Maryam has a post saying Bravo Charlie Hebdo, which alerted me to this cringing piece of crap in the Guardian. It’s by Philippe Marlière, who is a professor of French politics at UCL. The body of the article is a quick history of Charlie Hebdo, then suddenly in the last paragraph he flings himself down on the floor in surrender.
Of course people should be entitled to mock Islam and any other religion. However, in the current climate of racial and religious prejudice in Europe, how can these cartoons be helpful? Charlie Hebdo is waging a rearguard battle.
Helpful to what? It depends what you’re trying to “help,” doesn’t it. If you’re hoping to help defend the genuine right to mock Islam and any other religion, as opposed to a purely notional right mentioned in passing only to be negated in the next sentence, then these cartoons can be helpful by exercising the very right that Marlière pretends to affirm only to deny it in the next breath.
I mean get a bead on what you’re saying, dude. Don’t say people should be entitled when you mean they shouldn’t. Don’t say it in one sentence only to take it back in the next. Just admit it – you think people should not be entitled to mock Islam. Any other religion, yes, maybe, but Islam, no. So say that. Say that and then explain why.
Here’s something from Al Arabiya News:
I think we’re entitled to also ask whether or not such extreme love or reverence for this or that prophet is “helpful.” Why is the sensibility or wisdom of having this much religious passion never challenged? If people wish to hold their prophet in such high regard, they have to deal with the hurt that comes when he is slandered. That’s the trade-off, and to avoid it is to avoid taking responsibility for your own feelings.
The problem is that in Europe you can’t seperate this question from the problems of imigration and racism.
That’s why the cartoons have more than a whiff off “we can do whatever we want to you and we don’t give a fuck about you.”
Is it stupid to get their knickers in a twist over a cartoon? Of course it is, but there’s more to that.
In France and the UK, most recent immigrants who are muslims come from former colonies. They are underprivileged minorities who are dealing with exclusion and discrimination on a daily basis and there’s the baggage of colonialism.
It’s easy to look at the reaction of Egyptian or Iranian mullahs and pretend that it’s all one monolithic block and ignore that, if your goal is to integrate immigrants into society then it’s indeed not helpfull.
And I’ve been in this business for far to long to believe in good faith that this is just about freedom of expression. Dunno about Charlie Hebdo, but in general I’ve seen how the right just struck a different tone in the last years. Because handily the brown people they don’t like are also largely muslims. So, when it was abit frowned upon by the end of the 90’s to declare that you just hate immigrants, it is now very fashionable and totally accepted when you declare that you have a problem with Islam and that you fear about Islamist influence in society* and it’s just a coincidence that those people are also the mean brown people you hate anyway.**
*No, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t oppose Shariah law or shouldn’t fight religious influence in the public sphere and so on. But actions have effects. And if you tell a large minority casually that you hate them and don’t give a fuck about them because of guilt by association with the most extreme members of that group, you shouldn’t be surprised if they hate you right back. Sheesh, that’s not a one-way road.
** In Germany you could see this swing dramactically. When it was still popular in the 80’s and 90’s to oppose against Italian immigrants as well, this has completely stopped. And that’s not because ultra-catholic Sicilian fathers have any other ideas about the value of their daughters than conservative muslim fathers. You can also see this continuity in the people who run those groups.
Apart from the case of personal attacks, there are two main reasons why people are offended:
1. They have chosen to be offended.
2. They were indoctrinated to be offended.
In a world of 7 billion people, 1000s of gods, 1000s of religions, vastly many ideologies, and global communications, choosing to be offended is futile and self-harming. And while it is hard to undo the effects of indoctrination, at least people can learn the lesson and not indoctrinate their children in continuation.
How is protecting people from the nature of a society with free expression helping them integrate into that society? And how can immigrants in one country be protected (for integration purposes) from free expression in another country?
Islamic states are experiencing modernity being thrust upon them as a package: the global communication capability they want brings with it communications they don’t want. I don’t how how they will solve that dilemma. But immigrants from those countries can’t be kept in a bubble in the receiving country. And surely they can’t expect that the values of the receiving country be adapted for their sake?
barry pearson
It think the “free expression” defense is actually a pretty big strawman that we would see throgh easily in other cases.
It is, of course, half true: You have no right to forbid people to say stupid, bigoted shit. But you can absolutely object to what’s being said and say that people shouldn’t say it.
It’s a bit like the misogynists insisting on their right to call women “cunts” because Freedom of Speech. We see through this. We understand that their primary goal isn’t freedom of speech but to silence women.
This is, of course, more difficult with religion and I think this might be actually harder to understand from an American perspective where religion is much more salient than in most european countries.
For many immigrants in European countries who actually immigrated into the country of the former colonial power, there are two levels to this:
Level one is the religious insult. This is what’s discussed on the surface and this is what many people are hung up on: freedom of expression, freedom of speech, get over it, shut up (or leave).
