The Republic of Dissent

Acceptable biases and fears

Quote of the day from Glenn Greenwald about the firing of Juan Williams from NPR for expressing his fears over 'Muslims' 'who look Muslims' in certain situations:

The principal reason the Williams firing resonated so much and provoked so much fury is that it threatens the preservation of one of the most important American mythologies:  that Muslims are a Serious Threat to America and Americans.

I have to say that the whole thing makes me more than uncomfortable. America has entered an age where free speech is about content precisely because it is no longer possible for Americans to have a dialogue about issues. The goal of political or social discussions is to shut up the opposition and to make the argument that it is either simply or solely bigoted or dumb. Where there is a prevalent notion in a society that people have to be careful about what they say, it is in general because there also exists the prevalent and uncomfortable one that people can't change, that people are their vilest thought, and that education and dialogue don't matter.

Arousing literature

Mary Elisabeth Williams poses the question of the day:

Is it entirely possible that someone out there reading a fictional account of a rape could become aroused?

Is it just me, but doesn't that sound like a limited question, one that makes two gross assumptions, the first being that sexual pleasure is always pornographic and  the second that the only trouble with rape is the lack of jouissance or just enjoyment?

I have to say that I'm not convinced that a novel can be pornographic and artistic or that if it makes rape pornographic, it is ought to be placed in the cemetery of forbidden books.

Dangerous thoughtlessness and free speech

The statement of the day is from Juan Cole about the draw Muhammad Day:

I think when you know people have died in violence over some piece of thoughtlessness, it is the height of irresponsibility to repeat it for no good reason.

I agree with Cole's sentiment, but disagrees with his conclusion. It's always better to live i a society where thoughtlessness, even when it is bigoted and can produce violence, can be expressed because it reminds us that the civility and the education necessary to maintain a liberal and open society are never a given

Freedom of speech isn't about content

I agree with Peter Tatchell on this:

Freedom of speech means accepting the right of other people to say things that we may find disagreeable and even offensive. Unless people make untrue libellous comments or incite violence, they should not be criminalised for expressing their opinions.

It is too easy to be a liberal society in the Lockean sense of the word when the context is peaceful and agreeable. Freedom of speech is a principle that is under attack in too many societies because there is this dangerous notion that dissent, outrage or vile speech is as destructive as terrorism and should be quieted because manufactured and artificial consent in a society is key to its cohesiveness. The trouble of course is in our world, there is almost nothing as attractive and as potent as the forbidden especially when it pertains to challenge an established order or political correctness.

Fanaticism, ridicule, and the steps forward

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the whole South Park and Muhammad affair:

Islamists seek to replace the rule of law with that of commanding right and forbidding wrong. With over a billion and a half people calling Muhammad their moral guide, it is imperative that we examine the consequences of his guidance, starting with the notion that those who depict his image or criticize his teachings should be punished.
In "South Park," this tyrannical rule is cleverly needled when Tom Cruise asks the question: How come Muhammad is the only celebrity protected from ridicule? Now we know why. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right. I'm only wondering whether the whole cycle of shock, awe, screams of cultural insensitivity, apologies or a refusal to back down lead anywhere, but down the ground. It is true that backing down is dangerous when an essential value such as free speech, which includes the right to make fun of gods and prophets is challenged there must never be a surrender to fear and to threats. The most difficult question to me isn't about fighting extremism and refusing to accept that in the name of  religion or whatever else some forms of speech are forbidden, the capital question is what happens afterward standing the confrontation.

Cultural insensitivity

Thought-provoking examples from Margaret Wente of the most outrageous of censorship and of blackmail:

In 2005, Burger King in Britain got in trouble when some Muslims thought the swirly design on the wrapper of the ice-cream cones looked like the word “Allah.” “I feel humiliated,” complained one unhappy customer. “I’m going to make [the person who did this] see that it was the biggest mistake in his life.” Burger King promptly recalled the ice cream and apologized. Instead of telling people to get a life, the Muslim Council of Britain said: “We commend the sensitive and prompt action to prevent any hurt being caused to the religious sensibilities of others.”
Nike got in trouble in the U.S. for the same reason – putting a design on a running shoe that some Muslims thought resembled the name Allah. Nike eventually negotiated a settlement with a leading Muslim group. It apologized for any unintentional offence, recalled all products carrying the design, introduced training for Nike designers in Islamic imagery, and agreed to investigate how the design came about. McDonald’s goofed up too, in quite a different way. A few months ago, for fear of offending Muslims, the Singapore chain pre-emptively omitted a pig from a series of animal toys it had created to depict every sign in the Chinese zodiac. This time it was the Chinese who were infuriated. They demanded that their beloved pig be reinstated, and blasted McDonald’s for cultural insensitivity.

The problem is both in the US, in Canada, and many other countries, culture has become sacred as a result of the supremacy of identity politics. The implication of this sacralization is censorship and the crippling fear to appear to be insensitive to others' cultures because it is seen as the most unacceptable of all violations. Wente's examples are also a proof that an eroding togetherness created by the segregation of differences and the reinforcement of different communities at the expense of the whole society. Unfortunately, this trend is going to continue because identity politics is the present and I'm afraid the future.

America doesn't have a 'Muslim' problem

Essential questions from Glenn Greenwald responding to Ross Douthat's op-ed on South Park and its caricature of Muhammad

Who could possibly look at the U.S. and conclude that brutal, inhumane, politically-motivated, designed-to-intimidate violence is a particular problem among Muslims, or that Muslims receive special, unfairly favorable treatment as a result of their intimidation?  Do you mean except for the tens of thousands of Muslims whom the U.S. has imprisoned without charges for years, and the hundreds of thousands our wars and invasions and bombings have killed this decade alone, and the ones from around the world subjected to racial and ethnic profiling, and the ones we've tortured and shot up at checkpoints and are targeting for state-sponsored assassination?

Scams and free speech

Different take from Bill Tieleman on Ann Coulter's visit to Canada and her assertion that she was a victim of censorship and of a hate crime:

God bless the University of Ottawa students who did something in one night that millions of Americans have spent years hoping for -- they shut up Ann Coulter!
But don't call this a "free speech" issue. Coulter -- the ridiculously rabid right-wing American commentator, and federal Conservative Party activist Ezra Levant played the media like a cheap fiddle to make it appear she was muzzled -- not at all.
Coulter and Levant -- not the police, not the University of Ottawa -- cancelled her speaking engagement last week -- not because of a riot, or because violent protesters bashed down the doors -- but because it was a great publicity opportunity.
And most media bought it, hook line and sinker -- reporting that no matter how offensive Coulter's views are, they should be tolerated in a free and democratic society, especially at a university, blah, blah, blah.
What rubbish!

I feel dirty for even taking about Ann Coulter so I'm going to stop.

The merits of free hate speech

I agree in part with Rick Salutin on this::

The best response to Ann Coulter is – to respond. Tell her to piss off, not shut up. Challenge her, as a Muslim student in London, Ont., did, saying she has no flying carpet (a Coulter witticism) to “go back home” on. So get a camel, says la Coulter. Then it's the protesters' turn; they can hiss, walk out, pie her – I don't consider pie-ing violence, I consider it symbolic speech. It's what you do when you don't have the podium and a mic. Think shoe thrower of Baghdad. That was a shoe (or two) heard round the world.
Nor do I feel like joining in the ritual statements that find Ann Coulter's views appalling. The only point of free speech is when it's about views you find appalling. Otherwise, it's “allowed speech,” because it doesn't offend you.
One Ottawa student protester said a campus should be a safe and positive space. I agree with safe but not so much with positive. I'd even say a university should be a safe and negative space, in the sense used by Herbert Marcuse, whose student I was. He praised the power of negative thinking, by which he meant learning to be critical of the way things are. Little kids deserve a safe and positive space, largely so they can gain the self-assurance to deal with all the negative space they'll meet later on. In fact, one of the unheralded merits of free hate speech is that it can give those vilified and maligned a sense of their own strength.

What amazes me is that Ann Coulter manages to irritate and to unnerve too many people when it should become obvious to almost everybody that wrestling with a pig in the dirt is pointless because it likes it, pigs like dirt.

Coulter and Canada

As always, Ann Coulter knows how to be dignified after suffering 'a setback' in Canada, here is her reaction:

You guys used to be so cool. You were smokers. You had epic hockey fights. We had half our comedians from Canada. Now you’re all a bunch of girls named Francois.

I wish Coulter had been able to speak in Ottawa and  that Canadians to the contrary of American had been able to put her down nicely by showing her that she doesn't deserve to be taken seriously even though she is entitled to speak and by not taken the bait of antagonism and just ignoring. I will bet by favorite left toe that Coulter isn't going to have the guts to go through with her threat to file a human-right complaint alleging that she was the victim of hate speech. That would be a further proof that she is commercial figure who only believe in her principles when they protect her or earn her a few bucks.

