Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks
Posted May 5, 2008
Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become
the latest projectile in the world's most important culture war: the
zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders,
who lives under perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently
released a 15 minute film entitled Fitna ("strife" in Arabic) over the
internet. The film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes
images of Muslim violence with passages from the Qur'an. Given that the
perpetrators of such violence regularly cite these same passages as
justification for their actions, merely depicting this connection in a
film would seem uncontroversial. Controversial or not, one surely would
expect politicians and journalists in every free society to strenuously
defend Wilders' right to make such a film. But then one would be living
on another planet, a planet where people do not happily repudiate their
most basic freedoms in the name of "religious sensitivity."
Witness the free world's response to Fitna: The Dutch government sought
to ban the film outright, and European Union foreign ministers publicly
condemned it, as did UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Dutch television
refused to air Fitna unedited. When Wilders declared his intention to
release the film over the internet, his U.S. web-host, Network
Solutions, took his website offline.
Into the breach stepped Liveleak, a British video-sharing website, which
finally aired the film on March 27th. It received over 3 million views
in the first 24 hours. The next day, however, Liveleak removed Fitna
from its servers, having been terrorized into self-censorship by threats
to its staff. But the film had spread too far on the internet to be
suppressed (and Liveleak, after taking further security measures, has
since reinstated it on its site as well).
Of course, there were immediate calls for a boycott of Dutch products
throughout the Muslim world. In response, Dutch corporations placed ads
in countries like Indonesia, denouncing the film in self-defense.
Several Muslim countries blocked YouTube and other video-sharing sites
in an effort to keep Wilders' blasphemy from penetrating the minds of
their citizens. There have also been isolated protests and attacks on
embassies, and ubiquitous demands for Wilders' murder. In Afghanistan,
women in burqas could be seen burning the Dutch flag; the Taliban
carried out at least two revenge attacks on Dutch troops, resulting in
five Dutch casualties; and security concerns have caused the Netherlands
to close its embassy in Kabul. It must be said, however, that nothing
has yet occurred to rival the ferocious response to the Danish cartoons.
Meanwhile Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish cartoonists, threatened to
sue Wilders for copyright infringement, as Wilders used his drawing of a
bomb-laden Muhammad without permission. Westergaard has lived in hiding
since 2006 due to death threats of his own, so the Danish Union of
Journalists volunteered to file this lawsuit on his behalf. Admittedly,
there is something amusing about one hunted man, unable to venture out
in public for fear of being killed by religious lunatics, threatening to
sue another man in the same predicament over a copyright violation. But
it is understandable that Westergaard wouldn't want to be repeatedly
hurled at the enemy without his consent. Westergaard is an
extraordinarily courageous man whose life has been ruined both by
religious fanaticism and the free world's submission to it. In February,
the Danish government arrested three Muslims who seemed poised to murder
him. Other Danes unfortunate enough to have been born with the name
"Kurt Westergaard" have had to take steps to escape being murdered in
his place. (Wilder's has since removed the cartoon from the official
version of Fitna.)
Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been
widely vilified for "seeking to inflame" the Muslim community. Even if
this had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost
supernatural coincidence of moral blindness and political imprudence.
The point is not (and will never be) that some free person spoke, or
wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as to inflame the Muslim
community. The point is that only the Muslim community is combustible in
this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies,
renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to
be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than
about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of
this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the
form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.
There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of
the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam
is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you.
Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced
as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it
isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less
peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or
kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you
primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies
criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia."
Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often
called "a chilling effect" on our exercise of free speech. I have, in my
own small way, experienced this chill first hand. First, and most
important, my friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali happens to be among
the hunted. Because of the failure of Western governments to make it
safe for people to speak openly about the problem of Islam, I and others
must raise a mountain of private funds to help pay for her
round-the-clock protection. The problem is not, as is often alleged,
that governments cannot afford to protect every person who speaks out
against Muslim intolerance. The problem is that so few people do speak
out. If there were ten thousand Ayaan Hirsi Ali's, the risk to each
would be radically reduced.
