Free Speech Is No Offense
Angry Muslim reaction after last week's decision by Queen Elizabeth to knight Salman Rushdie came as no surprise. Unfortunately, too many people do not understand the serious consequences of misplaced respect for offended religious feelings. A prime example - the United Nation's Human Rights Council's passage of a scandalous resolution condoning state punishment of speech deemed insulting to religion, which helps regimes that silence criticism and crush dissent. by Flemming Rose
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“The only right you don’t have in a democracy is the right not to be offended.”
These words by New York law professor Ronald Dworkin come to mind when reading about the angry Muslim reactions after last week’s decision by Queen Elizabeth to knight Salman Rushdie.
Unfortunately, too many people do not understand the consequences of their misplaced respect for insulted religious feelings: this respect is being used by tyrants and fanatics around the world to justify suicide attacks and to silence criticism and to crush dissenting points of view.
Here’s what Mohammed ljaz ul-Haq, the religious affairs minister of Pakistan -our ally in the war on terror- had to say about Sir Salman’s knighthood: “If someone blows himself up he will consider himself justified. How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West?”
Mohammed ljaz ul-Haq is the son of former president Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who was killed in a plane crash in 1988. One of the characters in Rushdie’s novel about Pakistan’s political turmoil, %%AMAZON=0099578611 Shame,%% is based on Zia ul-Haq. The late president’s son was later forced to soften his attack on Rushdie, but his line of “reasoning” exposes the problem in a nutshell: he is absolutely sure that blasphemy and terrorism are comparable crimes. And he can find many arguments for this perverted logic in the reactions among people in the West to the fatwa against Rushdie after the publication of “The Satanic Verses” in 1988, which was denounced blasphemous for its depiction of the prophet Mohammed.
Minister ul-Haq was joined by another cabinet member, Pakistan’s minister for parliamentarian affairs Sher Afgan Khan Niazi: “The ’sir’ title from Britain for blasphemer Salman Rushdie has hurt the feelings of Muslims across the world. Every religion should be respected. I demand the British government immediately withdraw the title as it is creating religious hatred,” he said.
Again: insult, blasphemy, respect for religion, those words are being repeated over and over again as justification for violent attacks and death threats. By the Iranian government, by the chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain, and by leading politicians and opinion makers in the West.
And they have made their way into the United Nation’s Human Rights Council, the highest ranking international body with the mission of protecting human rights. On March 30 it passed a scandalous resolution condoning state punishment of speech that governments deems as insulting for religion.
“The resolution is based in the expectation that it will compel the international community to acknowledge and address the disturbing phenomenon of the defamation of religions, especially Islam,” said Pakistan, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
What does this mean? Well, it means that the UN is encouraging every dictatorship to pass laws that make criticism of Islam a crime. The UN Human Rights Council legitimizes the criminal persecution of sir Salman Rushdie for having insulted people’s religious sensibilities. Beautiful, isn’t it?
And the Labour Government in Britain was delivering ammunition to this kind of policy when back in 2006 it put a lot of effort into passing a law against religious hatred. It failed by one vote. Salman Rushdie fought this law. In an essay “Coming After Us” for the anthology “Free Expression Is No Offense” he wrote:
“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until religion came after me… At that time it was often difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was part of a broader, global assault on writers, artists, and fundamental freedoms. The aggressors in that matter, by which I mean the novel’s opponents, who threatened booksellers and publishers, falsified the contents of the text they disliked, and vilified its author, nevertheless presented themselves as the injured parties, and such was the desire to appease religious sentiment even then that in spite of the murder of a translator in Japan and the shooting of a publisher in Norway there was widespread acceptance of that topsy-turvy view.”
Fortunately, Salman Rushdie is doing well, celebrating his 60th birthday today and working on a new novel, “a fantasia or shaggy dog story which connects Renaissance Florence with 16th century India”, as he put it in a recent interview with the Daily Telegraph.
But the fact of the matter is that by adapting the resolution against “defamation of religion” the UN has tacitly endorsed the killing of Rushdie’s colleagues in parts of the world where no one can protect them.
**UPDATE**
Ibn Warraq reacts to Rushdie’s knighthood at Northern Light.
Flemming Rose is the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten; he now blogs at PajamasXpress’ Northern Light.
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14 Comments
1. Fred Beloit:We really do need to get out of the UN and try something new to replace it. Would love to hear one of the candidates for President suggest it.
Jun 19, 2007 - 6:21 am 2. Bill:Imagine the crimes against humanity with which Christopher Hitchens (or any other godless heathen like myself) will soon be charged. When you say, “there is no god.” What does that say of the fellow who would be seen as his prophet. Oh the humanity! Oh the hurt feelings! Forget genocide, we must have our priorities.
Jun 19, 2007 - 7:48 am 3. ic:Bill: a god-denier, just have to declare Atheism a religion, and Hitchens its high priest.
Jun 19, 2007 - 9:36 am 4. Ron:A scholarly, thorough, and readable text dismantling Islam as a religion and properly identifying it as a political movement is sorely needed. Until such unveiling occurs, our sympathies to the perceived religious tendencies hamper our will to win.