The vulgarity of hate speech laws

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

For as long as I'll live, I'll never understand how people want to vest in the Government the power to criminalize particular viewpoints it dislikes, will never understand the view that it's better to try to suppress adverse beliefs than to air them, and will especially never understand people's failure to realize that endorsing this power will, one day, very likely result in their own views being criminalized when their political enemies (rather than allies) are empowered.  Who would ever want to empower officious technocrats to issue warnings along the lines of:  be forewarned:  if you express certain political views, you may be committing a crime; guide and restrict yourself accordingly?  I obviously devote a substantial amount of my time and energy to critiquing the actions of the U.S. Government, but the robust free speech protection guaranteed by the First Amendment and largely protected by American courts continues to be one of the best features of American political culture.

Hate speech laws are both paternalistic and ineffective, More importantly, they are vulgar, because they assume that hate is solely a problem when it is expressed and that the State is a nanny that can forbid the content of expression without eduction.  All one has to do is to look at Europe to realize that the attempts of governments to disinfect and to civilize through force rather tan education lead to the rise of marginal groups, to the fetishism of the forbidden views and of disobedience within society and to the multiplication of zones (football stadiums) where people express violently point of views that can express publicly.

South Africa, censorship, colonial mentality

BruElla N Gila on South Africa, Winnie Mandela,  freedom of speech, and  censorship:

What matters most in a democracy is for the people to be fully involved in the political discourse that gave them their democracy in the first instance.
Why then would a person of Winnie's stature resort to fear and denialism in fear of reprisal by fellow comrades or even worse being declared an outcast in a party she has made her home since her youth?
It is not important when and why the interview was held, it is also trivial to focus on who conducted the interview, but it is important that these views were expressed.
South Africa has an entrenched culture to discourage freedom of expression, a mindset that speaks of the damage caused by the colonial mentality endured by many for years.
What is wrong with having a contrary view when it comes to certain people? We never fought to protect holy cows - neither did we vow to always say the "right" things - we fought to express our views by speaking to power and being true to ourselves. We need to remind ourselves that many died and were jailed solely for the reason of speaking out.

I would love to agree that the question here is uniquely one of the colonial mentality, and of censorship, because it would make it simpler, but I cannot. In countries, which have been torn by atrocious events such as Apartheid as is the case for South Africa or by a genocide for Rwanda, freedom of speech is always judged in the historical context and with the hard learned realization that it can undo reconciliation and revived deep and old resentments within their societies. Societies who have experienced traumatic events are likely to view words as weapons that can erode its hard to maintain cohesion, but inflaming old hateful passions. The reason why Winnie Mandela backed down had nothing to do with censorship, but with her recognition that she had crossed a line that she couldn't crossed if she wanted to still be a revered figure internationally and be invited everywhere to give speeches for a fee. The point is that Winnie Mandela backed down because she is very astute as identity politics and at marketing and knows when words can become not only politically, but also financially costly. In short, Winnie Mandela isn't a victim of censorship, she is a victim of her sense of self and of history. South Africa isn't suffering from its supposed colonial mentality, but rather from its understandable difficulties to let go its history, without insisting that it should be omnipresent in their present and their future because it was so traumatic and bloody.

Scumbags and Freedom of Speech

I agree with Mr. Eugenides's point on the visit of Geert Wilders to London:

Since when did freedom of speech entail rolling out the red carpet for scumbags?

Geert Wilders as a freedom fighter

Toby Young, my favorite judge of Top Chef, defends Geert Wilders in the Daily Telegraph by arguing that he is a freedom of speech warrior:

are the Dutch people just fed up with being told they’re not allowed to criticise Muslim extremists because to do so is “Islamophobic”? As a defender of free speech, I don’t believe for one moment that the Koran ought to be banned. But if I was a member of the Dutch electorate I would vote for Geert Wilders’ party nonetheless because I don’t think he deserves to go to jail for 16 months just for arguing that it should.
Wilders doesn’t really want to ban the Koran, of course. It’s a theatrical gesture — a situationist move — designed to underline the absurdity of trying to limit freedom of speech on the grounds that certain words or phrases or images might move people to violence. What Wilders is saying is that if you believe the critics of Muslim extremism should be silenced because their words might incite religious hatred, then, logically, you ought to ban the Koran on the same grounds. It’s not a serious suggestion, so much as a reductio ad absurdum of a completely untenable, illiberal position.

It is for precisely this reason that I have always believed that European countries are wrong to attempt to censor what they consider to be hate speech or speech denying certain historical events such as the Shoah. Hate-speech laws or any other laws that try to limit free speech based on its content always make the extremist the victim. Moreover, they force people such as Toby Young who likes to provoke and who believe that freedom of speech is the most sacred of values to defend Geert Wilders without seeking to see behind the trees. Guided by his orthodoxy about free speech,  Young is convinced that Wilders can only be right because that it is always absolutely unjust to try to shut somebody hate because society doesn't like what he is saying or finds it too distasteful. It isn't an erroneous positon to take, just a limited and an absurd one because the conclusion seems to be that victims of censorship are always and absolutely right or rather they cannot be right or even extremist.

Rwanda, Free speech, and reconciliation

I have to admit that I have mixed reactions when reading this from Stephen Kinzer's article on Paul Kagame and his efforts to advance the reconciliation in Rwanda after the genocide:

Kagame's government has passed laws against disseminating "genocide ideology", meaning views that could inflame communal hatreds. People are supposed to describe themselves only as Rwandan, never as Hutu or Tutsi. Kagame claims these laws are necessary to keep Rwanda back from the abyss of violence. If he enforces them during the political campaign, though, critics will accuse him of suppressing free speech.
Last month, a Rwandan-born businesswoman who has spent more than a decade in the Netherlands, Victoire Ingabire, arrived in Rwanda and announced that she was a candidate for president. Her party is based abroad and not recognised in Rwanda. According to a UN report (in French), she is supported by leaders of the principal Hutu insurgent group, which is among factions terrorising the eastern Congo.Ingabire's first statements after landing in Rwanda were thinly veiled appeals for Hutu solidarity. "There is no shame in saying I am Hutu or am Tutsi; there's nothing wrong with that," she told one interviewer.
Appealing to ethnic identity this way is illegal. The official press launched a sharp campaign against Ingabire, and her campaign group has been attacked at least once. She has been interrogated by police and warned that she will be arrested if she continues preaching "genocide ideology". Amnesty International responded by accusing the government of "intimidation and harassment".Nonsense, replies President Kagame. He believes western human rights activists underestimate the prospects for a new outbreak of ethnic violence in Rwanda, as well as the danger of allowing ethnically charged speech. "We've lived this life," he said angrily at a news conference. "We've lived the consequences. So we understand it better than anyone from anywhere else."

I am torn for two reasons.  I believe that Kagame is right and that the priority had to be on making sure that history didn't repeat itself and that therefore no fighting words lighted up the poudrière. However, I also realize that those are short-term measures which may lead to cover old wounds without leading to healing.  I wonder whether it is possible to have reconciliation based solely on the victims' terms especially when they are still a minority as the Tutsis are in Rwanda. I worry about what is going to happen not only really after Kagame, but in more than twenty years for now when it would be less difficult for too many with a tenacious sense of resentment and entitlement not just to deny the severity of the genocide, but to deny its very existence.

Fundamental questions

Jytte Klausen, the author whose book, The Cartoons that Shook the World, was censured by Yale University Press by removing the Muhammad cartoons gave a great interview available on Eurozine in which she explains the motives behind her book and why she thought the cartoons were a necessary addition:

My idea was not to engage the provocation of: "Do I now dare to print these bad pictures or not?" That would never be my purpose. My purpose was to get the whole page from the newspaper as it was reprinted that day. There have been many misunderstandings and often the online versions of the cartoons have incorrect translations of the captions. In the book, and it was written with this purpose, I ask the reader to put on different glasses and look at the images and analyse them from the vantage point of the different arguments that were made against and for the cartoons at the time. What would a Danish reader see? What did the cartoonist intend to show? Why would a secular Muslim say they were Islamaphobic? Why would a religious Muslim say they were blasphemous? These are all different readings of the meaning of the cartoons and I wanted my readers to look at how no illustrations, and no caricature, is read in the absence of context. And I do describe some of them actually as anti-Semitic in a classical European style.

