Author: Mick Hartley

tone of voice, which as it happens I chance to find “offensive.” (By the way, hasn’t the word “offensive” become really offensive lately?)…. The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

The contortions of the press over the cartoons affair continue to amaze. Here’s William Rees-Mogg, in the Times:

As usual, the great John Locke got it right. The world ought to be more tolerant but some things remain intolerable…..

Modern liberals may be shocked at John Locke’s final exception to the rule of toleration. “Lastly,” he writes, “those are not to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.” Modern liberals do not much worry about oaths or atheism.

Locke would not have wished to be read as though he were infallible, since he believed in reason, not authority. But his doctrine of general toleration is the more persuasive because he recognises that some things are not tolerable. These are views that are too destructive for society; one only has to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf to recognise the possibility of that.

Oh for goodness’ sake….now the cartoons are to be compared to Mein Kampf? Why don’t we just adopt sharia law and have done with it.

f being totally wonderful is going to be found offensive by the Muslim community – or rather its self-appointed hard-line spokesmen. So then, should every reference to Mohammed, for instance, be followed by the phrase, “peace be upon him”? Is it perhaps offensive to leave that out? Does the simple “Mohammed”, without the “pbuh”, come across as insufficiently reverent? A bit trivial, you might think, but then cartoons are trivial, aren’t they? Offensive sometimes, no doubt, but trivial.

And if we take it that far….well, you can see where this is going. A line has been drawn. They can define offence as they please, and we’ve given them a clear indication that we’re not going to argue about it. We are not to offend Muslims, though Muslims are of course perfectly at liberty to offend us: an opportunity they seized with relish at the recent demonstrations in London, with their placards demanding that those who insult Islam should be exterminated, and (my particular favourite) that we should “be prepared for the real holocaust“. Many of us – most of us – no doubt find this offensive, and might argue that it is in fact considerably more offensive than a cartoon purporting to be of Mohammed, but it is, after all, a free country, and policemen were on hand to make sure that the demonstrators were protected in pursuing their democratic rights to protest. But, as we now know, this is a one-way street. Because, after all, the Islamists know they’re right, and we – well, we’re not quite sure, when it comes down to it.

But what’s been most depressing this past week has been the abject performance of the British press. It would have been one thing if they’d come out with it and said, well, frankly, yes, there is a question of freedom of expression, and it would be appropriate perhaps to show solidarity with our Danish colleagues, but there are people out there with violence in mind, and we have families and safe secure lives, and really, who needs the aggravation. Not very inspiring perhaps, but at least honest. But this smug weaselly self-righteous whining about how the cartoons weren’t very good anyway, and how freedom of expression comes with responsibilities etc. etc. – it’s been a fairly nauseating experience all round. Norm looks at Simon Jenkins’ “craven piece” in the Sunday Times. The Observer features the pompous Henry Porter:

Would I have published the cartoons of Muhammad? No, they aren’t funny and, frankly, they aren’t worth the trouble. Do I applaud and defend the freedom to publish such offensive, asinine work? Yes, and that is my immovable position, as intransigent as the Muslims who have demonstrated across Europe and the Middle East.

But….

Ah yes, what a surprise: there’s a “but”. In the remainder of the article Porter drones on for a while about Voltaire before mentioning “blinkered secularism”, and finally rolls over in as dignified a manner as he can manage given that, faced with the threat of violence – sorry, the giving of offence – he’s prepared to abandon all his grand talk about principles and immovable positions. “Heightened Islamic sensitivity is something we are going to have to take on board.”

And so says all of Fleet Street.

I was going to write a post about the cartoons affair which would have linked to the latest news from Damascus, plus this by Rob at Semiskimmed, Another Memo at The Religious Policeman, and this by George Szirtes – but then I started reading the Have Your Say comments at the Beeb, and got too depressed:

I didn’t see the cartoons, but from the description of them, I can see the ignorance and arrogance of some people in Denmark to Islam and/or Middle East. It’s about respecting others’ religions and cultures, not a freedom-of-speech issue….

What a sad state of affairs. People are using the disguise of “freedom of expression” when really there is something much deeper on the agenda. This is an attack on Muslims….

I have Muslim friends and they consider emotional or non-tangible attacks more damaging than physical, because such attacks, as they have explained to me, strike at the essence of a people. The West has not only attacked the Muslims but has done so by the worst possible means….

If people insist in the right to free speech as they call it, then they shouldn’t be surprised when they get hit when they offend someone. Personally I have nothing but admiration for the Muslims in the way they support their religion. Its a shame the west doesn’t support its religions to the same degree….

But this interesting insight into Muslim dietary habits cheered me up a bit:

It is not just the matter of pasteurising the Holy prophet with a bomb turban. Any sort of pasteurisation is not acceptable as that is against the Islamic faith in order to protect the monotheist belief.

scientious about protecting the brand”.

The implication of the remark is fascinating. It is that the only people whose feelings artists, newspapers and so on should consider are those who protest violently. The fact that Christians nowadays do not threaten to blow up art galleries, invade television studios or kill writers and producers does not mean that their tolerance is rewarded by politeness. It means that they are insulted the more.

