Department of State. But
other than a shorter name, how is this new
entity any different? We now clearly recognize that the information battle space is
equally as important as the physical battle
space, and that global violent extremist
groups are increasingly networked. We have
not put the required priority and resourc-
80
es against this problem, and we have been
conceding the information space to terrorist
groups. So in response to ISIL’s propaganda,
the Global Engagement Center, instead of
doing direct messaging, as its previous version did, is much more focused on empowering and enabling partners, both governmental and non-governmental, to speak out
against groups that espouse violence using
both traditional and social media. Just as
we’ll be cultivating third parties in our messaging delivering efforts, we also need partners in the private sector. From Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue, we have a wealth of
innovative thinkers in technology and marketing, and the new Center has authority to
bring in new talent from the private sector
to these efforts. The challenge is always,
how do we actually know if it is working?
As the director of the Global Engagement
Center, Michael Lumpkin, says: “This is the
difference between simple and easy – simple to say and not easy to do.” With private
sector tools and data analytics, the Global
Engagement Center will be much more focused on measuring results, changes in sentiment. But much like a startup, we want to
innovate, measure, and either fail quickly or
ramp up what we think is working. Lastly,
we also acknowledge that we cannot do this
alone. Terrorist organizations or radicalized
individuals are increasingly networked, and
it takes a network to defeat a network. So
we are working to build a network of governments, civil society organizations and
others to work to defeat violent extremism by empowering local voices, building
partnerships, providing counter narratives,
and articulating a shared vision for a better world. A world that respects all religions
while providing opportunities for all people.
Thank you for this opportunity to share
these thoughts with you tonight. n
BEN O’LOUGHLIN:
Obviously this series has been about culture,
communication and conflict. Today we are
thinking about how this can be used in
peacebuilding in the future. I am somebody
who does believe that culture and communication can make a difference in terms of
peacebuilding.
Just to give an example, if you look at what
President Obama did to reach the Iran deal.
We in Europe have been trying to reach
this deal since 2004 probably. For Iran, the
problem is communication more than anything. They have wanted acknowledgement.
Their problem with the West is because we
did bad things, particularly the US and the
UK in 1953 and after 1979. The Iranian leadership has been saying consistently since
2003/2004, “If you just acknowledge that,
if we can agree that that’s what’s happened,
then we can make peace over the nuclear program.” And our government wouldn’t
do it for a long time and Obama in his first
term couldn’t really say that. And there
was lots of talk of clenched fists. “Iran, if
you unclench your fists.” There were lots of
metaphors going round. And in his second
term, President Obama said: “Alright. Hands
up! No more! Unclenching fists, we will do
that. Yeah, we did some bad things back in
1953. Sorry about that.” And suddenly these
doors opened. By changing the narrative or
by creating a shared narrative with what
the Iranian leadership and what the Iranian
public believed about what has happened to
their country, by listening - what Courtney
was saying – and finding that narrative convergence, we got a peace deal which frankly
most people didn’t think was possible. So, I
firmly believe that communication and culture can lead to peacebuilding.
I am going to look at some difficulties and
some of the practical problems that we face
at the moment.
First of all, I want to start with the idea of
contesting the space. This is very big back
in Europe and in government here. The
problem of fetishizing the digital. It is great
to have Facebook involved in everything,
but if we look at radicalization: Who is going to Syria? It is certainly a problem in the
UK, but we are having it in the US as well.
Young people going to Turkey, going across
the border into Syria. Certainly in the UK’s
case, they pretty much all come from three
towns. I can’t name those towns – I hope
you let me off with that. But it is not the internet that is driving people to be radicalized. It seems to be communities. This is
where communities, women communities
and the like, become really important. So
the idea that by clamping down on Twitter
or by doing something different on Facebook, that can stop radicalization or the
consequences, is just not borne out by the
facts. Most people who have gone to Syria
in the last couple of years are from Tunisia.
Internet penetration in Tunisia is down here
somewhere [WE: Ben bows and points to
somewhere below the the lectern]. It is not
the internet that is making people angry.