Prudent censorship

Reading this sugary excerpt leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because of my anxious apprehension that it is a sign of things to come for we are in a world where taking offense or crying wolf put a stop to necessary interrogations and deserved criticisms:

There is, however, a glaring omission in The Cartoons that Shook the World. None of the twelve cartoons has been reproduced in the book. In August, Yale University Press announced that it would suppress the controversial images, citing advice from a handful of academics, diplomats and journalists, including Marcia Inhorn, John Negroponte, and Fareed Zakaria. According to the publisher, “the decision rested solely on the experts’ assessments that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims.”
Klausen reluctantly agreed. After all, by her own count, the publication of the cartoons had already been responsible for at least 200 deaths and 800 additional injuries. Yale University Press had to tread lightly, and it was certainly within its rights to do so.
To justify its decision further, the publisher noted that curious readers could easily view the cartoons online. Here, at least, Klausen is clearly at odds with her publisher. In the text, she warns readers that “the longevity of such sites is unpredictable and they are often marred by obscene commentary and misleading translations of the Danish captions.” 

For some reason I'm reminded of the second debate of the 2000 Presidential election  where to any timid criticism Gore made, Bush responded smartly that he was hurt because his heart was being questioned, which killed a debate, which he feared. If our biggest concern becomes to bow to the sacred and to the fanatical and absolute adoration that people have for it, why don't we just pass laws forcing us to love and to respect each other and not to question any religious or personal  beliefs..It's scary that we live in times where the heart and the divine are annihilating reason.

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Inhibited speech

I agree with Tim Black on this:

This act of searching out offence and proclaiming the depth of one’s feelings from online rooftops threatens free speech. Not because it’s censorship in the official sense – at least, not yet, although the thousand or so urging the Press Complaints Commission to intervene or the person complaining to the police might yet make it official if they get their way. Rather, the danger of such a vast explosion of offence-taking is that it inhibits, creating a ‘you-can’t-say-that’ culture in which one is scared to speak one’s mind, whether its contents are moronic or not.
‘Offensiveness is part of life; the politics of inoffensiveness is a threat to free speech and open debate’, argued O’Neill. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in the Independent today, disagrees, arguing that freedom of speech is fine as long as it’s not ‘without restraint’. But what else is ‘restraint’ but unfreedom? She’s not defending free speech, she’s defending non-offensive speech, where it’s fine to voice an opinion ‘until people’s deep feelings are roused’. And that is the problem. When feelings, especially hurt ones, are given such elevated public value, where it’s enough to claim that ‘the bad Daily Mail columnist hurt my feelings’ for the offending interlocutor to be shamed into silence, then there is no longer free speech. There’s only inhibited speech.

Poland, France, and Anti-Semitism

Interesting comparison between Poland and France and the way their society deals with anti-Semitism from Konstanty Gebert;  he seems to imply that France deals well with Anti-semitism I disagree strongly with him because I don't think that laws can eradicate bigotry, on the contrary they tend to victimize the bigots thus giving them  too much of the spotlight, which enable them in turn to become larger than the hate they spread:

Because Polish anti-Semitism is as widespread as it is skin-deep. Let me explain. Take France. In France they had very strong laws against public expressions of anti-Semitism. If you express anti-Semitism in public you can be seriously penalised. This doesn't necessarily affect what Monsieur Dupont says at his dinner table (and I've sat at some of those dinner tables – I know) but in public if somebody makes an anti-Semitic statement you'd better believe he or she is serious, because they are willing to take the rap.
In Poland, anti-Semitism is not penalised, period. Just recently, the public prosecutor in the town of Krakow closed the investigation into soccer fans yelling "Gas them!" to the fans of another club which is labelled as Jewish because, historically, like 70 years ago, it had been Jewish. So they yelled "Gas them," and they yelled, "We'll always triumph over you, you fucking Jews," and the public prosecutor decided such contents do not constitute a crime and dropped the case. And this comes in the wake of similar statements by different public prosecutors. So anti-Semitism isn't penalised, therefore it becomes a convenient venue for the expression of frustration. So if somebody says in public it's all the fault of the Jews and they should be kicked out of the country, this does not necessarily mean, as it probably does in France, that he is a dyed-in-the-wool and dangerous anti- Semite. It might mean that he had a bad day at work, full stop. This is no less excusable morally...

Prudence or fear ?

If I wanted to be abrupt, I would say that the threat of violence always succeeds in forcing people to censor themselves after reading this in the New York Times for I know that we live in a times when sense and sensiibility dominate, in most cases, only when the fear to lose something is overwhelming; I wonder what Kenan Malik would say:

It’s not all that surprising that Yale University Press would be wary of reprinting notoriously controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a forthcoming book. After all, when the 12 caricatures were first published by a Danish newspaper a few years ago and reprinted by other European publications, Muslims all over the world angrily protested, calling the images — which included one in which Muhammad wore a turban in the shape of a bomb — blasphemous. In the Middle East and Africa some rioted, burning and vandalizing embassies; others demanded a boycott of Danish goods; a few nations recalled their ambassadors from Denmark. In the end at least 200 people were killed. So Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

Expensive speech

I love India, but stories such as this one scare me:

A leading politician of India's ruling Congress party was arrested today and her house set on fire by activists after she suggested that a rival leader be raped so she can better understand the plight of victims.
Rita Bahuguna Joshi, the chief of the Congress party in northern Uttar Pradesh state, was placed under 14 days custody pending investigations for allegedly promoting social enmity, insulting a woman's modesty and insulting a person of lower caste. No charges have been filed yet, but the three offences are punishable by up to 10 years in jail.

Discrimination and Banishment

I wonder if Frank Furedi would apply the following principle no just on the British National Party (BNP), but on every shameful views including those who advocate for example the Burqa for women, deny the Shoah, and favor violence:

Discriminating against people on the grounds that they hold the wrong views is no more legitimate than discriminating against individuals on the basis of their religion or race.

I believe that the banishment is an admission of powerlessness, a confession that one doesn't possess the tools/doesn't know how to educate society and to persuade it to make good decisions on important subjects. There is such a thing as the duty, an obligation to persuade/to educate for those who believe fervently that they are on the right side of any issue, especially  when those issues are decisive to the overall health of a society.

Le net

David Post has an excellent post on France, the EU and Internet Speech, which is a must-read. My only criticism is that it asks more questions than it answers. The reason for that is that we are at a time where nobody quite knows where the law will go if the two options concerning Internet Speech remains between total freedom and censorship.

Shifting principles

Oliver Kamm on Liberalism, its ideals, and their degeneration:

Liberalism, in its broadest sense, has become suspicious of its own ideals.
Notions once considered reactionary, even extreme, have insinuated themselves into the mainstream of right-thinking (that is, left-thinking) social idealism.
The degeneration of progressive idealism has many roots. But among the most important is the instinct that the ideas of Western liberty are specific to time and place — that they are Eurocentric. Almost coincident with the revolutions of 1989, which testified to the power of the human instinct for liberty, was a far more atavistic political movement. (...) there is a type of left-wing thinking that regards militant Islam almost as idiosyncratic liberation theology. Verso, the left-wing publishing house, has produced a volume of the thoughts of Osama bin Laden entitled Messages to the World. To read the editor’s annotations is to gain the impression of a revolutionary figure who daringly challenges Western oppression. The mass murder of American and other civilians on 9/11 was the expression of a nihilistic, millenarian doctrine of religious absolutism. Yet for a certain type of critic the greatest war criminal of our age is Tony Blair.

I'm tempted, really tempted to agree totally with Kamm, but I can't because he doesn't present the whole picture. He sees a lot of the trees, but rearranges them to depict the forest that he wants to see.

The dangers of mediocrity

Tim Rutten reviews Bruce Bawer's new book on his favorite topic of the West, Immigration, Islam, Dechristianization, De-westernization, and terrorism, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom:

A mediocre book on an important topic always is disappointing.
When the treatment also is shallow and vulgarly argued -- as is the case with Bruce Bawer's "Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom" -- this reader is inclined to get up with a sour sense of resentment over time wasted, the sort of feeling that comes from being seated next to a garrulous bore at a dinner party.
A literary critic and writer for various neoconservative cultural and political journals, Bawer is also openly homosexual and has written extensively for a number of gay publications. He and his partner have lived in Europe for some time, and since moving there, Bawer has become one of those writers alarmed by what he sees as a cultural fifth column of Islamic immigrants gnawing at Europe's traditions of tolerance and democracy.
There certainly are dangerous, intolerant Islamists among Europe's immigrants, and their allies, he argues (not always inaccurately), are the dogmatic multiculturalists who find cultural equivalency between Magna Carta and sharia. The problem is that Bawer spins glancingly off that interesting, rather important point into descriptions of a vast, interlocking conspiracy of cultural, literary, journalistic and even entertainment elites he believes want to appease fundamentalist Islam and sell out the West's tradition of individual and civil liberties.
Why they're engaged in this betrayal is anybody's guess. That doesn't stop Bawer from enveloping one alleged case in point after another, rather like the rhetorical equivalent of a kudzu vine -- and with about the same logical structure.
Too often Bawer simply gets things wrong, both factually and by degree. For all his academic prominence, the late Edward Said never enjoyed anything close to the influence Bawer imagines for him; the notion that his debated book "Orientalism" changed the way the majority of Western writers and intellectuals perceived Islam simply is preposterous.

