By Sam Harris.
An excellent article IMO.
Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become
the
latest projectile in the world's most im****tant culture war: the zero-sum
conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives
under perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15
minute film entitled Fitna ("strife" in Arabic) over the internet. The
film
has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence
with passages from the Qur'an. Given that the perpetrators of such
violence
regularly cite these same passages as justification for their actions,
merely depicting this connection in a film would seem uncontroversial.
Controversial or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists
in
every free society to strenuously defend Wilders' right to make such a
film.
But then one would be living on another planet, a planet where people do
not
happily repudiate their most basic freedoms in the name of "religious
sensitivity."
Witness the free world's response to Fitna: The Dutch government sought to
ban the film outright, and European Union foreign ministers publicly
condemned it, as did UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Dutch television
refused to air Fitna unedited. When Wilders declared his intention to
release the film over the internet, his U.S. web-host, Network Solutions,
took his website offline.
Into the breach stepped Liveleak, a British video-sharing website, which
finally aired the film on March 27th. It received over 3 million views in
the first 24 hours. The next day, however, Liveleak removed Fitna from its
servers, having been terrorized into self-censor****p by threats to its
staff. But the film had spread too far on the internet to be suppressed
(and
Liveleak, after taking further security measures, has since reinstated it
on
its site as well).
Of course, there were immediate calls for a boycott of Dutch products
throughout the Muslim world. In response, Dutch cor****ations placed ads in
countries like Indonesia, denouncing the film in self-defense. Several
Muslim countries blocked YouTube and other video-sharing sites in an
effort
to keep Wilders' blasphemy from penetrating the minds of their citizens.
There have also been isolated protests and attacks on embassies, and
ubiquitous demands for Wilders' murder. In Afghanistan, women in burqas
could be seen burning the Dutch flag; the Taliban carried out at least two
revenge attacks on Dutch troops, resulting in five Dutch casualties; and
security concerns have caused the Netherlands to close its embassy in
Kabul.
It must be said, however, that nothing has yet occurred to rival the
ferocious response to the Danish cartoons.
Meanwhile Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish cartoonists, threatened to
sue
Wilders for copyright infringement, as Wilders used his drawing of a
bomb-laden Muhammad without permission. Westergaard has lived in hiding
since 2006 due to death threats of his own, so the Danish Union of
Journalists volunteered to file this lawsuit on his behalf. Admittedly,
there is something amusing about one hunted man, unable to venture out in
public for fear of being killed by religious lunatics, threatening to sue
another man in the same predicament over a copyright violation. But it is
understandable that Westergaard wouldn't want to be repeatedly hurled at
the
enemy without his consent. Westergaard is an extraordinarily courageous
man
whose life has been ruined both by religious fanaticism and the free
world's
submission to it. In February, the Danish government arrested three
Muslims
who seemed poised to murder him. Other Danes unfortunate enough to have
been
born with the name "Kurt Westergaard" have had to take steps to escape
being
murdered in his place. (Wilder's has since removed the cartoon from the
official version of Fitna.)
Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been
widely
vilified for "seeking to inflame" the Muslim community. Even if this had
been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural
coincidence of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not
(and will never be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated
in
such a manner as to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only
the
Muslim community is combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna,
like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially
salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights
to
their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our
accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and
more,
taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.
There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the
Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a
religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of
course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as
it
ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we
peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful
brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and
slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily
responsible
and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and
"Islamophobia."
Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often
called
"a chilling effect" on our exercise of free speech. I have, in my own
small
way, experienced this chill first hand. First, and most im****tant, my
friend
and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali happens to be among the hunted. Because of
the
failure of Western governments to make it safe for people to speak openly
about the problem of Islam, I and others must raise a mountain of private
funds to help pay for her round-the-clock protection. The problem is not,
as
is often alleged, that governments cannot afford to protect every person
who
speaks out against Muslim intolerance. The problem is that so few people
do
speak out. If there were ten thousand Ayaan Hirsi Ali's, the risk to each
would be radically reduced.