It is conspiracy stories, ideas going around
in the local community, and it is television
which is still really, really important. That is
still the main medium for most people in the
world. Yes, digital is important, but we’ve
got to see it in the context of all kinds of
other media and conversations going on.
Certainly, Twitter in the last twelve months
has actually clamped down on IS material and accounts. The people who had been
trying to keep these accounts going, a year
ago they were distributing content relatively freely, now they are battling extremely
hard to keep their accounts up. They don’t
have time to propagate; they are just trying to stay in existence. So, a lot of progress
has been made, but digital isn’t everything.
Another issue in terms of contesting the
space is using local proxies, if you like. This
is another difficulty that’s going to be on
the table for the next ten or twenty years.
It has been on the table for the last hundred
years. Using people in certain countries in
certain communities whose interests may
align with you and they may want to help
you build security, for example, or whatever aim you have got. But are they overtly
funded by you? We have an issue in the UK.
Say, we want to have some influence in a
country in the Middle East. You can launch
81
Peacebuilding
funding campaigns to sponsor NGOs or train
clerics in dealing with certain local problems. If that’s done overtly, brilliant. But I
want to call on the table that this also goes
on covertly. The information warfare has
not gone away. Certainly I have the sense
that my country does this, so I would imagine that the US probably does as well. You
can set up NGOs that will then fund other
NGOs such that the other NGOs don’t really know where the money originally came
from. I think this is something that is going
to go on and on and on. Insofar as public
diplomacy, which is supposed to be about
your government talking to publics in other
countries and helping them to build civil societies and whatever else they want, there’s
still a kind of information ops/public diplomacy difficulty there in the actual operational world going on. I would be interested to hear what you think about that and
whether it is legitimate to be paying people
to be on your side, given the stakes with
the conflicts that we have got going on at
the moment.
The second big issue is understanding communication. What have we learned from
the war on terror in terms of how persuasion works? You can persuade some people
under some circumstances by talking to
certain people who are exposed to some
content. If you start to address a million followers in Twitter, you might persuade two
of them. There have been extremely unrealistic expectations of how effective counter
narrative battles can be. We know this from
political communication, and this is where
international relations and foreign policy
can learn from communications studies. We
know that most people’s opinions are really
entrenched. They don’t change much over
their lifetimes. So the idea that having some
new TV station set up is going to change
anyone’s mind in a certain country is not
supported by any evidence. It is really, really difficult. I just want to put on the table
that there is a need to manage expectations
about what difference these can make. Of
course we want to be seen doing something
and projecting and saying the right thing.
But actually making any difference by doing
that is unlikely.
Also in terms of communication. Courtney
talked about the “RESOLVE” problem and
the new Center. Every three to four years,
there is a new center for - right now it is
countering violent extremism, five/six years
ago it was counterinsurgency because of the
things in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the
1990s it was something else. At least every
decade we go through a whole new wave
of: “Oh, it’s radicalization or, oh it’s foreign extremism, or oh, in five years we will
be calling it something else. We need to do
new studies on it, what is this new terrible
thing?” There is a kind of institutional forgetting that has been going on for the last
fifteen years. How that can be overcome?
How within the departments in your government here or across NATO and across
the alliance? We can actually realize that
there’s been fifty years of studies of radicalization; it is not something new. We kind
of know how it has worked in all kinds of
post-colonial situations. How do we build
on this?
Communication – you can get it right. But it
stills seems not be taken that seriously. If
you look at the people at the top of the military – although we say that communication
matters – they are not there because they
are great at communication. They are there
because they are good at hard power. If language is as important as the actual kinetics, which we’ve heard, at what point do the
specialists for language get to the top of the
military as well as the specialists in kinetics and in hard power? I think at that point,
when you have generals who have come
from Google or from Facebook, then you
can say you are taking communication seriously. Right now, that is not happening.
The final area to talk about is the role of
media in amplifying or containing conflict.