Censorship and bad fiction

The Guardian on Sherry Jones and her assertion that her book The Jewel of Medina about Muhammad and one of his brides,  hasn't found a publisher/distributor in the UK because of their fear of being targeted by Islamists:

Jones has now revealed on her blog that despite attempts to find a new UK distributor for The Jewel of Medina, "everyone, it seems, is too afraid". "Although the extremists lost in court, they have apparently won where it really counts – in the UK's book stores," she wrote. "The 'thugs' have accomplished their task — and freedom of speech, the first freedom to go when fascism gets a foothold, has taken a blow in the western world."
She called on "the people of Great Britain" to "speak out against those who are limiting their right to read, think, speak, listen, debate, discuss, criticise". "I hope the people of the UK can find the power, and the courage, to raise an outcry against censorship," she said. "Now it's time for the rest of us, including moderate Muslims and the press, who cherish our culture and our freedom, to raise a cry louder than that of radicals, so we don't lose that most precious, and crucial, of freedoms."
British publishers, however, disputed her claim that they were too afraid to publish The Jewel of Medina. "I've read the reviews and it sounds absolutely awful – beyond being offensive. If it were good we would actively consider publishing it, but an anachronistic bodice ripper – why would we be interested?" said Jon Wood, Orion publishing director.
Another publisher, who didn't wish to be named, agreed, pointing to the less-than-positive reviews of The Jewel of Medina in America, where the New York Times described its prose as "lamentable", and the LA Times said that it "suffers from large swaths of purple prose".

The freedom to hate

Alexander Cockburn argues against the Hate Crimes Prevention Act :

The problem with the Hate Crimes Prevention Act is that it creates a thought crime. After all, violent acts like assault or murder or rape carry specific and very serious penalties for the perpetrators, if convicted. (The Laramie roofers were convicted of murder anyway, and will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.) Motive does not enter the matter. And how will a prosecutor prove that a lesbian was murdered because of her sexual preference or because the mugger who stabbed her in the darkened entry to her building did so because she refused to give him her handbag?
As Representative Lamar Smith, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, protested: "All violent crimes must be vigorously prosecuted. Unfortunately, this bill undermines one of the most basic principles of our criminal justice system - equal justice for all. Justice will now depend on the race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other protected status of the victim. It will allow different penalties to be imposed for the same crime."
Advocates insist that the Hate Crimes Act will deal only with crimes of violence and have nothing whatsoever to do with limiting free speech or thought. But given the way case law evolves, and the manner in which ambitious prosecutors advance their political careers, there will be an irresistible incentive to bring indictments against anyone speaking hatefully about members of protected categories of people. Speech itself will become a 'violent act' and therefore unlawful.

I agree with the assertion that Hate Crime Prevention Act will have dangerous consequences and that it will not be an effective mechanism against hate crimes. I would like to be on the popular side on those who argue for that legislation because it would give me the feel good illusion that it is an act that would stop horrific crimes, but I know better. What worries me the most about such kind of legislation is that it places the emphasis on what differentiates people instead on reasserting the fact that they shouldn't matter because we are all equal under the law and that a crime is a crime is a crime. I think that the issue here is that the Hate Crime Prevention Act in fact reaffirms the viewpoint of those who commit crimes against gays, blacks, or any other group of people, it reaffirms the idea that those differences matter and are of so importance that the law must take them into account. The purpose of the rule of law is not to satisfy any emotional need that people have whether they are victims or not or whether those needs are justified or baseless, the rule of law exist in society to remind people precisely that people aren't slaves to their passions and that punishment isn't about vengeance or making a great emotional point about hate and other vile motives that criminals have. In modern societies, people even when they are capable of barbaric actions must be allowed to hate and it is the responsibility, the obligation to find other ways than punishment through laws to change their ways. It is difficult to resist the temptation to obtain absolute justice in our societies, but we must resist it because as Camus asserted absolute justice negates freedom.

European cowardice

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on what she believes to be an identity crisis in Europe, which makes Europeans unwilling to die for their values such as free speech and willing to tolerate the intolerable from Muslims :

Europe has become a place for new religions, new creeds, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. Everything is thus relative. This is an uncertainty that the Muslim does not share. The Muslim ethic and tribal spirit are far more resilient and fierce in war than the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
(...)Take the debate on freedom of expression. In 1989 and afterwards, the provocations in the name of Islam were greeted with a confident, "No way! This is Europe, and you can say what you like, write what you like," and so on.
Two decades later, Europeans are not so sure about the values of freedom of expression. Most members of the media engage in self-censorship. Textbooks in schools and universities have been adapted in such a way as not to offend Muslim sentiment. And legislation to punish 'blasphemy', if not passed, has been considered in most countries - or old laws that were never used are being revived.
(...) Muslims try to abolish freedom of expression using the vocabulary of freedom
The terrifying paradox about these developments is that Muslim immigrants were admitted into European borders on the basis of universal rights and freedoms that a large number of them now trample on, while others perhaps watch passively, or seek to defend only the image of Islam.
(...)In reality, if Europe falls, it's not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today - unlike their forbears in the Second World War - will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.

I don't know, but there is something is this Ali's arguments that seems artificial and even insincere. I think that Glenn Greenwald is right to assert that people such Ayaan Hirsi Ali go out of their way to clash with Islam because they believe in global clashes and that there is indeed a clash of civilizations, which must be won by the West by taking the fight to the barbarians. However,  it is difficult to deny that there is a malaise within Europe caused not solely by Muslim immigration, but also by the critical debate, which has yet to happen or to least lead to some decisive political action about what it means to be European and whether nationality and citizenship can be about something other than culture especially when the later clashes with the present social compact.

Words, deeds, and the post-Rushdie world

Sugary excerpt of the day from Kenan Malik who has a great book out titled From Fatwa to Jihad which is is one of the best of the year :

There is usually, in other words, no direct relationship between words and deeds. How people respond to words depends largely on the individuals themselves. They are responsible for interpreting the words and translating them into actions. Between words and deeds stands a human being, with a mind of his own, an ability to judge between right and wrong and a responsibility to face up to his own actions. It is not the words themselves that cause things to happen, but our estimation of the value and truth of those words. Free speech empowers the speaker. It also empowers the listener, placing a premium on his or her ability to weigh up the arguments and draw their own conclusions.
Most people would accept that there is a distinction between words and deeds and yet in the post-Rushdie world the law often acts as if there is no space between the two. ‘Words are deeds,’ Aesop wrote in his fable ‘Trumpeter Taken Prisoner’. And this is how it appears to the law. Muslim protestors who chant ‘Bomb, bomb Denmark’ or ‘Behead those who insult Islam’ may be moronic and offensive. But the idea that they are inciting murder is equally moronic and offensive to our intelligence. People do not respond to words like robots. They think and reason, and act upon their thoughts and reasoning. Bigots are, of course, influenced by bigoted talk. But it is the bigots who must bear responsibility for translating talk into action. In blurring the distinction between speech and action, incitement laws blur the idea of human agency and of moral responsibility.

The dangers of censorship

Michael Muhammad Knight on the censorship of  his novel The Taqwacores by its publisher:

If the publisher's intention was to show respect for Islam, it was only a certain kind of Islam — the monolithic Islam of uncompromised orthodoxy, the Muslim community as defined by its most conservative members, presuming all Muslims to believe and practice in one uniform fashion. This is an Islam that does not exist. The publisher was okay with my Muslim characters listening to the Sex Pistols, drinking beer, and having sex — in short, conforming to secular Western culture — as long as they never questioned the truth claims of their faith. It took a religious novel and stripped away the religion. Instead of engaging Islam with any honesty or imagination, daring to express doubts and unpopular beliefs, these characters were reduced to the children of immigrants who broke some rules on their way to assimilation: Muslim kids with bad haircuts and bad music who couldn't deal with their religion in any meaningful way.
The censorship of The Taqwacores in the UK expressed the publisher's view that my own experience of Islam is not legitimate, and that Islam is most accurately represented by so-called fundamentalists. In the name of tolerance and respect for cultural differences, the publisher denied that Islam itself could be diverse.
One reviewer wrote that this novel asked, "How do you define a 'true' Muslim? On what grounds? And does anyone have the right to judge?" The answer is yes, someone has claimed the right: the non-Muslim editor reading a manuscript with black marker in hand, running thick lines over my Islam.