As for infringements of my own speech, my first book, The End of Faith,
almost did not get published for fear of offending the sensibilities of
(probably non-reading) religious fanatics. W.W. Norton, which did
publish the book, was widely seen as taking a risk--one probably
attenuated by the fact that I am an equal-opportunity offender critical
of all religious faith. However, when it came time to make final edits
to the galleys of The End of Faith, many of the people I had thanked by
name in my acknowledgments (including my agent at the time and my editor
at Norton) independently asked to have their names removed from the
book. Their concerns were explicitly for their personal safety. Given
our shamefully ineffectual response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie,
their concerns were perfectly understandable.
Nature, arguably the most influential scientific journal on the planet,
recently published a lengthy whitewash of Islam (Z. Sardar "Beyond the
troubled relationship." Nature 448, 131-133; 2007). The author began, as
though atop a minaret, by simply declaring the religion of Islam to be
"intrinsically rational." He then went on to argue, amid a highly
idiosyncratic reading of history and theology, that this rational
religion's current wallowing in the violent depths of unreason can be
fully ascribed to the legacy of colonialism. After some negotiation,
Nature also agreed to publish a brief response from me. What readers of
my letter to the editor could not know, however, was that it was only
published after perfectly factual sentences deemed offensive to Islam
were expunged. I understood the editors' concerns at the time: not only
did they have Britain's suffocating libel laws to worry about, but
Muslim physicians and engineers in the UK had just revealed a penchant
for suicide bombing. I was grateful that Nature published my letter at
all.
In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very
essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion
page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too
critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion
page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy
over Wilders' film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on
the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by
offering to pay me a "kill fee." I declined.
I could list other examples of encounters with editors and publishers,
as can many writers, all illustrating a single fact: While it remains
taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered
especially unwise to criticize Islam. Only Muslims hound and hunt and
murder their apostates, infidels, and critics in the 21st century. There
are, to be sure, reasons why this is so. Some of these reasons have to
do with accidents of history and geopolitics, but others can be directly
traced to doctrines sanctifying violence which are unique to Islam.
A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately
followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In
Texas, police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and
underage girls into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental
predations of their menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted
the deference accorded to all major religions in the United States, its
fundamentalist branch, with its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse,
forced marriage, child brides (and, therefore, child rape) is often
portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But one could easily argue
that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in terms of its most
negative instances, is far more despicable than fundamentalist
Mormonism. The Muslim world can match the FLDS sin for sin--Muslims
commonly practice polygamy, forced-marriage (often between underage
girls and older men), and wife-beating--but add to these indiscretions
the surpassing evils of honor killing, female "circumcision," widespread
support for terrorism, a pornographic fascination with videos showing
the butchery of infidels and apostates, a vibrant form of anti-semitism
that is explicitly genocidal in its aspirations, and an aptitude for
producing children's books and television programs which exalt
suicide-bombing and depict Jews as "apes and pigs."
Any honest comparison between these two faiths reveals a bizarre double
standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the
marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children.
But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing
so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women
and children of traditional Islam?
What about all the civil, freedom-loving, moderate Muslims who are just
as appalled by Muslim intolerance as I am? No doubt millions of men and
women fit this description, but vocal moderates are very difficult to
find. Wherever "moderate Islam" does announce itself, one often
discovers frank Islamism lurking just a euphemism or two beneath the
surface. The subterfuge is rendered all but invisible to the general
public by political correctness, wishful thinking, and "white guilt."
This is where we find sinister people successfully posing as
"moderates"--people like Tariq Ramadan who, while lionized by liberal
Europeans as the epitome of cosmopolitan Islam, cannot bring himself to
actually condemn honor killing in round terms (he recommends that the
practice be suspended, pending further study). Moderation is also
attributed to groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR), an Islamist public relations firm posing as a civil-rights lobby.