This is something that again has not re-
ally changed much. What have we learned
through the war on terror? And what can
we learn for the future? We still find that,
although journalists are lovely people, they
want peace. The way in which our media
systems work, amplify, sensationalize, dramatize…. So something like Islamic State,
people who really know about it, who study
it, who work in intelligence on it, who know
it, would say that most Islamic State politics is pretty boring, bureaucratic, how do
we set up a state in a really difficult position. We see the sensational videos of the
beheadings – certainly through 2014 and
2015, this is what the public saw. Journalists are beginning to get a bit more responsible now. Islamic State are not particularly
Islamic. They might say sometimes in some
of their videos that: “We are destroying
these artifacts because they are idolatrous
and they go against our religion.” But if we
actually chart what is IS really blowing up,
most of the stuff that we think they have
blown up, they haven’t, or they have taken
six months to wait for the right opportunity in our Western politics before blowing
something up. So if that thing is really so
sinful, why didn’t they blow it up to begin
with? No, this is tactical, this is political, this
is Realpolitik. Our journalists and our media don’t report Islamic State in that way. So
what kind of journalism could do that? How
can journalists tell a more positive story
about the West? Because you mentioned the
campaign in the US right now. It is not great
public diplomacy with what is going on with
the primaries right now [WE: this refers to
the rise of the GOP candidate]. Certainly in
the UK and Europe, we are in a crisis. We
have a refugee crisis, we have the financial
crisis, we have Brexit and Europe possibly falling to pieces. If communication could
make a difference to young people who are
vulnerable to radicalization, who are thinking I want a really exciting life, I have no
excitement in the West, it’s all corrupt. You
got these fools running for office. I am not
going to get a job. Well, let’s have some adventure. Let’s go to Syria or Yemen or wher-
82
ever. How could we offer adventure in the
West? How could we offer something a bit
more inspiring? I think this is one of the
things of the series as well. What is Western culture, what is Eastern culture, is there
some kind of clash? How can we do stories
that show democracy works? The election
campaign looks as if democracy is not really
working very well. Could we find people doing democratic things that show that civil
society works in a democratic way? Would
that be persuasive to young people who
might be vulnerable to radicalization? What
would a good new story about the West be
any more? Because right now there don’t
seem to be any.
To wrap up, one of the things that needs
to be done is trying to get at the narratives held at the ground level by ordinary
people. I don’t believe that charting changes
of sentiment – we have been doing that for
decades – it makes no difference. Showing
people in a certain country favorable to you
and then they become more favorable or
less favorable. Do they like milk more than
beer? It is extremely flimsy. What needs to
be done over the next decade is, although
we look at the state narratives, we look
at the Islamic State narratives – nobody is
listening to ordinary people’s narratives in
Yemen or in Iraq. Where is their sense of
where their country was, where is it now
and where is it moving to the future? What
do they see as the challenges, what do they
see as the happy ending or the sad and disastrous ending? Where would they like to
be going? If it was possible for research to
do that rather than just looking at pros or
cons, or favorable or less favorable, then
we might be able to start doing what Courtney asked for, which is listening. We need
to actually hear the stories through which
people experience their own lives, their
country’s lives and the way the international system is heading. If we just rely on
surveys, we cannot listen and therefore we
can’t take into account. That, I think, is the
big thing for the next decade. n
PLENUM
Moderator: What did we learn while the
imams were here? How do we gather information?
Courtney Beale: It is a very important part
of the exchange program… What both sides
take away is the complexity... What an exchange program can do expose you to the
fact that the answer is much more complex, which in the long run will make you
question a little bit or try to learn a little
bit more or not accept a narrative that you
have been fed or a misconception that you
heard as being the absolute truth but try to
learn things in different ways based on your
time being exposed to something new and
different, whether it is international visitors
coming to our country or the other way round.
Moderator: How much do we have to acknowledge in relation to colonialism and the
wrongs involved?