Censorship never accomplishes its supposed or rather expressed objectives because it is more often than not an admission of guilt when used by a publisher or an author to diffuse a situation or an expression of powerlessness when done by society or others in a self-agrandizing attempt to purify their world.

The cult of the child

Provocative and thought-provoking questions from Anne Higonnet:

Childhood innocence has become a talisman adults hold up against all evil, doubt and despair. No – not all childhood innocence – only childhood sexual innocence. In Canadian law, images of children having any kind of physical harm done to them are treated in the same way as child pornography, but this is an exception. In the secular West, the ideal of childhood sexual innocence has become sacred. It cannot be questioned in any way, shape or form. In such a climate, who would dare to openly make pictures that involve children's or adolescents' bodies or their sexuality at all?

Higonnet's assertion that childhood innocence is a talisman is accurate. It led me to realize that the difference on this issue between the West and the rest of the world is that in other countries, childhood innocence is much more about boyhood than girlhood in the sense that girls stop being children to become women as soon as they "awake" sexual desires within men. This means for example that in those parts of the world, what would be considered pedophilia would be sexual activities with boys not girls who after all always instinctively know how to lure men with their bodies.

The cult of the child and the use of their innocence have more to do with adults than with children. Parents are obsessed with the notion that their kids must be innocent for the contrary notion would scare them shitless out their minds. It would mean that they are not in control of the little people they brought into this world and that good and protective parenting can produce bad children, which is a threatening idea for modern societies because it makes crime and punishment more complicated. Sex and innocence in the human mind don't go hand and hand because sex is considered dangerous and dirty especially when its sole goal is pleasure and self-gratification.

Capitulation

Excellent article in Prospect  on Hanif Kureishi, the Salman Rushdie affair, and writing about race and religion:

What particularly upset Kureishi’s critics was his refusal to play along with the idea that Asian writers had to treat Asian characters with respect. “I am a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani,” the landlord Nasser tells his white sidekick Johnny in Kureishi’s screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette when he evicts a black tenant. “It was a new idea of being Asian,” Kureishi says, “not the traditional notion of victims cowering in the corner. I wanted to show that Asians were not all progressive or nice—so I had an Asian as a vicious Thatcherite.”
(...)The Rushdie affair, Kureishi believes, transformed not just his own work, but also “the very notion of writing.” The fatwa “created a climate of terror and fear. Writers had to think about what they were writing in a way they never had to before. Free speech became an issue as it had not been before. Liberals had to take a stand, to defend an ideology they had not really had to think about before.” How have they borne up to the task? “The attacks on Rushdie showed that words can be dangerous. They also showed why critical thought is more important than ever, why blasphemy and immorality and insult need protection.
But most people, most writers, want to keep their heads down, live a quiet life. They don’t want a bomb in the letterbox. They have succumbed to the fear.”

Kureishi is correct in his assessment that writers have capitulated to fear. I think that this capitulation is less about fear and cowardice, than about the fact that too many writers don't view writing as Sartre and Camus did and don't believe that they have responsibilities beyond the one to sell and to be cool. Littérature engagée is dead and that is a tragedy for a century  that needs it more than anything else.

Free society and secularism

Timothy Garton Ash makes the following point on the importance of a secular public sphere to secure the freedoms of a democratic society:

Among the liberal essentials is equality before the law, including equal rights for men and women. Among the essentials is also freedom of religion. Since a core liberal notion is that we must be free not just to pursue our own version of the good life but also to question and revise it, it follows that we must be free to propagate, question, change or abandon our religion. In a free society, proselytisation, heresy and apostasy are not crimes. This - and apostasy in particular - is not accepted in many versions of Islam, but it is a liberal essential on which there can be no compromise.

In order to secure these freedoms, we need a secular public sphere. But what exactly do we mean by that? To say "Enlightenment values" begs the question, "which Enlightenment"? The Enlightenment of John Locke, which claimed freedom for religion, or that of Voltaire, which aspired rather to freedom from religion? (I deliberately simplify a complex history.) A liberal order in which the devotees of all Gods are free to try their hand in the public square, on an equal footing with those who insist - correctly, in my view - that there is no God? Or a liberal order in which all gods are kept as far as possible out of the public square? (The French republican understanding of laïcité is closer to the latter, the United States' first amendment tradition to the former.) I'm more of a Lockean myself, but I don't think this debate is best pursued at the abstract, theoretical level of "which Enlightenment"? Better to tackle specific issues: faith schools, new mosques, the teaching of evolution, the hijab, Muhammad cartoons and so on.

We do, however, need to be clearer about the difference between secularism and atheism. Secularism, in my view, should be an argument about arrangements for a shared public and social life; atheism is an argument about scientific truth, individual liberation and the nature of the good life. Today's debate around Islam is bedevilled by a confusion between the two. Atheists must be free to say to Muslims, Christians or Jews: "Your mind would be much more free if you gave up your ridiculous belief in God." Believers must be free to argue back: "You would have a more profound sense of personal freedom if you did believe." But neither is entitled to demand that of the other as a condition for participating as a citizen in a free society. The public policy argument about freedom for religion and the private conviction argument about freedom from or in religion should operate on different levels.

The key question is how to maintain or to build a secular society without the pious claiming that religion is essential to public life and to the health of a society. In the US, when one watches the political debate, it is impossible not to realize that it is taken for granted that religious faith is part of the political discourse and that candidates are expected to talk about their faith and other personal matters. The point is that the barrier between the private and the public when it comes to religion is never solid and that in these times when citizens want and demand certainty, secularism becomes impossible to defend.

From the age of reason to the age of derision

Josie Appleton has on Spiked one of the best articles I’ve read this week. It is about the use of what she calls the “offense card” to stop debates, which is about the use of the pretext that others are vile and offensive to attack the person to win an argument instead of debating their viewpoint. Sugary excerpt:

Discussions become a case of two sides competing to present themselves as the victim. This is all heat and no light: there is little revealed in the exchange, and indeed it is often easy to forget why people are arguing in the first place. It is also unnecessarily fractious, obstructing the possibility of a genuine dialogue, where discussants could learn from each other and clarify their differences.

[…]Prior to the epidemic of phobias, opinions – even objectionable ones – were described as ‘isms’ (as in racism, sexism), which could be engaged with and argued against. If you did not agree with somebody’s views, you had to explain why, and illustrate their errors. Accusing critics of ‘hate’ or ‘phobia’ suggests that they do not have ideas worthy of recognition, only beastly black bile. Discussion would be like talking spider anatomy with an arachnophobe. They don’t need conversation: they need treatment!

The focus on crying ‘hate speech’ means that lobby groups become organs for complaint. Their role is less to celebrate their own cause, than to present themselves as the victims of their opponents. Muslim organisations now spend very little time talking about the virtues of Islam, or offering moral guidance for a good Muslim life: instead, many have dedicated themselves to unearthing Islamophobia in every nook and cranny, analysing TV coverage and the subtexts of newspaper reports.

I agree with Appleton’s main point on hate speech and on the fact that increasingly in democratic and modern societies, it is becoming impossible to have a debate on any subject. Nowadays, people don’t know how to talk to each other, how to engage in a civil discussion without shouting and badgering the other by forcing her/him into submission and beating her/his brain out. With modernity and with the popular notion that all issues have been settled and that old consensus, which took human beings from the dark ages to Enlightenment, societies have forgotten that a debate isn’t a war. Today, having a debate means to fight an enemy, who needs to be annihilated, when it needs to be again a process where the people who argue that they are on the side of righteousness or of reason have the responsibility and even the obligation to persuade, to convince. Intellectual laziness is leading people to resort to emotions to avoid doing the hard work of thinking through an issue and of making arguments that would take discussions from the “You are mean and evil” to the “I will prove you wrong.” We like in a world full of presumptions, assumptions, and received ideas because the pretext that history has ended has been used as an excuse to stop thinking, to stop listening and to stop debating since everything has not been said already and all debates have been settled.

I have always found the idea of hate speech problematic because speech is supposed to be free and because once you put the epithet “hate” in front of it, you are implicitly saying that it isn't free unless it expresses a lovely and beautiful sentiment and that there is only place for love in the world. The inability of those who defend great causes to defend them without becoming mindless and fierce zealots frightens me. These noble “fighters” almost always end up convinced that their adversaries are not only wrong, but evil, which means that they cannot change and that for that reason, debate is useless. Modern societies for all of its Enlightenment values and for its secularism have been evangelized in the sense that everything has becoming sacred. For  that reason, debate is blasphemy and people who go against the norms are treated as sinners who ought to be excommunicated. Thus, the modern world is a sect where all questions become challenges to the sacred. Discussion is impossible because it is sinful to question the sacred and to take the viewpoint of the unbelievers and  the sinners seriously by debating rationally with them. Our time is one where the righteous are always victims and saints or the mighty and strong believers in the fact that might makes right and unchallenged authority.

