Stand up, Speak Out



David Aaronovitch writing The Times makes a powerful argument that liberal, secular democracies around the world have stepped on to a slippery slope by being so mealy mouthed in their condemnation of Islamic extremism.

I agree and if you ask me this all began with the UK's failure to defend and stand up for the author Salman Rushdie who was issued with a 'fatwa' over the publication of The Satanic Verses (not an cartoon in sight) and since then it's been all largely downhill.

As David Aaronovitch says, it's amazing to think that less than a year ago a huge row erupted inside a mainstream UK political party (the Lib Dems) with seemingly normal people calling for Maajid Nawaz to be rejected as a Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for tweeting a depiction of Jesus and Mo, thereby allegedly insulting Islam.

You couldn't make that up and there are countless more examples of decent people 'kow towing' to this kind of nonsense by having anguished debates about whether full-body veils should be allowed in court or whether gender-segregated seating should be acceptable during university debates.       

No right thinking person would respond to an attack on a mosque or a synagogue by suppressing images of mosques or synagogues, so how can self-censorship play a role in an open and honest debate about what some people regard as blasphemous or offensive to their religious beliefs.

If you follow that kind of Alice in Wonderland logic, Monty Python's 'Life of Brian' would have been withdrawn or banned years ago.    


Our cowardice helped to allow this attack

By David Aaronovitch - The Times

Decency towards Muslims – laced with a certain fear – has made Britain reluctant to satirise their religion openly

Yesterday in Paris we in the west crossed a boundary that cannot be recrossed. For the first time since the defeat of fascism a group of citizens were massacred because of what they had drawn, said and published. Or else, in the case of the murdered police officers, because it was their job to protect such citizens. Children lost parents, parents lost children and for what? For the cretinous notion that a deity who supposedly made the Universe, the world and everything in it would give a fart in a gale about whether an insignificant speck of humanity drew a picture of a man in a turban and called it Muhammad?

God, of course, is not mocked, but Man. The cartoonists cannot unmake the creation if it happened. They can’t storm the ramparts of heaven and topple the celestial throne. But they can make the believer feel silly. They can suggest that the divine is in fact claybound, that the ineffable is really just another bloke in a robe. They can suggest, with an immediacy that a column lacks, that the grandest conceit is exactly that — a conceit — and all the more absurd for being so grand. No one who kills for God, therefore, is killing for anyone but themselves and then because, really, they cannot bear to be thought silly.

Journalists and writers have been violently attacked before here in the west. The Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses was shot and nearly killed in Oslo in 1993. Eleven years later a “controversial” film-maker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered in Amsterdam by a Dutch Muslim outraged by a short film that Van Gogh had made. Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine whose staff were slaughtered yesterday, had been firebombed three years ago after the publication of a cartoon depicting Muhammad. In 2010 a Somali-born Muslim broke into the house of the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard (another depictor of the founder of Islam), armed with an axe.

Appalling as these attacks were, they were generally the work of disorganised loners. The real consequences of organised violence in response to supposed “insults” to Islam and the prophet were felt in Muslim countries themselves. That’s where the riots took place and the embassies were set on fire.

Until yesterday. As of now there is not a broadcaster, a newspaper, a magazine, a publisher in the democratic world that is not reviewing its security and imagining what would happen if the murderers turned up at their place. Where the killers’ cars might draw up, whether they’d use grenades to get past the man who stands at the door and gives you the once-over, whether they’d use the lifts or the stairs.

Who would they be? We know who they’d be. They’d be Muslim men, sometimes converts, who had lived among us for years. French Muslim leaders acknowledged this when they went to the scene of the Paris massacre within hours of the killings. “They have hit us all,” the leaders said. “We are all victims. These people are a minority.”

In the week when thousands of Germans in Dresden and elsewhere marched again in vague opposition to the Muslim presence among them, the Charlie Hebdo massacre seems like a gigantic placard held above them reading: “See? Told you!” This, a buoyant Marine Le Pen will remind French people, is what you get. And even some liberals who loathe the National Front will agree, in sadness.

The problem is, you may think, that even though the vast majority of Muslims would no more kill a cartoonist than a Methodist would, they still don’t quite get our commitment to freedom of speech. When they complain about insults and say they’re angry about this or that being published and want it banned, then they create the permissive fluid in which the violent zealot swims.

So we need to be clear, for everyone’s sake, and at the moment we are anything but. This is the deal for living together. The same tolerance that allows Muslims or Methodists freedom to practise and espouse their religion is the same tolerance that allows their religion or any aspect of it to be depicted, criticised or even ridiculed. Take away one part of the deal and the other part falls too. You live here, that’s what you agree to. You don’t like it, go somewhere else.

The countries of Europe need the same glacial clarity that governs free speech in America. There shall be no law (or action) that abridges the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for redress.

And there’s something else we need to do. A reason why Charlie Hebdo could be singled out for attack is because the rest of us have been cowards. There should, of course, be satires on Islam as on Christianity as on capitalism as on Russell Brand. But there aren’t. Part of this is because of a misplaced decency (“why make people feel uncomfortable?”) but most of it is fear.

Let me remind readers that just under a year ago there was a minor British controversy about a cartoon called Jesus and Mo, which depicted a nice-looking Jesus and a nice-looking Muhammad. A Muslim politician, Maajid Nawaz, tweeted this cartoon to demonstrate its anodyne quality and was rewarded by a campaign against him on the basis of insulting the prophet.

The BBC’s Newsnight hosted a discussion but would not show the cartoon being discussed. There was “no strong journalistic reason to use it”, said the programme editor, ludicrously. Channel 4 Newsshowed part of the cartoon but with Muhammad blanked out.

They weren’t the only ones — as far as I know no one but tweeters published it. Newspapers don’t like insulting the religious. That’s a genuine inhibition. But the main reason was given yesterday by the blunt editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, and it’s the reason that all seasoned hacks know: fear of violence and a sense of responsibility towards employees. Is publishing X worth the risk that some demented Godnik will turn up at your door with a carving knife and a selfie-stick?

But that logic leaves the likes of Charlie Hebdo, who are more reckless or more committed to freedom of expression, looking like eccentric and isolated stand-outs in a sea of slightly shamed discretion. We who don’t publish what may offend Muslims but would offend no one else, act in in effect to abnormalise what should be normal — we help to make peculiar that which should be banal.

We have operated a Muslim double standard and in so doing we have gently connived in turning Charlie Hebdo and others like them into targets. Paris says we must stop.

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