Ben O’Loughlin: It depends which country
we are talking about. If you are the superpower who is expected to police world order, you can listen but can’t really give in
to too much. If you’re a kind of middle-level
country like Britain or Germany or Norway
or Japan there is less to lose. So, you can
listen and you can hear, but to take into account, you’ve got to give a little. …If you’re
alluding to European countries with colonial
histories like Britain, we can kind of work
our way through the wrongs and we don’t
have so much to lose really by saying, “Yes,
we did a bad thing.” So I think it depends on
what your country’s sense of itself within the international system is. China can’t
really go around and apologize for many
things….. China can listen but it can’t just
say, “Yeah. You have what you want. You
have those islands, they’re not really ours.”
Because that’s not what a superpower does.
The more power you have, the more anxiety you have about losing power, and also
about showing that you still have power. So,
you have to demonstrate you have power.
Otherwise, how do we know that you have
power? So it is very difficult being a very
powerful country because listening becomes
a very difficult task. You can listen but can’t
show that you heard by taking into account
and changing. So that’s why the Obama –
Iran example is quite unusual for a leader….
Beale: …You may remember when Obama
went on his first international trip and how
he was listening and the Republican Party
then severely criticized him for going on an
apology tour around the world. Your domestic politics comes into play as well, and your
strength as a leader within that domestic
context, for what you acknowledge.
Moderator: Where do we stand with respect
to peacebuilding today?
Beale: We have to build on our lessons from
the past. There is no silver bullet for what
we need to do differently for peacebuilding. The challenge is that things only work
when they are done in very long-term ways.
And that’s difficult with political cycles and
very rapidly changing dynamics around the
world. I am reminded of Colombia, where I
served. I was there towards the end of a fifty year civil war, in 2016. The US had been
providing funding through Plan Colombia at
that point for ten or fifteen years and was
finally starting to see things turn around
a little bit. I am not owing the Colombian
turnaround to US assistance, but I think part
of that was a long-term bipartisan strategy
to address security issues and development
issues. The hope for peacebuilding is to
have governments and international partners with a very long-term investment in
stabilizing and bringing peace to these communities and countries.
O’Loughlin: Although I was critical of the
digital and its fetishization, there are all
these crisis mapping and conflict mapping
digital projects going on now where we
can see through various kinds of data such
as people’s SMS phone messages and citi-
Peacebuilding
zen journalism and blogs where there is a
trouble point. After the Haiti earthquake in
2010, it’s now standard for any humanitarian crisis operation. We know that if the big
data is telling there is something terrible
here, we can send resources and whatever
is needed. That is conflict mapping, that is
crisis mapping. When we are talking about
communities and peacebuilding, we can flip
this on its head. Nobody is doing peacemapping. Nobody is saying: “Oh this community
works, even though everything around it is
chaos. Something is keeping people together
here. Somehow people have got goods and
they have got water and shelter and they
have some kind of thing going on.” This
is where what you are talking about with
NGOs and civil society is really interesting. That is where they are most effective.
It is not coming from above. I am suggesting a change in vision and how we envision peace and conflict through this kind of
digital moment we are going through. How
can we, rather than looking for where are
the crises and how do we solve them, look
for where is the cooperation and how do we
expand that? There are very different ways
of thinking about how we can approach this.
Question from the audience: How does the
drone policy complicate your public policy
work?
Beale: It is very difficult to deal with from
a public diplomacy perspective, but is a reality of a country balancing counterterrorism and security and other foreign policy
priorities. One of the biggest challenges in
the past with the drone policy was we are
not able to talk very openly about it. We
can’t talk about how decisions are made or
exactly how the program works. Not having
transparency around something fuels misinformation and anger. While this President
has used drones, and people have very different feelings whether we should, he has
tried to move towards increasing transparency in the program for lots of moral and
ethical and foreign policy reasons. But also
so that we are able to talk about it and ex-
83
plain it as we seek to do communications
and public policy around the world. But it is
an extremely challenging issue.
Question from the audience: One aspect that
has been missing in the conversation about
the Arab Spring has been the understanding
that we are either part of this larger “other”
or there is no “other.” To what extent do the
internal politics of this conflict-ridden region
complicate the larger question about peace?