This sad reality takes me back to André Glucksmann’s argument that the world is being “somalized” and I wonder whether it is possible to stop this Somalization if the only tools at the disposal of those fighting it are force and moral outrage. Voltaire, no not Voltaire for I don’t like him. Camus didn’t become Camus by just dismissing Nazism and Fascism as evil and by refusing to take on Nazis and their absurd absolutisms. Camus became Camus because he took on the challenge to think in an age where thought was believed to lead only to alienation and nihilism. He showed with the force of his arguments that ethics matter and that even if God doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean that nothing is forbidden. At the end, the challenge of our time isn’t just survival and Somalization. The challenge of our time is never to forget that to remain modern, moral and rational, our societies must never renounce debate and accept divinization to run away from its duty to perpetually justify its principles and its actions. Thus, they should welcome challenges because they give it the opportunity to convince. What is sad and dangerous is that today, most people have accepted to become little Gods or rather semi-Gods to be able to just issue condemnations, fatwas, without judgments, without trials, without debate.

A Dutch and a Western Tragedy

Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie express in an op-ed their principled outrage over the fate of Ayaan Hirsi Ali “condemned” to live like a prisoner because the Dutch government has refused to pay for her security:

Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
[…] There is also the matter of broken promises: Hirsi Ali was persuaded to run for parliament and to become the world's most visible and imperiled spokeswoman for the rights of Muslim women, on the understanding that she would be provided security for as long as she needed it. Zalm, in his capacity as both the deputy prime minister and the minister of finance, promised her such security without qualification. Most shamefully, Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, has recommended that Hirsi Ali simply quit the Netherlands and has refused to grant her even a week's protection outside the country, during which she might raise funds to hire security of her own. Is this a craven attempt to placate local Muslim fanatics? A warning to other Dutch dissidents not to stir up trouble by speaking too frankly about Islam? Or just pure thoughtlessness?

Victimizing Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I have had my differences with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but I can’t argue with the fact that she is a courageous woman whose voice is essential not only in the debate about Islam, but on everything else. For all of these reasons and because I agree with those who believe that people have the right to take on religion and even to offend the pious, I think that the fact Ali has been forced to leave the United States because the Dutch government no longer wants to pay for her bodyguards is a disgrace. It is a disgrace because it means that Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn’t have the right to be Ayaan Hirsi Ali and to defend passionately her principles because it is dangerous and too dangerous. The issue here is even larger Ayaan Hirsi Ali for it is about what the world should be for whatever what one thinks of her, the world is richer for her presence because she is a gadfly. For all of these reasons, I agree with Leon de Winter when he writes that that the Dutch Government is making a fool of itself:

There are exactly five people that the Dutch government has to protect against death threats from radical Islamists.

This sort of protection is expensive. Society bears the costs because freedom of opinion, a cornerstone of our culture, is on the line. The extremists, for their part, are prepared to risk their own lives to kill those under government protection.

The costs of protection are completely disproportionate to the outcome: the continued existence of our values and norms.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the sixth person granted protection by the Dutch government.

[…] How much is her life worth, according to Minister Balin's budget? How does he calculate this? These are politically sensitive questions, questions that former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher never asked when it came to the life of Salman Rushdie, wherever he happened to be.Dutch society has no choice in this case. Canceling Ayaan's protection would be the equivalent of a death sentence. She can lead a relatively quiet life in the United States, but not in the Netherlands. And because she is so well known in the Netherlands and practically lives the life of a prisoner, not even able to go out on the street, the most humane solution is to continue to provide her with protection in America.

Ennui, Spleen, ignorance, and the right to insult

I am all for provocation when it is based on something more than a childish attempt to attract attention and when it doesn’t use stereotypes and reinforces ignorance. That’s what Hugh Fitzgerald does in the following quote while trying to make the point, which I agree with that there are no excuses for terrorism. What is sad is that Fitzgerald uses Baudelaire and Gogol to try to cover up his ignorance and biases:

Ennui. Baudelaire's "Spleen." Gogol's "Skuchno na etom svete, gospoda" at the end of "Nevskij Prospekt." That's the ticket now.

First it was "poverty." But they all turned out to be middle-class or rich, far better off, and far better educated, than the run-of-the-mill Muslims, so it couldn't be that.

Then it was "sexual tension." But then there were those who pointed out that Bin Laden and many of his pals had all the wives they could afford, and then some, so it couldn't be that.

Now it's "boredom." So what are we Infidels to do? Shall we all become a race of Noel Cowards, with "a talent to amuse," and make sure we keep Muslims all around the world -- not known for their sense of humor -- constantly in stitches, or occupied with things to do, so that they don't, heaven forfend, become "deadly bored" with the "bored" part applying to them and the "deadly" part applying to us, their victims?

Might it, could it, just possibly be that Muslims, whose ideology covers everything, that is a religion and a politics and an economics and a geopolitics and a book of etiquette and a social order and a manual of hygiene and a guide to the right sports and a clothing guide and a guide to hairstyles and to everything under the sun, and who grow up in societies, or in families, suffused with Islam, or if they are new converts, are smothered by their minders -- they are assigned minders in the first period just after their "reversion" to make sure that there are no hitches, no backsliding, no finding out of something that might cause someone to change his mind -- with Islam, Islam, Islam, with what those texts-- Qur'an and Hadith and Sira -- say, actually have an effect on the minds of Believers, when those passages are known to all Muslims, when they are the stuff of the khutbas at Friday Prayers, when they are known or if not known by heart, known in their essence, known by the attitudes they create, the atmospherics that they give rise to.

All one needs to do to understand why Fitzgerald’s words are more insulting than provocative is to replace Muslims with another group and imagine what one can say that is horrible about it to make the point that they are responsible for their own faults. That said Fitzgerald has the right to write whatever he pleases about religion because religion isn’t sacred, that is something that can't be challenged and yes even made fun of or insulted, and that the religious, like all of the rest of the people, can be the victims of ignorance and foolish attacks masquerading as cultured analysis.

Sometimes, it really takes two

I read two articles this morning, which made my morning even though they left me very pensive. The first one is from the Little Professor on the new movie Becoming Jane, which strangely enough is not widely available in Washington DC. Sugary excerpt:

After watching the film, it struck me that biopics about the life of the author inadvertently contribute to the death of the author. That is, such films frequently represent authorship as transcription or collage; the author's own unique contribution frequently gets lost in the mix.  On the one hand, Becoming Jane does want to argue in favor of the imagination, in the form of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe.  Radcliffe's bestsellers derive, we are told, from an mental "landscape," a wild and eerie place pointedly not embodied in her reserved, restrained figure and rather shabby setting.  And Jane's own plots, we are also eventually told, will also be unreal, if in a different sense: although Jane initially rejects the comforts of poetic justice in Fielding's Tom Jones, the novel which is also the source of her sexual awakening (this is one of the more literate seduction techniques in recent memory, I must say), her experience of romantic loss teaches her the need for stories in which everyone gets their just rewards.  In that sense, the film detaches fiction from "real life."   

I have seen the movie so it would be unfair of me to make a judgment about its quality. The first thought that I had when I heard that there was a movie about Jane Austen’s life, I wondered if that wasn’t a way for the makers of the movie (and the author, Jon Spence for it is based on a book titled Becoming Jane Austen) to have it both ways. Let me explain what I mean. My guess is that the movie would have been harder to sell and to commercialize if it didn’t make the assertion that it was about Jane Austen. Thus, Jane Austen in this case is the hook to attract a wider audience even though it seems clear from the reviews and from the trailer of the movie that it may be a well-made romantic film about a young woman trying desperately to find love. How many times have we seen that before? So to make it fresh and sexy, they used Jane Austen to attract bookish people who want to know more about the writer and they use Anne Hathaway to attract a younger and hipper audience who like her in her roles in the Princess Diaries and in the Devil Wears Prada. I wouldn’t surprise if Becoming Jane were a good movie, but I wonder if it sells what it promises implicitly that is a film about the life of Jane Austen.