Level two is more sophisticated. It’s not about freedom of expression, but about putting the darkies in their place. It’s gaslighting them, it’s the dog whilstles. It’s sending the clear message that they’re not worth shit and not welcome. Yet (with the help of religious leaders who profit from a Level 1 outrage) the constant refusal to address Level 2 (oh, it’s just a coincidence that muslims and brown people are very overlapping groups in Europe) means that muslims have no way to address their grievances. And those are not primarily that somebody drew a carricature. Those are that they’re discriminated against, demonized, othered, that their countries are fair game for bombs and drohnes. They’re constantly under attack. Then such a carricature is just the final straw.
To make this whole conflict about carricatures and religion would be like making the Irish Troubles to be about Roman Catholics vs. Protestants. That’s naive and doesn’t solve any problems.
Well, and sure you can’t protect them from what somebody in a different country does. But you can send a message that you disagree with that.
Giliell
While you’re right that it is pretty tough to separate those questions of free speech from immigration issues in Europe, in this case Charlie Hebdo is a pretty far left publication, that as always been sympathetic to immigrants. France is a very secular country and Left very often mean anti-clericalism. Their stance on Islam is similar to their strong criticisms of Christianism (Catholicism mostly, since it’s France) and even Judaism. It is even a little toned down compared to some criticism of Christianism.
“It is, of course, half true: You have no right to forbid people to say stupid, bigoted shit. But you can absolutely object to what’s being said and say that people shouldn’t say it.”
Except that it’s not just the bigoted shit that brings out the fury. It’s things like the recent non-bigoted, merely skeptical, documentary on Islam on Channel 4. It’s novels like The Satanic Verses. It’s even completely accidental things like the American military burning some prisoners’ possessions in Afghanistan which happened to contain some Qurans – an event which produced far more rioting than the deliberate murder of Afghan civilians by a deranged US soldier at almost exactly the same time.
If there is genuine ethnicity-based bigotry going on, and there is, the answer is not to silence the bigots, but to challenge their claims, and make it loudly heard that they do not speak for the majority of us secularists, and at the same time make it clear to Muslim extremists, as with any other religious extremists, that it the content of their almost-certainly factually incorrect claims about reality, and not the language they speak or the colour of their skin that we object to.
And the Northern Ireland troubles in a very real sense is about Catholics and Protestants. Not because they are squabbling other over specific points of theology, but because, without religion to make them see each other as two separate rival communities, there’s no way they wouldn’t have simply blended into each other through intermarriage by now. Just as in England there are no rivalries between Saxons and Normans any more, because no one with English roots can plausibly claim not to be descended from both groups, so in Northern Ireland, most people would by now have both native Gaelic and also Anglophone immigrant ancestry, and have no basis for identifying with only one of two separate groups if there were not a religiously inspired taboo against the two groups mixing.
I omitted a lot of the background to what I was saying about “values”, etc. I have documented it elsewhere, for example in “Dimensions of enlightenment“. I used this analysis in my post “A message of support for Rebecca Watson“. (And a similar post about Jennifer McCreight).
Freedom of expression is one of the attributes of an Enlightened society. Yes, it can be uncomfortable, but it is hard to draw a line. The UK, where I live, has laws that criminalise incitement of racial and religious hatred. But the law on religious hatred has an interesting section:
(I suspect that if the Qur’an didn’t already exist, attempts to publish it now would run into trouble with the incitement to hatred laws!)
It is vitally important to distinguish between a potentially harmful attack on a person or group of people, and criticism and ridicule of a religion or ideology. It is especially important to attack Shariah, because it is incompatible with Enlightenment, and it is Shariah that lies behind Islamic views of blasphemy. In effect, Shariah tries to protect itself from criticism.
This might be controversial: Islam must be criticised until everyone treats it as a hobby!
There’s only one reasonable argument against publishing the cartoons: The publishers generally aren’t the people who are being put at risk. They’re safe in France, while embassy staff in Muslim countries are suffering. It’s not an argument I agree with, but neither is it stupid and cowardly.
Unfortunately, Philippe Marlière doesn’t make that argument. He just whines about how the cartoons aren’t “helpful”.
Of course people should be entitled to mock Islam and any other religion. However, in the current climate of racial and religious prejudice in Europe, how can these cartoons be helpful? Charlie Hebdo is waging a rearguard battle.
Another silly attempt to conflate religion with race, thereby making cirticism of religion a form of racism.
However I do agree with the observation that Charlie Hebdo is fighting a rearguard battle, but for reasons altogether different.
In France and the UK, most recent immigrants who are muslims come from former colonies. They are underprivileged minorities who are dealing with exclusion and discrimination on a daily basis and there’s the baggage of colonialism.