Beale: ….Thank you for your question, which
brings us again to the understanding of narratives….If you look at sectarian tensions,
they are among the primary challenges that
drive this and how politics interacts with
that in the Middle East, I would say it is absolutely something that anyone looking at
this problem has to better understand in order to try to help be part of the solution.
O’Loughlin: We need very good contextual
cultural understanding of those countries.
…If you look at the way people use social
media in Syria compared to in Egypt, for
example, the culture of fear and obedience
or performed obedience in Syria was so important. It overrode everything compared
to the more experienced political activism
that was in Egypt. So you have to know really, likely on the ground, how culture informs politics. How the habits of everyday
life, how they sense things, which is generational, so you really need good expertise
about that. Without that, we simply run into
problems.
Question from the Audience: Messaging is
a key tool in countering violent extremism.
How can the West do a better job in getting
its message out first and louder than the
other side?
Beale: I am not sure that getting it out louder is necessarily getting us to our goals. I
think the way that social media has allowed
any individual around the world to have a
voice, to create a video that goes viral, to
take an online movement offline and have
impact in the community, actually means
that we need to look more at networks and
partnerships rather than being the loudest
or having the most media entities or having
the biggest journalist tell your story. That is
certainly a part of it. But the issues of credibility and having others who feel the same
way and are espousing the same views is
in some ways more useful because a lot of
people no longer trust authorities and institutions and government and even media
in many places around the world. They get
their news from Facebook. They believe
what their friends are telling them. The direction that we are heading in in terms of
working with partners and creating relationships with people who share our goals has
been to try to also be able to have influence
in the social media realm even though we
are just one of many people in the online
and the traditional media world.
O’Loughlin: I agree with Courtney that being fast and loudest is really not the most
important thing. What seems to be the game
if you think strategically? It is contesting
the space. What we are talking about here
is about winning the argument within the
space. But there is also contesting the nature of the space like: How does it work,
what are the protocols, how does communication work? … What’s important I suppose
is,… how do you configure a space that is
going to enable the widest possible variation of people to speak? From my point of
view, you would keep it an agonistic rather
than antagonistic framework. … We have to
get beyond the question: How do we win arguments within a given space? I would shift
the question to: What is the game to contest the nature of the space? … Europe has a
completely different notion of the internet,
I would argue, to the US. We have the Right
to Be Forgotten. Our bias coming after the
Holocaust and the idea that if you saw your
mother being raped, or you saw people being gassed - if we had a Holocaust today,
there would be footage of that. In Europe,
we know things like that happened. So, we
don’t want the automatic thing to be that
84
information is free. Because that information might be painful, it might take an awful lot of trauma and working through to
get beyond that. Our contesting the space
is to create a different notion of privacy, a
different theory of information to the US,
where here it is more a liberal, optimistic
view compared to our kind of historical
perspective. … You have got to decide what
you are the first and quickest into, that’s the
game.
Paul Smith, British Council: It is a practical
question which picks up on the first big
question. Do we need a new kind of diplomat and a new kind of negotiator in the
world at the highest level even of the Ambassador…whose primary job is actually to
understand the countries they are in and
seriously and deeply return that back to the
decision-makers in their own country such
that they can truly listen, truly understand
and send back as it were briefings which
are not always about the political agenda
and what the politicians are doing and saying in that country and what the economic variables are in that country, but would
somehow have got through to an understanding of the cultural sociology and the
uniqueness and distinctions of the people…?