The second article was a post by Louise Tucker on the Blog Books of the Guardian. It is about the fact that Ann Patchett was involved in a controversy when a book Truth and Beauty (which was a good, but a difficult and exhausting read because it is so intense) about her friend Lucy Grealy was assigned to freshmen at Clemson. Some people had trouble accepting that fact and went to extraordinary lengths to prevent her from giving a lecture at the School. Sugary excerpt:

Which brings me to my question. At Clemson, the minority did not win. Patchett still gave her talk, despite her friends urging her to cancel, despite the unfriendly newspaper and TV coverage and despite the fact that her book had been described as a "sewer". But, if Clemson, in the supposedly free US, can try to ban a writer and her work on this basis, how is it any different from those who imposed a fatwa on Salman Rushdie, or tried to imprison Orhan Pamuk? If bigots and the religious right can make the most mild-mannered and uncontroversial of writers think twice about discussing her work in public, what hope is there for those whose writing is far removed from either of those descriptions? And what hope is there for education, if teachers hesitate to include titles that may cause offence? I wonder now if I would still blithely choose to teach Madame Bovary (adultery), or Orlando (transsexual, or transgendered main character depending on your perspective), or even Ulysses (all those yesses...) what happens to our education system, and to our freedom to read, if, and when, those decisions are hampered by fear?

I think that Louise Tucker puts her finger on one of the contradictions of America, which is after all the only country on earth, which guarantees the pursuit of happiness to its citizens. However, increasingly in some parts of America, some thoughts, writings, forms of expression are forbidden because they are deemed anti-American or immoral. The question of purpose and of effectiveness is never asked in this type of heated confrontation between those who value free speech and those who asserts that not all speech is free and that they know obscenity and vileness when they see them. In other words, is it rational or even American to argue that some speech is so vile that is contagious for Americans who are so weak and so vulnerable that they can only be infected by materials, which are deemed by some to be inappropriate? What I’m trying to say is that it is easy to understand why it is difficult and forbidden to read Lolita in Tehran, but not why it is the case in Clemson or any place else in the United States.

Reading Mein Kampf in Europe

Daniel Johnson writes in the New York Sun against the move to make it possible for people to read Mein Kampf in Germany and in other European countries. He argues that although denazification has worked, reading Mein Kampf may renazified today’s Europeans:

Ben Macintyre is a friend of mine. But his assumption that "Mein Kampf" is a "historical relic" and his recommendation that "everyone should read it" are not only wrong, but also dangerous.

He acknowledges the likely objections of Holocaust survivors, but only to dismiss them: "Whatever sympathy one may feel for those who suffered, no book should be banned, however pernicious." It is not a matter of sympathy for Hitler's victims — it is a matter of lending respectability to contemporary anti-Semitism, which is undergoing an alarming revival in Europe and beyond. It isn't only the stupid and the ignorant who were influenced by "Mein Kampf," intellectuals read it too. They didn't take Hitler seriously, with disastrous consequences. Later in the 1930s, it was the same editor, Geoffrey Dawson, who turned the Times into the leading mouthpiece of appeasement. People sometimes say: "If only British leaders had read ‘Mein Kampf' — they would have known what to expect from Hitler." Well, many of them did read it — and they didn't know what to expect.

[…] Nazi literature does not just circulate in the hermetic, deranged mental universe of Islamism — it is ubiquitous. That is partly because the movement has been influenced by Nazi ideas from its inception, but also because it has a similar demonology to Hitler's: purging of the West in general and Jews in particular.

When the journalist Richard Littlejohn was making a TV documentary on anti-Semitism in Britain, he was shocked to discover how easy it was to buy a copy of "Mein Kampf" in ordinary Muslim-owned stores. He found one on sale a few yards away from the house near Oxford Street where the Blair family will move when they vacate Chequers, the official prime ministerial country residence.

German denazification took a long time — and it included eradicating the influence of "Mein Kampf." What an irony if the same book were to become the vehicle for the renazification of Europe — only this time not under the swastika, but the crescent.

It is Johnson’s view on this subject that I find dangerous and even condescending. His argument is that since Europeans failed to take Nazism and Fascism seriously and since those led to the Holocaust, they should be forever be treated differently than the rest of the world for his argument is against Mein Kampf being read in Germany and Europe, but not in America or elsewhere. Johnson is in fact arguing that Europeans are not equipped with the tools necessary to resist Nazism and Fascism and that for this reason, their states should controlled their hateful impulses for fundamentalism and genocide by continuing to forbid the sale of Mein Kampf. Johnson is asserting that something within the German and European psyches led to Nazism and the Shoah and that reading Mein Kampf may unleash it once again. When Johnson attempts to tie Islamism to Nazism by stating that Mein Kampf inspires and encourages Islamism, he tries purposely to confuse the issue in an attempt to argue that just like European societies let Nazism rise, they are letting Islamism rise because they are not taking it seriously and because within them there is a disposition for these type of extremism. However, in spite of expressing his fears about extremism in Europe, Johnson never explain why reading Mein Kampf should only be forbidden in Europe and not everywhere and why history should be the sole rationale for this decision when so many, i.e. Pascal Bruckner are arguing against repentance and collective and eternal guilt. The reason why Johnson offers anecdotal evidence instead of arguments to support his central thesis is that Mein Kampf to him is a metaphor of what he must believe to be the ills of European identity, which he believes it is sick and weak because it has never being able to stand up for itself because it is too feminized and too pacified to stand up against extremism when it means being manly and using force.

The goodness of blasphemy

Christopher Hitchens in his usual blunt manner defended in Slate the need to offend God-Fearing people especially Muslims (hat tip: Michael C. Moynihan). Hitchens made the point that being afraid to offend the religious is a form of surrender against the irrational and the absurd. Moreover, to Hitchens, the issue is as much about free speech, as about a society not giving in to the extremism of faithful and not establishing special rules for them by shielding them against criticizing, dissent, and yes, even blasphemy. Sugary excerpt:

But the plain fact is that the believable threat of violence undergirds the Muslim demand for "respect."

Before me is a recent report that a student at Pace University in New York City has been arrested for a hate crime in consequence of an alleged dumping of the Quran. Nothing repels me more than the burning or desecration of books, and if, for example, this was a volume from a public or university library, I would hope that its mistreatment would constitute a misdemeanor at the very least. But if I choose to spit on a copy of the writings of Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or James Joyce, that is entirely my business. When I check into a hotel room and send my free and unsolicited copy of the Gideon Bible or the Book of Mormon spinning out of the window, I infringe no law, except perhaps the one concerning litter. Why do we not make this distinction in the case of the Quran? We do so simply out of fear, and because the fanatical believers in that particular holy book have proved time and again that they mean business when it comes to intimidation. Surely that should be to their discredit rather than their credit. Should not the "moderate" imams of On Faith have been asked in direct terms whether they are, or are not, negotiating with a gun on the table?

On principle, I agree with Hitchens, but I think that there is a middle point between surrender and full frontal confrontation. The issue is not simply a religious one, but one of cultural differences and a complex of superiority or of inferiority. I’m trying to say that confrontation is necessary in most cases because it forces a conversation about right and wrong by forcing people to understand that certain things are unacceptable and that they must tolerate accept that they are not the world and religion and culture cannot be used to justify the unjustifiable. However, a confrontation must not be used as an excuse to debase important discussions about what is permissible and inexcusable to a third grade level by limiting them to insults and childish tantrums about who is right, which God is greater, and who has superior morals. Thus, my concern is about more about the tone and style for too often people use a condescending tone and correct statements of facts to reaffirm illogically ideological preferences or simply to resort to insults to avoid debates about culture, religion, and reason.

So is Hitchens right? He is, but useful and needed conversations must not become screaming matches where the goal becomes to offend and to shock rather than to make blunt arguments about wrong, rights, God, culture, and reason. That said the age of blasphemy is over and the most important issue is no longer blasphemy or tolerance, but the willingness to accept that others have the right to offend you  and to disagree bluntly.

Holocaust Denial and Censorship

Deborah Lipstadt makes powerful arguments against censoring Holocaust deniers in an article in Spiked. Lipstadt is a respected Holocaust scholar and her arguments therefore have more weight in my view given her expertise on the subject. She argues that using the law isn’t the best way to protect history, but the facts are and I agree with her wholeheartedly. However, she also writes that she believes that those who incite people to deny the Holocaust should be pursued and that she understands the fact that Germany and Austria given the historical context have laws against Holocaust denial:

[…] I believe quite strongly that those who engage in incitement – which is often the object of denial – and lead others to engage in acts of violence should not be granted a shield of protection by the law. Some people throw stones. Others use words to encourage people to throw stones. Both are equally guilty.

Secondly, I fully understand why countries such as Germany and Austria, the countries which spawned the Holocaust, would have laws against Holocaust denial. The geographic context in which something is said is of crucial importance. The swastika or denial of the Holocaust has a different resonance in Atlanta than it does in Berlin or Vienna.