Many recent immigrants to the UK are also Hindus from India, a former colony of Britian.
They’re just as brown as Muslims from Pakistan, but yet haven’t tried to blow up The Tube.
Frnance has a very large Vietnamese community as Vietnam was once a colony of France. They too are a visible minority, struggling with maginalisaion and social exclusion, and yet I’ know of not a single vietnamese neighbourhood/enclave in Paris, or indeed any other french city, that is now a violent no-go zone for non-buddhists.
So if being non-white, somewhat marginal and hailing from an ex-colony had any validity as an argument here, then why haven’t either of these two groups been engaging in violence?
Is that what we object to? I don’t think I would care so much about “the content of … claims about reality”. Life is too short.
I think what I object to far more are the nasty bits of the Qur’an which have consequences. For example: The bit about wife-beating. [4:34] The bits about not having Jews as friends.[5:51, 5:60] The bits that define women as inferior beings for the rest of eternity. (At most half as reliable in court [2:282]. Only deserving half the inheritance of their brothers [4:11, 4:176]). The bit about “slaying the pagans wherever you find them”. [9:5] etc.
But that means I object to Shariah, and a characteristic of some extremists is favouring Shariah (or a variant of it). So that is like saying “I object to everything you stand for”!
I suspect that making clear what we object to is useful as explanations to third parties, but not useful with the extremists themselves.
Mostly true, except for the fact that in this case Charlie Hebdo headquarters were burned down 10 months ago for publishing a cartoon of Mohammed in November 2011.
Ahhh… I take that back.
“Another silly attempt to conflate religion with race, thereby making cirticism of religion a form of racism.”
I don’t think this conflation is entirely disreputable, although some disreputable people do it for disreputable reasons. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are from non-white ethnic minorities in the west and this should colour our attitude somewhat to the publishing of ‘provocative’ material. But the Hebdo situation is different. The situation is being provoked by the protesters, not the publishers, and a stand needs to be made to protect western traditions of free speech which will anyway benefit the majority of peaceable Muslims.
I don’t think this conflation is entirely disreputable, although some disreputable people do it for disreputable reasons. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are from non-white ethnic minorities in the west and this should colour our attitude somewhat to the publishing of ‘provocative’ material.
The overwhelming majority of Christians are non-white as well, but no one ever conflates criticism of Christianity, and there,s a lot of it, with racism.
I find the whole view that Christinaity is somehow “white”, whereas Islam black and brown, a form of soft racism in itself.
The majority of Buddhists, on the other hand, are no doubt Oriental, but I still don’t see people criticising Buddhism accused of reworking the ‘yellow peril’ theme.
Except (perhaps) for the case of Judaism, religion and race are two entirely different things.
davidhart @8
Tangential question, but: this assertion seems to require demonstration. Religion certainly distinguishes the parties, but from the outside it seems that the meaningful distinction would be Catholics=natives=union with the Irish Republic vs. Protestant=colonist (or adherent)=part of the UK. (Disclaimer: this is a fight in which I have no dog.)
Just a quibble. There is the concept of an Ethnoreligious group, an ethnic group of people whose members are also unified by a common religious background. Jews/Judaism are not the only case; Sikhs/Sikhism is another common case (especially in the UK), and there are others.
Otherwise, I agree with your basic point.
It can sometimes be important also to bring in the word “multiculturalism”. I discuss this further at “What is multiculturalism? Is it good or bad? “.
Whoops! Wrong link for “multiculturalism”!
See: “What is multiculturalism? Is it good or bad?“.
To avoiding more innocent third parties being killed, perhaps? While the publishers of Charlie Hebdo are certainly risking their own lives, they are also risking those of many other people – or why do you think France is closing embassies, consulates, cultural centres and schools across multiple countries today? Yes of course violence is the responsibility of those who perform it, but can no-one among those cheering the trolling of Muslims even admit that there’s a moral issue involved in taking action you know may result in the death of innocent third parties?
Yes, this is the excuse racists such as the EDL in the UK have been relying on for years now: “Oh no, we’re not racists, where did you get that idea, it’s just the Islamization of Britain we’re against!”. This from people some of whom have long records as neo-Nazis. In fact, just as “sexism” covers actions that reinforce existing inequalities based on gender, whether or not the person performing those actions subjectively regards women as inferior, so “racism” covers actions that reinforce existing inequalities based on race or ethnicity – which Charlie Hebdo‘s publication of the cartoons, in the current circumstances, does, because it is, without a doubt, trolling a community which suffers from such inequalities. Try to imagine, just for a moment, being a member of that community – and let’s say one who does not, in fact, believe in or practice Islam, but has that cultural and family background. Obviously, individual responses differ, but I think I’d feel much the same as if Charlie Hebdo had put out an issue with a headline such as (the French equivalent of) “Ragheads go home”. Such implicit messages are recognised easily enough by Ophelia where sexism is concerned, but of course it’s always harder to see them when you happen to be on the privileged side of the fence.