Jun 19, 2007 - 6:16 pm 5. freetoken:Then the LORD said to Moses: “Take the blasphemer outside the camp. All those who heard him are to lay their hands on his head, and the entire assembly is to stone him. Say to the Israelites: ‘If anyone curses his God, he will be held responsible; anyone who blasphemes the name of the LORD must be put to death. The entire assembly must stone him. Whether an alien or native-born, when he blasphemes the Name, he must be put to death.”
Lev 24:13-16
So…. doesn’t appear to be anything new here. Those who think Rushdie should be executed are probably in the mainstream of human history, and those few of you libertines of present and past couple of centuries are the oddballs.
If the UN puts a quote from an OT prophet on its front step, then why is it unreasonable to think that the concept of blasphemy enters into the process of one of its councils?
If the majority of mankind has some religious sympathy of one kind or another, why would you not expect that an international body picks up on that nature of mankind?
Jun 19, 2007 - 11:37 pm 6. FreedomLeaver:So wheres the Laws protecting us from them. Its only the Muslims that I have witnessed rioting and killing people!
Jun 20, 2007 - 5:41 am 7. Sue:I think the trouble with us Westeners, is that we don’t realise how free we are.
So that we don’t really see the significance of these moves - by the Islamist being made against us, in the UN, etc. We are so lucky that we are born in the free world - that we have trouble comprehending what all the fuss is about in the Islamic world.
But there is also a problem with this, because the Islamists are trying to replace our way of life with theirs - they are attempting to Islamise the world. This is where Westerners need to know that these demands on our freedoms are not harmless, requests, and that they are intended to collectively erode our way of life. In this respect we could be looking back to the dark ages, to a time when scientists, artist, writers and free thinkers were all persecuted under similar religious laws.
Most of us will never venture into a Muslim country and see and really understand how restricted life is there, but we do have to try harder to comprehend our own freedom, in relation to other people’s lack of freedom, particularly in the Islamic world - because our freedoms need to be protected.
Jun 20, 2007 - 5:45 am 8. AaronZ:It is true that most Muslims are not terrorists.
It is equally true that most terrorists are Muslim.
I haven’t the answer as to why this is true but I suspect when we find the answer we will be a lot closer to solving this problem.
Jun 20, 2007 - 11:39 am 9. Shome Mishtake:Has anyone noticed the similarity between Dame Jade Goody and Sir Salmon?
Both have brought a lot of money to media interests, both get death threats, both induce burning protests in ex-colonies, both went to elite universities, both get considerable coverage of what they do in public, both have interesting “partners”, both have rudely challenged “sacred cows”.
Jun 20, 2007 - 12:39 pm 10. marketeer:In the “West” the approval meter for Rushdie (though not necessarily for all he says or believes) has been evidenced by the sales of his books. There had already been a vote on this. There had also been some retreat from his opponents.
Now the “State” has been hijacked by some unelected, unaccountable “board” to stamp “State” approval on what has already been approved and has stirred up some “State” reactions. This is in fact totally unnecessary from any point of view other than for its own aggrandisement.
For this reason I see no problem with the “State” apologising for causing other “States” offence on their own behalf without dragging the readers into it.
Jun 21, 2007 - 6:42 am 11. Fafyrd:Another reason why we need to leave the UN and support congressmen & candidates who list that as a goal.
We can see the protection of Islam as an immediate effect but this resolution could affect any.
Jun 21, 2007 - 4:09 pm 12. ben:Islam is a religion which condones acts which we (the west)consider normally illegal and violent such as murder, stealing etc. as long as these acts are perpetrated upon non Islamists. The West would do well to prohibit all immigration of these people or we will be seeing religious violence in this country escalate as these people have the opportunity to commit these acts against us. You cannot mix Christianity and Islam. It’s like water and oil. I hope our congress will realize this and acts to protect us from these nut-jobs before it is too late. Please congress save us from these people.
Jun 22, 2007 - 4:42 am 13. KA:Aaron Z,
“It is true that most Muslims are not terrorists.
It is equally true that most terrorists are Muslim.
I haven’t the answer as to why this is true but I suspect when we find the answer we will be a lot closer to solving this problem.”
It’s because there is an ideology that exists and is spread by Muslims (not all, but enough to create the problem we have today) that justifies what we call acts of terror in the name of their cause. This ideology is actively taught in schools to the relatively young population of the Muslim world, and in that sense I think we know what the problem is, but we haven’t yet figured out the solution.
Jun 22, 2007 - 8:26 am 14. wayne:The most outrageous thing about this whole deal is that I’ll bet not one of the (goat-diddling, boy-molesting, sharia’-touting, knuckle-dragging, woman-beating) mullahs and ayotollahs have even read the book.
I’ve read it. There is NOTHING in there. Some sarcastics comments about how Mohammed would view modern Indian Islamic culture. Whoopie. Even the Danish cartoons were at least 50 times as offensive as what is in Satanic Verses.
If this is the truly representative of the intelligence of those who follow the religion of Islam … this is a verse that only Satan could appreciate.
Jun 22, 2007 - 2:33 pm