The Republic of Dissent

The right to be hateful

From Wendy Kaminer:

Death, disease, war and genocide are tragic; famine is tragic; climate change is potentially tragic. An isolated incident of anti-Semitic graffiti is unsettling and lamentable, but it is hardly a tragedy. It is human nature. Few of us will go through life without being insulted or disliked on account of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or other immutable characteristics. People can be mean and stupid. People harbour biases; they always have and always will, and their right to believe in the inferiority or sinfulness of particular groups is the same as your right to believe in equality.

America's, and for that matter the world's, increasing obsession with purity bugs me. It kills debate with self-righteousness and the idea that being right affords one the right to be ignorant, intolerant, and obnoxious.

 

Writing, speech, and politics

From Mo Yan's Nobel Lecture:

I am as uncomfortable and as annoyed  with Yan's defense of what he calls 'necessary censorship' as I am with the oppressing notion that writers and their writing are always and solely pawns on a bigger political chessboard.  It is true that being politically neutral is almost impossible for a writer, but so is being right especially when s/he believes that being a great writer means being a decent politician or even just a good intellectual. 

 

 

The vices of American higher education

Sugary excerpt of the day from Tim Black:

(...) if many of those passing through higher education are not only taught to believe that there are certain things you must not say, but are also actively discouraged from engaging in vigorous intellectual debate, is it any wonder that national debate is so often intellectually flaccid, and divided by sides that seem incapable of hearing the other’s argument. While the incredible political and cultural polarisation evident in the US, with people seeming to live in almost entirely separate moral communities, as [Charles] Murray put it, might not have been caused by campus censorship, it has certainly not been helped by it. The uncritical self-certainty of campus life has at least served to reinforce the hyperpolarisation of public debate. (...) It is as if higher education helps to draw the battlelines in the Culture Wars, with the disputatious but prejudiced mass on one side, and the enlightened illiberal elite on the other.

Sin and crime

From Duleep Allirajah over at Spiked on the fight against racism in English football:

Racist speech is, in other words, a modern taboo. It is no longer seen as the expression of a political ideology but as something more akin to a sin. Anti-racism, by the same token, is no longer a political project but an inquisition against racial name-calling.

Hum, something is rotten in the State of Denmark...I suspect that it is the fact that modern societies are too eager to abdicate the responsibility that they have in educating their members rather than to criminalize all of their shortcomings whether or not they become criminal acts. 

Limits`

I agree wtih David Cole on this:

There is a place for limits. I am a professor. I do not tolerate, in my classroom, disrespectful speech of any kind, because it interferes with the learning environment that I seek to foster. I am also a father, and have a similar view with respect to the need for respectful speech around the dinner table. A responsible newspaper publisher might well decline to print an article that its editors were convinced was likely to spark violence. But these limits are not imposed by law, but by social norms and ethics, which are in turn informed by discussion, dialogue, and culture. Such norms are quite powerful, and ensure that for the most part, people do not use their freedom of speech irresponsibly. In those isolated instances where freedom is exercised irresponsibly, it is far better to employ more speech to condemn it (...)

The trouble is that 'modern' societies are less and less willing to educate their citizens because it requires more than the use of force and punishment and thus more willing to just squash what is considered to be unacceptable and intolerable.  

A troubled marriage

From Jonathan Turley (hat tip: Matt Welch):

The very right that laid the foundation for Western civilization is increasingly viewed as a nuisance, if not a threat. Whether speech is deemed imflammatory or hateful or discriminatory or simply false, society is denying speech rights in the name of tolerance, enforcing mutual respect through categorical censorship.

As in a troubled marriage, the West seems to be falling out of love with free speech. Unable to divorce ourselves from this defining right, we take refuge instead in an awkward and forced silence.

One caveat,  free speech isn't a western right or value. That said, I think the problem is that free speech has just become expensive for citizens who value security and comfort over pretty much everything else. It is for that reason that a knowledge citizenry is key to a liberal democracy to realize that there are certain things that can never be too costly!

The American surveillance state

From Glenn Greenwald:

(...) the fact that the US government keeps files on people who have never been charged with any crimes, let alone convicted of them, and then deems some of them to have "derogatory national-security records" is creepy indeed. Governments should not be surveilling and storing massive amounts of information about law-abiding citizens, and in free countries, by definition, they do not. But that is exactly what a surveillance state entails.