As for infringements of my own speech, my first book, The End of Faith,
almost did not get published for fear of offending the sensibilities of
(probably non-reading) religious fanatics. W.W. Norton, which did publish
the book, was widely seen as taking a risk--one probably attenuated by the
fact that I am an equal-op****tunity offender critical of all religious
faith. However, when it came time to make final edits to the galleys of
The
End of Faith, many of the people I had thanked by name in my
acknowledgments
(including my agent at the time and my editor at Norton) independently
asked
to have their names removed from the book. Their concerns were explicitly
for their personal safety. Given our shamefully ineffectual response to
the
fatwa against Salman Rushdie, their concerns were perfectly
understandable.
Nature, arguably the most influential scientific journal on the planet,
recently published a lengthy whitewash of Islam (Z. Sardar "Beyond the
troubled relation****p." Nature 448, 131-133; 2007). The author began, as
though atop a minaret, by simply declaring the religion of Islam to be
"intrinsically rational." He then went on to argue, amid a highly
idiosyncratic reading of history and theology, that this rational
religion's
current wallowing in the violent depths of unreason can be fully ascribed
to
the legacy of colonialism. After some negotiation, Nature also agreed to
publish a brief response from me. What readers of my letter to the editor
could not know, however, was that it was only published after perfectly
factual sentences deemed offensive to Islam were expunged. I understood
the
editors' concerns at the time: not only did they have Britain's
suffocating
libel laws to worry about, but Muslim physicians and engineers in the UK
had
just revealed a penchant for suicide bombing. I was grateful that Nature
published my letter at all.
In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very
essay
you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of
Wa****ngton Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of
Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the
paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders'
film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which
responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a
"kill fee." I declined.
I could list other examples of encounters with editors and publishers, as
can many writers, all illustrating a single fact: While it remains taboo
to
criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise
to
criticize Islam. Only Muslims hound and hunt and murder their apostates,
infidels, and critics in the 21st century. There are, to be sure, reasons
why this is so. Some of these reasons have to do with accidents of history
and geopolitics, but others can be directly traced to doctrines
sanctifying
violence which are unique to Islam.
A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately
followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In
Texas,
police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage
girls
into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their
menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded
to
all major religions in the United States, its fundamentalist branch, with
its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides
(and, therefore, child rape) is often ****trayed in the press as a depraved
cult. But one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the
aggregate and in terms of its most negative instances, is far more
despicable than fundamentalist Mormonism. The Muslim world can match the
FLDS sin for sin--Muslims commonly practice polygamy, forced-marriage
(often
between underage girls and older men), and wife-beating--but add to these
indiscretions the surpassing evils of honor killing, female
"cir***cision,"
widespread sup****t for terrorism, a ****ographic fascination with videos
showing the butchery of infidels and apostates, a vibrant form of
anti-semitism that is explicitly genocidal in its aspirations, and an
aptitude for producing children's books and television programs which
exalt
suicide-bombing and depict Jews as "apes and pigs."
Any honest comparison between these two faiths reveals a bizarre double
standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the
marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children.
But,
leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could
we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children
of
traditional Islam?
What about all the civil, freedom-loving, moderate Muslims who are just as
appalled by Muslim intolerance as I am? No doubt millions of men and women
fit this description, but vocal moderates are very difficult to find.
Wherever "moderate Islam" does announce itself, one often discovers frank
Islamism lurking just a euphemism or two beneath the surface. The
subterfuge
is rendered all but invisible to the general public by political
correctness, wishful thinking, and "white guilt." This is where we find
sinister people successfully posing as "moderates"--people like Tariq
Ramadan who, while lionized by liberal Europeans as the epitome of
cosmopolitan Islam, cannot bring himself to actually condemn honor killing
in round terms (he recommends that the practice be suspended, pending
further study). Moderation is also attributed to groups like the Council
on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamist public relations firm
posing
as a civil-rights lobby.
