However, I would have preferred that the take down was as a result of people expressing their views with their buying power rather than political or violent pressure. I stopped paying attention to any of Ferial's media with the cartoons that insulted my prophet and am glad with that choice after this spear debacle.
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COLUMN by City Press editor Ferial Haffajee
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The Spear is down – out of care and fear
The Spear is down. Out of care and as an olive branch to play a small role in helping turn around a tough moment, I have decided to take down the image.
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4 comments:
She wants to create controversy, she must deal with the consequences. She sounded like a sad puppy on 702 this this morning...
Hmm. I suppose I should say first that I am utterly ignorant of South Africa politics (and Kenyan politics, and any number of political scenes) and I didn't understand either the art piece or the surrounding controversy. But I do understand freedom as it exists in the United States. I don't say that I understand freedom in the west, because the different countries of the western world actually have radically different ideas of what should be free. Take hate speech. In many western countries, hate speech is now illegal. In the United States, it is a protected right guaranteed by the Constitution, and most often explained by Evelyn Beatrice Hall's statement, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
On the one hand, this results in some pretty awful things thriving when they should be dying, such as the picketing of funerals. On the other hand, such an uncompromising take on the freedom of speech gives everyone in the United States the ability to speak their mind without fear from government reprisal. Of course this does not mean they are free from consequence, but I'm not sure that imposing consequences on others when we disagree serves to improve any state of affairs.
From reading what she wrote, I'm inclined to believe that Ferial is not an unreasonable person with whom debate is a pointless affair. You may never agree with her, but I suspect engaging in reasoned debate in the public square with someone of her mindset would be on-balance, a positive thing. There are plenty of people out there with whom debate is useless and counterproductive. There is no reason to argue with the trolls of this world. But I cannot see even the slightest resemblance here, and I must conclude that debate has ended prematurely.
I think what we have here in South Africa is a clash of cultural values. On the one side you have, the media in South Africa, like media everywhere I guess, which is very much part of global media, almost with it's own culture and value-system, based on the origin of media culture: the US.
On the other side, you have South African culture, which is a complex make-up of at least Africa, European, Afrikaans, Muslim and Indian cultures. One of the results of Apartheid is that these individual cultures evolved separately, and we only started building a South African culture and value-system recently and the chinese walls of apartheid started crumbling.
So certain local cultures, primarily the European cultures, identify more with the western / media value system and others like the African, Muslim and Afrikaans cultures don't.
Ferial is in a pretty complex space, being part of the media and the Muslim culture and I sympathise that it must be hard to pick a priority. However, for muslims in particular, we were quite disappointed that her values aligned to media became her priority. Many have engaged with her on Twitter etc., unfortunately, not bearing in mind the complexity of her role and decisions. And I agree, that if the right mindsets are involved, debate will yield positive results. But, when the mindsets are clouded by emotion, the opposite is more likely.
I'd argue that the clash of cultural values is at the root of most political disagreements. In the US, the two dominant ideologies are actually astoundingly similar, given how vicious some of the politics gets. What's actually different between the two camps are the cultures they represent.
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