I’m not sure that I agree with the caveats that Lipstadt adds to her argument against Holocaust denial laws even though they give me pause. My concern here has to do with effectiveness. I doubt that laws can stop Holocaust deniers and those who incite them. In other words, it may make the rest of society feel good about itself especially when it has a tormented history to have laws against Holocaust denial, but the key question, which is almost never addressed, is whether the law is an effective tool in this situation. Laws more than likely would be doing more harm than good by rewarding deniers with public attention and by granting them the “holy” status of victims.

When Christopher Hitchens is right, he is brilliant...

Europe, the Holocaust, and free speech

George A. Pieler and Jens F. Laurson have an article in Reason Magazine against Europe’s attempt to make Holocaust denial a crime. They argue that making Holocaust denial a crime is a form of censorship, which is unnecessary because the Holocaust doesn’t need to be protected by restricting free speech. Sugary excerpt:

Cynical Realpolitik also betrays racist aspects of this legislation: Western Europe, where Holocaust Denial already is stigmatized or outlawed, wants to ensure its new and "less-enlightened" Eastern cousins, not always in conformity with Western sensibilities and political correctness, won't embarrass the EU. The Holocaust as such may not be an issue, given its sweeping historical weight across Europe, but the law's implications go far beyond that. What Western experience, education, and gained knowledge have made unacceptable is being legislatively-prescribed to other peoples, rather than letting knowledge, discussion (yes: demagoguery, but also common sense and fact) settle through the marketplace of ideas what should be a non-issue to begin with.
The danger is that fringe radicals will style themselves "martyrs of freedom" claiming—not without success—that what they have to say is so 'dangerous' (i.e. true—what state has to outlaw a lie?) that it needed to be banned. Trivializing or denying the Holocaust is so pernicious, it does not deserve the honor of being outlawed. That will not serve the memory of its victims, living or dead.

I agree with Pieler and Laurson for two reasons. The first reason is that such laws ineffective in the sense that they don’t stop Holocaust denial, but simply give Holocaust deniers more attention and attention in this case means more money and more followers. The second reason is that it takes Holocaust denial into spheres such as the internet where it is practically impossible to disprove by countering it with facts. Free and democratic societies have nothing to fear from Holocaust denial because they have the facts on their side. Banning Holocaust denial is a form of surrender because it says in a way that society has no other means than the law to protect its history when it has something more powerful than the law, the truth.

Explaining the wrongness of Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Halleh Ghorashi explains why Ayaan Hirsi Ali is wrong on her views about Islam, migrants and integrations and why they are too dogmatic and counterproductive. Ghorashi writes that Ali became a part of the "rightist discourse on Islam" which pictures immigrants as enemies of the state, which were the cause of their own problems. Thus, Ali is the representative of homogeneity and that makes an advocate of racism without race since her argument is that there are cultures, which are superior to others instead of saying that some races are superior to others. Sugary excerpt:

Following this argument I believe that Ayaan is certainly entitled to her ideas, but I also believe that her standpoints on the emancipation of Islamic women migrants are too simplistic, too reductionist, and too dogmatic. It seems strange when I as an ex-Marxist, a-theist Iranian refugee defend the space of Islamic migrants. For a long time I have considered Islam to be the major reason that I had to leave the country of my childhood memories and my loved ones.

It was in the Netherlands that I learned to make a distinction between a dogmatic way of thinking and someone's belief. I have learned that Islam as a religion should not be blamed as a whole because of the acts of a repressive regime. By practicing democracy in the Netherlands, I learned to respect people for their thoughts as long as those thoughts were not forced on me. And it is here that Ayaan and I differ.
It was in the Netherlands that I realized how shortsighted and dogmatic Ayaan's kind of thinking was. I found out that real Enlightenment does not come from exclusion but inclusion of thoughts. Real enlightenment means thinking and reflecting upon one's own thoughts, and being brave enough to listen to the other. The art of knowing lies not in excluding other ideas by suppressing or ignoring them, but in confronting other ideas through dialogue. The Dutch philosopher Theo de Boer makes the interesting point that real dialogue happens when one is able to suspend one's own ideas for a while in order to listen to someone else's. This he considers one of the basic conditions for any dialogue.

Ghorashi makes what I think is the most compelling case so far against Ayaan Hirsi Ali's ideas and beliefs. I think that too many people tend to be too deferential to Ali because she is first and foremost a victim and a courageous one at that. However, the fact that she is right to speak out and that her right to do so should be defended doesn't make that what she says is gospel. It means that she has a legitimate point of view, which as Ghorashi shows can be debated and contradicted.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and liberalism

Guernica has an interview with the always interesting Ayaan Hirsi Ali in which she calls in herself a liberal not in the Communist sense of the word, but in the John Stuart Mill and Classical sense of the word. I wonder if that makes her a libertarian or a conservative. Here is what I think is the most fascinating quote from that article:

I don't think I belong—the moral framework that they have to offer me is not convincing. I think they have not withstood the challenge of liberalism to Islam. I think that Islam is a challenge to liberalism too... But of course I am a product of Islamic civilization—you can call it a civilization still: my parents, my heritage, and so on—and so I have this obligation, I feel this obligation, especially in the context of now, where there is a conflict between the Islamic world and the Western world. And such a conflict—I think that I can't just lie around and be silent on that and enjoy a life of Western progress and at the same time keep quiet about what is not right with us. That's my take on it: I don't believe in hell and heaven anymore. Or angels. I think Islam is a superstition like every other superstition. But now because it's a superstition, unlike Christianity, that hasn't been tested and hasn't gone through a process of enlightenment, I think it's a dangerous superstition. […] But I think if my parents were suddenly to turn up now—because that was a conditioning that went on forever—my reflex would be to behave in a certain way—of what's expected of me.

Censorship and political correctness

Maria Grasso has an article lamenting the fact that students in Oxford can only use the word “gay” to designate a gay person. Sepia Mutiny had a post last week on the expulsion of a Student from American University for calling using a homophobic slur after being told to “go back to India.” All of this leads me to wonder where the proper balance between freedom of speech and decency not only on a college campus, but also in a democratic society. It seems to me that by censoring someone for using offensive or inappropriate, Universities are in fact giving up on their primary mission, which is to educate. Censorship or attempts to impose political correctness through inflexible rules are in fact asserting that you are not only what you say, but more importantly, that one is born a bigot and thus can never be change.

Orhan Pamuk and Exile

Orhan Pamuk who won the Nobel Prize for Literature just last year is said to have flee Turkey to live in exile in the United States. Pamuk had to face the courts of his country before for assaulting Turkishness for talking about the Armenian genocide. As one who is in favor of Turkey becoming a member of the European Union, this latest event just shows that it isn't yet ready and that its society must undergo deep changes before it becomes part of the EU.

Holocaust denial and free speech

“I’m opposed to Holocaust denial laws for three reasons. First because I believe in free speech. Governments should make no laws limiting free speech, because it is never good when that happens. Second, because these laws turn Holocaust deniers into martyrs. Look what happened to David Irving when he was released from jail in Austria– he became a media darling, given room to spout his misinformation. We should ignore them rather than chasing them down. And thirdly, and most importantly, such laws suggest that we don’t have the history, the documentation, the evidence to make the case for the Holocaust having happened. They suggest we don’t trust the truth. But we do have the evidence, and we should keep on developing it and deepening it, and we should trust it.”Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University.

Fighting for modernity

Andrew Anthony has an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Guardian in which she argues that the fight for modernity must be taken to Islam. Sugary excerpt:

She argues that Europe's determination to maintain cultural difference will lead increasing numbers of alienated Muslims to seek the unambiguity of fundamentalism. Liberals, she says, have shirked the responsibility of making the case for their own beliefs. They need to start speaking out in favour of the values of secular humanism. And they need to make clear that they are not compatible with religious bigotry and superstition. 'You have to say that if you want the Prophet Muhammad to be your moral guide in the 21st century and you are aware of the choices the Prophet Muhammad made towards unbelievers, women, homosexuals, do you really think you're going to succeed? You will get into some sort of cognitive dissonance if you at the same time want to adapt to a life here.'

Defending Jane Fonda

PZ Myers defends Jane Fonda over at Pharyngula. He makes the following point, “Jane Fonda was exactly correct on the Vietnam War; we should not have been there, we shouldn't have thrown away tens of thousands of American lives in that futile, destructive effort.” I think that Jane Fonda knows that she doesn't have anything to gain by marching or speaking against the war and that she does it not only because she believes that the war is wrong, but also because she is an informed activist. It is easy to dismiss her as part of loony left, but even when one doesn't agree with her points of view or find them outrageous, they are well thought out and based on information not just ideology.