O’Loughlin: That is the best explanation I
have ever heard of what a public diplomacy officer is supposed to be doing overseas. My hope is that the US government
is training people to do that. … One of the
challenges we face is that all the resources
are back here in Washington, and yet the
expectations about our experts who can do
that are out in the field. Your average public
affairs officer does not necessarily have access to big data, or for security restrictions
cannot be everywhere around the country
to understand these things. So the challenge
going forward is that, given the importance
of these issues and with the centralization
in DC in mind, how are we building that
leadership and giving the right tools to the
diplomats so that they can do that. n
© Courtney A. Beale
COURTNEY A. BEALE is Senior Director for
Global Engagement National Security Council and Special Assistant to the president at
the National Security Council. In that role,
she oversees the U.S. government’s public
diplomacy efforts to engage and influence
citizens and non-state actors in support of
national security goals. Beale graduated
with a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from
Princeton University in 2013 and a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Foreign Service
from Georgetown University in 2002. Prior
to her present posting, Beale worked as the
Director of the Office of Strategic Planning
in the Public Affairs Bureau, served as the
Public Affairs Officer for three U.S. consulates in northeast Mexico, and was the Deputy Spokesperson at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. She speaks Spanish, Hindi, and Urdu.
Courtesy Ben O’Loughlin
BEN O’LOUGHLIN is Professor of International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. O’Loughlin’s expertise is in
the field of international political communication. He is Specialist Adviser to the UK
House of Lords Select Committee on Soft
Power and UK Influence. The committee aims
to understand how power and influence are
changing in a transformed global media and
geopolitical landscape and how the UK can
most effectively exercise power within that
landscape. O’Loughlin joined Royal Holloway
in 2006 after completing a DPhil Politics at
the University of Oxford in October 2005.
From 2004-2006 he was Research Associate
on the Economic and Social Research Council project Shifting Securities: News Cultures
Before and Beyond Iraq War 2003, for which
he was based at the University of Wales Swansea and King’s College London
© Philip Bermingham
PAUL SMITH was Director of the British
Council in the USA and Cultural Counsellor
at the British Embassy Washington DC, from
2012-2016. He was educated at King Edward’s School Birmingham and Queens’ College Cambridge where he gained a double
first in English. He joined the British Council
in 1983 and has had postings in Kano and
Lagos (Nigeria), Burma, Chile, Germany and
Bangladesh and then as Director of the British Council in New Zealand, in West India
(Mumbai), Egypt, Afghanistan.
85
Peacebuilding
Destruction, continued from page 75
PANELISTS:
Introduction, continued from page 77
Courtesy Nadia Oweidat
Courtesy Honey Al Sayed
HONEY AL SAYED is adjunct professor at the
School of Foreign Service in the Culture and
Politics department at Georgetown University
and development manager at El Hibri Foundation, which supports peace education and
interfaith cooperation. Al Sayed created the
bi-lingual radio program “Good Morning, Syria,”
and co-founded SouriaLi radio, a grassroots
non-profit online radio station dedicated to
working with Syrian people in fostering an
advanced level of awareness in civil society.
Al Sayed was moderator of the panel “Destruction as Image-Act - Remapping History.”
NADIA OWEIDAT is a Senior Non-Residential
Fellow at New America Foundation. She also
teaches Modern Islamic Thought and Extremism at Georgetown University. Her doctoral
research illuminates currents of Islamic thought
and the challenges facing reformers who work
from within the tradition. Oweidat’s expertise
spans a wide range of contemporary issues
such as the Arab Spring, countering violent
extremism, the radicalization of Muslim youth,
and Internet trends among Arabic speakers.
© Rüdiger Lohlker
To build trust and credibility abroad does
not start at a point zero in history. The work
is loaded with conflicts about superiority
and dignity or the recovering of dignity.
Public policy aims, among other things, to
reconcile such wrongs and their effects today
by restarting the dialogue. Being part of the
Western world, we seek to restore the credibility of Western values and moral authority, which are the cradle of liberalism and tolerance. These are long-term commitments, and
there are a multitude of citizens, cultural
bearers and organizations such as the European Union Institutes of Culture (EUNIC) which
are contributing their share to this new era.
Thank you to both Courtney A. Beale and
Ben O’Loughlin for their time to prepare,
come and share with us their knowledge
and insights into the complex fields of public diplomacy and peacebuilding. Thank you
also to the British Council for their support
of the Iconoclash series in general, and this
event in particular. n
© Wilfried Eckstein
Courtesy Christian Christensen
CHRISTIAN CHRISTENSEN is Professor of
Journalism in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. He obtained his
PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.