Even when one finds a true voice of Muslim moderation, it often seems
distinguished by a lack of candor above all things. Take someone like
Reza Aslan, author of No God But God: I debated Aslan for Book TV on the
general subject of religion and modernity. During the course of our
debate, I had a few unkind words to say about the Muslim Brotherhood.
While admitting that there is a difference between the Brotherhood and a
full-blown jihadist organization like al Qaeda, I said that their
ideology was "close enough" to be of concern. Aslan responded with a
grandiose, ad hominem attack saying, "that indicates the profound
unsophistication that you have about this region. You could not be more
wrong" and claiming that I'd taken my view of Islam from "Fox News."
Such maneuvers, coming from a polished, Iranian-born scholar of Islam
carry the weight of authority, especially in front of an audience of
people who are desperate to believe the threat of Islam has been grossly
exaggerated. The problem, however, is that the credo of the Muslim
Brotherhood actually happens to be "Allah is our objective. The Prophet
is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way
of Allah is our highest hope."
The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is
simply not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like
myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that
Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at
every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of
political correctness and religious apology. Many western scholars, like
the much admired Karen Armstrong, appear to live in just such a place.
All of their talk about how benign Islam "really" is, and about how the
problem of fundamentalism exists in all religions, only obfuscates what
may be the most pressing issue of our time: Islam, as it is currently
understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world's Muslims, is
antithetical to civil society. A recent poll showed that thirty-six
percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) believe that a person should be
killed for leaving the faith. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims
feel that their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and
prosecuted, and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists
should have been brought to justice. And these are British Muslims.
Occasionally, however, a lone voice can be heard acknowledging the
obvious. Hassan Butt wrote in the Guardian:
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the
British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim
terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to
laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole
cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7
was Western foreign policy. By blaming the government for our actions,
those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for
us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical
examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.
It is astounding how infrequently one hears such candor among the public
voices of "moderate" Islam. This is what we owe the true moderates of
the Muslim world: we must hold their co-religionists to the same
standards of civility and reasonableness that we take for granted in all
other people. Only our willingness to openly criticize Islam for its
all-too-obvious failings can make it safe for Muslim moderates,
secularists, apostates--and, indeed, women--to rise up and reform their
faith.
And if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is
the western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and
Muslims too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil
discourse. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous
form of "affirmative action" at work, especially in western Europe,
where Muslim immigrants are systematically exempted from western
standards of moral order in the name of paying "respect" to the glaring
pathologies in their culture. Hirsi Ali has also observed that there is
a quasi-racist double-think on display whenever western powers trumpet
that "Islam is peace," all the while taking heroic measures to guard
against the next occasion when the barbarians run amok in response to a
film, cartoon, opera, novel, beauty pageant--or the mere naming of a
teddy bear.
Have you seen the Danish cartoons that so roiled the Muslim world?
Probably not, as their publication was suppressed by almost every
newspaper, magazine, and television station in the United States. Given
their volcanic reception--hundreds of thousands of Muslims rioted,
hundreds of people were killed--their sheer banality should have
rendered these drawings extraordinarily newsworthy. One magazine which
did print them, Free Inquiry (for which I am proud to have written), had
its stock banned from every Borders and Waldenbooks in the country.
These are precisely the sorts of capitulations that we must avoid in the
future.
The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we need
more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents
that not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it.
As Ibn Warraq, author of the revelatory Why I Am Not a Muslim, said in
response to recent events:
It is perverse for the western media to lament the lack of an Islamic
reformation and willfully ignore works such as Wilders' film, Fitna. How
do they think reformation will come about if not with criticism? There
is no such right as 'the right not to be offended; indeed, I am deeply
offended by the contents of the Koran, with its overt hatred of
Christians, Jews, apostates, non-believers, homosexuals but cannot
demand its suppression.
It is time we recognized that those who claim the "right not to be
offended" have also announced their hatred of civil society.
More...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/losing-our-spines-to-save_b_100132.html
--
Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/
(20,000 articles 4000 humor)
Blogs - http://rowlandsblogs.blogspot.com/
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