Even when one finds a true voice of Muslim moderation, it often seems
distinguished by a lack of candor above all things. Take someone like Reza
Aslan, author of No God But God: I debated Aslan for Book TV on the
general
subject of religion and modernity. During the course of our debate, I had
a
few unkind words to say about the Muslim Brotherhood. While admitting that
there is a difference between the Brotherhood and a full-blown jihadist
organization like al Qaeda, I said that their ideology was "close enough"
to
be of concern. Aslan responded with a grandiose, ad hominem attack saying,
"that indicates the profound unsophistication that you have about this
region. You could not be more wrong" and claiming that I'd taken my view
of
Islam from "Fox News." Such maneuvers, coming from a polished,
Iranian-born
scholar of Islam carry the weight of authority, especially in front of an
audience of people who are desperate to believe the threat of Islam has
been
grossly exaggerated. The problem, however, is that the credo of the Muslim
Brotherhood actually happens to be "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is
our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of
Allah is our highest hope."
The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is
simply
not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself
speculate
that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves
acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every op****tunity and to
deny
it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and
religious apology. Many western scholars, like the much admired Karen
Armstrong, appear to live in just such a place. All of their talk about
how
benign Islam "really" is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism
exists
in all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of
our
time: Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers
of
the world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society. A recent poll
showed
that thirty-six percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) believe that a
person should be killed for leaving the faith. Sixty-eight percent of
British Muslims feel that their neighbors who insult Islam should be
arrested and prosecuted, and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish
cartoonists should have been brought to justice. And these are British
Muslims.
Occasionally, however, a lone voice can be heard acknowledging the
obvious.
Hassan Butt wrote in the Guardian:
When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British
Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist
groups
linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in
celebration
whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of
terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.
By
blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's
bombs'
line did our propaganda work for us. More im****tant, they also helped to
draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence:
Islamic theology.
It is astounding how infrequently one hears such candor among the public
voices of "moderate" Islam. This is what we owe the true moderates of the
Muslim world: we must hold their co-religionists to the same standards of
civility and reasonableness that we take for granted in all other people.
Only our willingness to openly criticize Islam for its all-too-obvious
failings can make it safe for Muslim moderates, secularists,
apostates--and,
indeed, women--to rise up and reform their faith.
And if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the
western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and Muslims too
immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse. As Ayaan
Hirsi
Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous form of "affirmative action" at
work, especially in western Europe, where Muslim immigrants are
systematically exempted from western standards of moral order in the name
of
paying "respect" to the glaring pathologies in their culture. Hirsi Ali
has
also observed that there is a quasi-racist double-think on display
whenever
western powers trumpet that "Islam is peace," all the while taking heroic
measures to guard against the next occasion when the barbarians run amok
in
response to a film, cartoon, opera, novel, beauty pageant--or the mere
naming of a teddy bear.
Have you seen the Danish cartoons that so roiled the Muslim world?
Probably
not, as their publication was suppressed by almost every newspaper,
magazine, and television station in the United States. Given their
volcanic
reception--hundreds of thousands of Muslims rioted, hundreds of people
were
killed--their sheer banality should have rendered these drawings
extraordinarily newsworthy. One magazine which did print them, Free
Inquiry
(for which I am proud to have written), had its stock banned from every
Borders and Waldenbooks in the country. These are precisely the sorts of
capitulations that we must avoid in the future.
The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we need more
criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that not
even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it. As Ibn
Warraq, author of the revelatory Why I Am Not a Muslim, said in response
to
recent events:
It is perverse for the western media to lament the lack of an Islamic
reformation and willfully ignore works such as Wilders' film, Fitna. How
do
they think reformation will come about if not with criticism? There is no
such right as 'the right not to be offended; indeed, I am deeply offended
by
the contents of the Koran, with its overt hatred of Christians, Jews,
apostates, non-believers, homo***uals but cannot demand its suppression.
It is time we recognized that those who claim the "right not to be
offended"
have also announced their hatred of civil society.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/losing-our-spines-to-save_b_100132.html
--
femail1583@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|