His research focuses upon the relationship
between media and power. This includes the
use of social media during times of warfare,
as well as how governments and activist organizations such as WikiLeaks have begun
to harness tools such as Twitter for the purposes of information distribution.
RÜDIGER LOHLKER is Professor of Islamic Studies in the Oriental Institute at the
University of Vienna, Austria. He is fluent
in twelve languages. His research looks at
the history of Islamic ideas, Islam and the
Arab world online, modern Islamic movements, Jihadism and Islamic law. He focuses
on Arab and Islamic websites and contemporary Islamic movements (Jihadism and
Salafism in particular) in a comparative perspective. He maintains several blogs about
Islam and Arabian culture, critique of antiMuslim discourses and Arab hacker culture.
WILFRIED ECKSTEIN served as the director
of the Goethe-Institut Washington DC from
2012-2016. He has been with the Goethelnstitut since 1988. He worked ten years in
Moscow and St. Petersburg , and served as
the director of the Goethe-Institut in Bangkok from 2004-2008, and in Shanghai from
2009-2011. Eckstein studied History, German
and English literature and languages and
political science in Heidelberg, Frankfurt/
Main and Princeton. He was the curator and
organizer of the ICONOCLASH series.
86
ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION
As stated by curator Bruno Latour in “Curator’s Concepts:
What Is Iconoclash,” http://bit.ly/2chjJbO and
http://bit.ly/2cYg7hR, accessed September 2016.
1
This claim is made in Hassan Abu Hanieh and Dr. Mohammad Abu Rumman’s The „Islamic State“ Organization: The Sunni Crisis and the Struggle of Global Jihadism,
(Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Jordan & Iraq, 2015) ISBN 9789957-484-53-8, in the publication by Behnam
T. Said, Islamischer Staat: IS-Miliz, al-Qaida und die
deutschen Brigaden, (2. Auflage, Verlag C.H.Beck, München,
2014), and in Joby Warrick’s Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
(Doubleday NY, 2015).
2
As quoted in an interview in the Süddeutsche
Zeitung, January 12, 2015
CAN/MUST GOOD ART BE POLITICALLY CORRECT?
READING AND DISCUSSION WITH SALMAN RUSHDIE
For European readers: this has been a broad public
campaign by Homeland Security in the United States,
particularly in train and metro stations in recent years,
“to report suspicious activity to local law enforcement.”
www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something
1
Quoted from The Guardian March 02, 2016
http://bit.ly/1LwpeRt
2
As stated by UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova in
“UNESCO calls for mobilization to stop cultural cleansing
in Iraq” February 27, 2015: http://bit.ly/2d3eZbs
6
President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation Hermann Parzinger in an interview with Deutsche
Welle, December 14, 2014, http://bit.ly/2cRjbI8
MORE ALIENATION, PLEASE.
A CRITIQUE OF CULTURAL VIOLENCE
The shock over the terrorist attacks in Paris in January
2015 inspired Slavoj Žižek to write an essay on Islam
and modernism (“Blasphemische Gedanken. Islam und
Moderne,” Ullstein Verlag, 2015). In it, he addresses the
rupture between the Western world’s advocacy for tolerance and the fundamental hatred of Western liberalism
within radical Islam. Slavoj Žižek makes a plea for the
West to insist on the legacy of the Enlightenment, with its
strengths of criticism and self-reflection. He argues for a
renaissance of individual autonomy and the sovereignty
of the people.
1
Garry Trudeau had said that the cartoonists’ irreverent schtick “wandered into the realm of hate-speech.”
http://bit.ly/2dErY07 quote checked on June 12, 2016
1
published in Nerikes Alehanda https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Lars_Vilks_Muhammad_drawings_controversy
2
http://bit.ly/1eOHQcf
4
http://bit.ly/1oQe3mO
INTRODUCTION
View Nico Prucha’s presentation during the November
10, 2015 discussion “What is Cultural Heritage? And for
Whom?” at http://bit.ly/2cKoXQz.