I would love to see a debate between Glenn Greenwald and Paul Krugman because the more I read them, the more I wonder what is the point of Obama's presidency? The answer to that question can't just be the other side is evil especially when the 'good guys' are doing  abominable things!

Bullying

From Wendy Kaminer:

There is much to decry in current hysteria about bullying: It teaches students that they have no right to give offence or make each other uncomfortable. It doesn’t teach them how to engage in debate. It redefines free speech as civil speech and then defines civility, between adults, as language fit for children.

I would like to be a contrarian and to agree...but I'm hesitating because I don't believe that all debates are useful.

Journalism and firebombs

Sugary excerpt on which I munch all weekend from Lawrence Pintak:

But journalism is not supposed to be a firebomb. The goal is to inform, not inflame; to understand, not distort. Isn’t that what separates it from propaganda? 

Back in 2006, after the frenzy over publication of the first set of Muhammad cartoons, many Muslim journalists simply couldn’t understand why Western news organizations would republish the offensive images just because they had the legal right to do so.

“When I insult your religion or your feelings, it is crossing the limits of freedom of expression,” Salama Ahmed Salama, the respected Egyptian columnist, told me at the time. It is a sentiment widely shared among his colleagues. In surveys I have conducted among journalists across the Muslim world, aspirations toward objectivity are always tempered by a sense that they must “balance the need to inform with the need to show respect.”

It’s likely the same reason most Western news organizations haven’t republished the topless Kate Middleton pix. Or why most US newspapers do not show dead soldiers. Or why, as I write this, I have told the head of my college’s NPR network that we will not publish the name of an underage rape victim, even though state law gives us the legal right. Such restraint does not damage our journalism.

I don't completely agree with Pintak, but  he is on to something for he has the merit to go beyond the obvious and to do more than reasserting  the principles behind the freedom of expression, That said, the issue here is one of culture in the literary sense of the word for our age is one  of hurt feelings because journalists have become everyday people who hang to their own inculture and in fact do propagandize. 

The prohibition of insults

A dumb, inaffective and dangerous suggestion from SA Hoseini:

It’s high time a law was passed around the world prohibiting any kind of defamation or insult to religion — otherwise we are going to witness a repeat of this kind of grim news — again and again and again.

The false security of consensus

Christopher Hitchens wasn't always right, but he was absolutely necessary.

It is hard to disagree with the assertion that consensus and God are, for lack of a more elegant word, suckers!

The personal is the geopolitical

Sugary excerpt from Pankaj Mishra's review of Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's memoir:

Rushdie's neat oppositions between the secular and the religious, the light and the dark, and rational literary elites and irrational masses do not clarify the great disorder of the contemporary world. They belong to an intellectually simpler time, when non-western societies, politically insignificant and little-known, could be judged solely by their success or failure in following the great example of the secular-humanist west; and writing literary fiction could seem enough to make one feel, as Tim Parks wrote in a review of Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, "engaged on the right side of some global moral and political battle".

Indeed, such complacencies of imperial intellectual cultures were what Rushdie had bravely attacked in his brilliant early phase. "Works of art, even works of entertainment," he had pointed out in 1984, "do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and … the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context." No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.

I am left wondering how much the personal even when it is geopolitical should matter in literature even when it is not fiction. Another way to phrase my discomfort would be to wonder how much who Rushdie is or isn't should affect not only how he is read, the value of his writings.

In short, I am butting heads with Mishra because although I am conceding to him that the personal is the geopolitical, I question the essential nature and even the meaning  of that assertion...

Speech

Quotes of the day, the first from A. Barton Hinkle:

The trouble with protecting feelings is that advocates of free expression have them, too: Many of them are genuinely pained by the prospect of government silencing people by threat of force. Flag-burners and bigots also have feelings – rather strong ones, judging by their willingness to suffer the hostility of their fellow citizens. Likewise, gays and lesbians have feelings that are hurt when religious conservatives call them sinful, and religious conservatives have feelings that are hurt when gay-rights activists call them haters. If we go around silencing any speech that might hurt someone’s tender ego, then before you know it nobody will be able to say much of anything. Defending free speech requires defending it when the speech makes you mad, not just the other guy. That’s a lesson that seems to need repeating – over and over.



The second from Gleen Greenwald:

My real question for those who insist that advocacy of violence should be suppressed is this: do you apply this view consistently? Do you want those who advocated the attack on Iraq - i.e., who advocated violence - to be arrested? How about those who cheer for the war in Afghanistan, or drone attacks on Pakistanis and Yemenis? The next time someone in the US or UK stands up and advocates a new war - say, attacking Iran - should they be arrested on the ground that they are advocating violence?