Right now, at the fashionable White Cube Gallery in Hoxton, you can see the latest work of Gilbert and George, mainly devoted, it is reported, to attacks on the Catholic Church. The show is called Sonofagod Pictures and it features the head of Christ on the Cross replaced with that of a primitive deity. One picture includes the slogan “God loves F***ing”.

Like most Christians, I find this offensive, but I think I must live with the offence in the interests of freedom. If I find, however, that people who threaten violence do have the power to suppress what they dislike, why should I bother to defend freedom any more? Why shouldn’t I ring up the Hon Jay Jopling, the proprietor, and tell him that I shall burn down the White Cube Gallery unless he tears Gilbert and George off the walls? I won’t, I promise, but how much longer before some Christians do? The Islamist example shows that it works.

There is a great deal of talk about responsible journalism, gratuitous offence, multicultural sensitivities and so on. Jack Straw gibbers about the irresponsibility of the cartoons, but says nothing against the Muslims threatening death in response to them. I wish someone would mention the word that dominates Western culture in the face of militant Islam – fear. And then I wish someone would face it down.

Via Clive Davis, though I’ve no idea what Clive means when he says that “both sides of the argument get an airing” here.

This‘d make a Guardian reader choke on their muesli (via):

Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.

This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: it was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British Imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic Imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples.

What’s happening over at Harry’s Place? First Brownie:

I stand by my view that no constructive purpose can be served by the publication of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in other journals across Europe. The message that liberal democracies will continue to assert the primacy of free speech, even where that risks offending religious sensibilities, has been sent and we should continue to send it.

And we continue to send it by…..backing down and apologising when confronted with the threat of violence.

Then, in the next post, Gene:

[H]ow many of those with a “rub it in their faces” attitude toward the cartoons would be willing to stand face-to-face with a group of striking bus drivers in Tehran and tell them, in effect, “I support your cause, I wish you the best in your struggle against the regime, but I also think your deeply-held religious beliefs are a bunch of crap. And furthermore, I think cartoons featuring your most revered religious figure, which you may find deeply offensive, ought to be published as widely and as often as possible until you learn to stop complaining about it. But hey, solidarity forever.”

Which makes sense if you think that:

a) the purpose of republishing the cartoons is to “rub it in their faces”, and,

b) the newspapers that have published the cartoons are saying that they think Islam is a bunch of crap,

both of which are precisely the distortions promulgated by those Islamists seeking to make something out of all this nonsense, (as opposed to the real reasons for republishing – showing solidarity with colleagues under threat, and affirming the right to freedom of expression in the face of violent intimidation),

and c) those striking bus drivers, detained without trial in the prisons of Tehran, can think of nothing that concerns them more than some cartoons printed four months ago in a Danish newspaper.

eek with the Danish intelligence service, which called the situation “very, very tense”.

He said that a text message had been sent to the mobile phones of young Muslims “telling people not to react to provocations from Right-wing extremists, like burning the Koran, but I know some Muslims will not listen to our message”.

He said the level of anger was “very high” in the Muslim community across Europe and the wider world.

“It is more likely [than not] that any minute we will hear of violence unless the police can control the situation.”

Mr Akkari is the spokesman for a group of Danish imams and activists who brought the cartoons – plus three more offensive ones from an unknown source – to the wider attention of Muslims in trips to Egypt and Lebanon. One of the three new cartoons shows Mohammed with a pig’s snout.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Akkari referred to the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands in 2004. Mr van Gogh was shot and stabbed to death by a Muslim extremist as “punishment” for making a film about the repression of Muslim women that included images of naked women with Koranic verses on their skin.

“For four months we have been trying to take this conflict in hand politically and by the legal system so that we should not see any scenario like Holland,” Mr Akkari said.

I don’t know what that “not” is doing in the last sentence. Clearly Akkari has been doing everything he can – including dreaming up three more offensive cartoons, including Mohammed with a pig’s snout, which were never part of the original twelve – to ensure that the affair will end in violence.

those newspapers in Europe which have, in marked contrast to the Times and the rest of the British press (as far as I’m aware), shown at least some degree of courage.

Nathan Sharansky sums up the Palestinian election:

To the outside world, the Palestinians have now chosen the party of terror over the party of peace. But in the eyes of most Palestinians, the differences between Hamas and the “moderate” Fatah were not primarily in their views toward Israel. In fact, satellites of Fatah, such as Tanzim and the Al Aksa brigades, were no less responsible for the terrorism against Israel than were Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Indeed, the leading figure on Fatah’s list was Marwan Barghouti, a man serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison for his role in terror attacks.
No, the real difference for the Palestinians was that a Fatah-run Palestinian Authority was rightly seen as a corrupt and feckless organization that had done and would continue to do nothing to improve Palestinian lives, whereas Hamas was untainted by corruption and appreciated for providing real social services.
With the vote being a choice between corrupt terrorists dedicated only to themselves and honest terrorists who are also dedicated to others, is it any surprise that Hamas won by a landslide?