1
Additional Information: New York Times article “From
Indonesia, a Muslim Challenge to the Ideology of the Islamic State” (http://nyti.ms/2cRqxMp) and the YouTube
trailer to the film Rahmat Islam Nusantara (The Divine
Grace of East Indies Islam)
(http://bit.ly/2cZyL7a).
See also the excellent catalog accompanying the exhibition by Trümpler, C. ed. 2008. Das Große Spiel: Archäologie und Politik zur Zeit des Kolonialismus (1860-1940).
Köln: Dumont
1
2
Goode, J. 2003. Capital Losses: A Cultural History of
Washington’s Destroyed Buildings. Second Edition. Smithsonian Books
1
See Thomas Gibbons-Neff, The Washington Post Checkpoint Newsletter “WATCH: B-52 Stratofortress Drops Its
First Bombs on the Islamic State,” April 23, 2016, http://
wapo.st/1SmEe20.
2
See the March 15, 2016 Defense Department publication “Iraq and Syria: ISIL’s Areas of Influence, August 2014
Through February 2016,” http://bit.ly/1S5oMJC and IHS
Markit’s December 21, 2015 online press release “Islamic
State’s Caliphate Shrinks by 14 Percent in 2015,” http://
bit.ly/1m4BDB0.
3
See Philip Seib’s March 13, 2016 Huffington Post article
“Underestimating the Islamic State,”
http://huff.to/22duEoQ.
4
As quoted on Wicktionary and attributed to Thomas
Jefferson discussing slavery and the Missouri Compromise, 1820, http://bit.ly/2d97pvr.
5
As stated by Derek Cholet in “The Long Game: How
Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role
in the World” (Public Affairs, 2016).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PICTURE POLICY
REWIRING THE ISLAMIC NET: CREATING AN
ALTERNATIVE TO THE ONLINE PROPAGANDA OF IS
This article is excerpted from an academic article, and is
reprinted courtesy of the author.
1
CARTOONS AND TABOOS –
DANCING IN A VISUAL MINEFIELD
http://bit.ly/1slLWma
3
REFORMATTING SPACE: THE SELF-PROCLAIMED
“ISLAMIC STATE’S” STRATEGY OF DESTROYING
CULTURAL HERITAGE AND COMMITTING GENOCIDE
TRAFFICKING CULTURAL MATERIALS –
APPROPRIATION OF MANKIND’S PROPERTY
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
2
PEACEBUILDING
2
5
1
See “Twitter deletes 125,000 Isis accounts and expands
anti-terror teams” in the February 5, 2016 issue of The
Guardian: http://bit.ly/2ah0xft
CULTURAL HERITAGE
3
4
See Slavoj Žižek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real
(London, NY, Verso 2002)
DESTRUCTION AS IMAGE-ACT - REMAPPING HISTORY
2
This information is quoted from Magnus Ranstorp’s article “The Virtual Sanctuary of al-Qaida and Terrorism in
an Age of Globalization.”
3
Quote taken from page 15 of Joseph A. Carter, Shiraz
Maher and Peter R. Neumann’s article “#Greenbirds: Measuring Importance and Influence in Syrian Foreign Fighter
Networks.” (www.icsr.info)
4
Quote taken from page 4 of Ali Fisher’s “Swarmcast:
How Jihadist Networks Maintain a Persistent Online Presence.” (www.terrorismanalysts.com)
REWIRING THE ISLAMIC NET: CREATING AN
ALTERNATIVE TO THE ONLINE PROPAGANDA OF IS
Carter, J.A., Maher Sh. and Neumann P.R. “#Greenbirds:
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Published by the Goethe-Institut Washington | Director: Wilfried Eckstein (2012-2016)
Editing: Norma Broadwater | Layout: Anna-Maria Furlong, AMF Graphics
October 2016