Or is it the case, as it certainly appears, that when people say that "advocating violence" should be suppressed, what they really mean is: it should be prohibited for those people over there to advocate violence against my society, but my society is of course free to advocate violence against them?

 

 

The age of hurt feelings

I agree wholeheartedly with Alex Massie on this:

Perhaps it wasn’t sufficiently appreciated at the time but Rushdie was the victim of a terrorist campaign. Not just Rushdie either. Anyone associated with The Satanic Verses was a target too. That meant publishers, translators, even bookshops and libraries. All these were targeted and people were murdered.

Rushdie was a test. In the west, your claim to be a decent liberal in a decent liberal society was at stake. In the east, the stakes were very much higher. Those people who pusillanimously suggested Rushdie must carry some responsibility for violence for which he bore no responsibility at all betrayed would-be modernisers in the Arab world and those Imams and other muslim “community leaders” who had the courage to say Iranian politics should reach no further than the Straits of Hormuz. Some of those people were murdered too.

All this, however, was the beginning of a time in which taking offence would be elevated to an art form. Not all such faux-outraged, manipulated, foolishness would be as consequential or as violent as the Rushdie affair but, viewed retrospectively, I think you can see The Satanic Verses as the unhappy opening to The Age of Hurt Feelings.

I am amazed that I live in an age when people can do whatever they want and can get away with unreason, stupidity and violence by asserting that their feelings are hurt as if being hurt means being right.

 

Hate speech is just too expensive

I disagree strongly with Peter Spiro on this:

(...) the Benghazi protests were prompted by this film depicting the prophet Mohammed in not very flattering terms. The equation from the protesters at the US consulate in Benghazi: this film was produced by an American; we will hold America responsible for it.

The result: national foreign relations are seriously compromised by the irresponsible act of an individual. For structural and functional reasons, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. (....) our European friends would argue that democracy is better served by banning such material. Either way, our exceptionalism on this score doesn’t serve us very well.

There are two main reasons for my disagreement.  The first has to with the definition of hate speech and who/what decides what it is. The second  is that I believe that the 'European model' isn't democratic at all, but paternalistic (mainly because of recent history) for at its core is the presumption that a society can never be mature enough to handle filth and thus the state must intervene to avoid that the kids do harm to each other.

Assange's superfluousness

I agree with Julian Ku on this, however I reserve the right to change my mind after reading what Glenn Greenwald had to say about the whole Assange show:

Assange is acting like a paranoid lunatic and it is astonishing to me that so many folks who should know better instinctively side with an accused rapist whose main argument is that the Swedish (Swedish!) justice system is being controlled by the CIA and US government. (...)n the end, (...) Ecuador will quickly tire of Assange after a few months and kick him out, especially after the global media start forgetting about him.

International cause célèbres

Sentences du jour from Brendan O'Neill:

The guilty verdict against feminist punk band Pussy Riot doesn't only point to a powerfully censorious streak in modern Russia – it also highlights the dangers inherent in Westerners' transformation of cases like this into international cause célèbres. (...)Pussy Riot have not only been screwed over by their enemies but also, ironically and sadly, by some of their so-called friends.

Unfortunately, I suspect that O'Neill is right.

 

F*ck it!

Sugary excerpt of the day from Mary Beard :

Ok let's imagine that you are listening to some news bulletin with your 10 year old. S/he says what an f-word, mummy? Do you then lie and say "oh it means funny word" or do you tell the truth and say "fucK'?

And what is the down side of telling the truth? Either they know the score, or they don't...so where is the corruption? (It reminds me, as I think I've said before, of going to Greece with the kids 20 years ago, and finding that all the Greek toddlers were supping their Coke and crisps in front of films that no under-16 would get into in the UK..and no apparent harm was being done to the Greek children.)

(...)It is also the case that words  change very quickly, and change their sensibilities. When I was a kid, I think it would have been "Fuck, b-word, c-word"....but "black" and "fuck" have swapped paces in the last few decades, so now we cant say "fuck" but we can say "black".

Kind of amazing

Sentences from Robert Wright to munch before the end of the weekend:

It's kind of amazing, when you think about it. You write a piece arguing that a given person shouldn't be allowed to write for respectable publications, and at no point do you make critical reference to anything this person has ever said or written!

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.