Oh yes? Why do you think that? Why don’t you look at Maryam Namazie and think you might react the way she does?
“Helpful” and “Unhelpful” are weasel words.
…so “racism” covers actions that reinforce existing inequalities based on race or ethnicity – which Charlie Hebdo‘s publication of the cartoons, in the current circumstances, does, because it is, without a doubt, trolling a community which suffers from such inequalities. Try to imagine, just for a moment, being a member of that community – and let’s say one who does not, in fact, believe in or practice Islam, but has that cultural and family background. Obviously, individual responses differ, but I think I’d feel much the same as if Charlie Hebdo had put out an issue with a headline such as (the French equivalent of) “Ragheads go home”.
I see.
The vast majority of the world’s Christians are non-white and none too rich. Most are Thirdworlders living in hardship and poverty.
Think of Pakistan’s Christian minority, some of whom have been charged with balsphemy even though tghey’re underage and mentally handicapped. Think, too, of Egypt’s Coptic community, some of whom have been burned alive in their very own churches, or Iranian pastors languishing in jail.
Now the artist behind “Piss Christ” was white, comfortable and quite well off.
He lived, no doubt, on the privileged side of the fence.
Although, not as much as, say, all those oleaginous Saudi princes and Emirs of Kuwait presently screaming blasphemy.
So is his work, then, to be considered “racist”?
It would have to be were I to adhere to your criteria for what constitutes “racist”.
You see, if a white artist is to be considered racist because he lampoons a religion ( Islam) whose adherents are majority non-white, then it only follows that a white artist lampooning Christiantiy, a religion whose adherents are majority non-white, must necessarily be considered racist as well.
Trends@23 says
but the biography on his gallery’s website says (linked to his Wikipedia page)
I haz a cognitive dissonance.
Whether or not EDL say it, it is still true, and isn’t an “excuse” when used properly. For example, they are different concepts in UK law. A reason the law against inciting religious hatred was introduced (2006) is because Islam wasn’t covered by the earlier law against inciting racial hatred (Public Order Act 1986 s17). (While Jews, and I think Sikhs, were).
It is important to keep these meanings clear. And we need to know what we are talking about, to ensure that we don’t criticize a race but we have no qualms about criticizing a religion. Remember the 2006 Act:
“Use it or lose it” may be a popular saying but it is certainly not a universally valid principle, and there is no inconsistency in suggesting that a right is more likely to be preserved if used sparingly. Marliere’s conclusion re Charlie Hebdo may (or may not) be wrong, but if you want to attack it you are more likely to change minds if you do so intelligently (even though you have the right to do so foolishly).
barrypearson says:
In as far as Judaism and Sikhism are racial concepts, they were covered by laws relating to inciting racial hatred. Although it would have been hard to convince a court before 2006 that one were inciting hatred of such groups for purely religious reasons, if it could be done then no offence would have been committed.
The problem I have with a specific law against incitement to religious hatred is this. It seems to me quite reasonable for it to be illegal to incite hatred of a person because of their membership of, or claimed membership of, or assumed membership of a religion. However this still remains true if “religion” is replaced with “chess club.” The point being that incitement to hatred of people is what is at issue, not hatred of religions or chess clubs.
I agree!
The 2006 law followed a huge amount of public debate and criticism. It was largely seen, I think with some truth, to be providing for Muslims, an important voting group, protection that Jews could get through the racial hatred laws and that Christians (and only Christians) could get through the blasphemy laws. (The latter have now gone).
I suspect that, since these all come under “Public Order Acts”, inciting hatred of chess-club members that might lead to public disorder is covered. But the penalties, and perhaps level of evidence and so ease of prosecution, are different.
I agree with Giliell and Nick Gotts. In many developed countries, including France as well as the UK and US, Muslims are a marginalized minority group, made up mainly of people from African and Asian immigrant backgrounds. Muslims and people from Muslim backgrounds are frequently the targets of discrimination, stereotyping, and violence. (And Nick is right that far-right groups, such as the EDL, often use anti-Muslim rhetoric as a convenient cover for their racist anti-immigrant agenda.)
I think that those of us who are white Westerners need to be aware that we’re speaking from a position of privilege, and need to be aware of the social context. This doesn’t mean Islam should be immune from criticism – and I will be the first to condemn religiously-motivated violence, which is never justified – but it does mean we have to be aware of the effects of our words.
(And I don’t favour the French approach to secularism. The French burqa ban has been an unmitigated disaster (as I predicted at the time), and, far from “liberating” Muslim women, has contributed to their marginalization and oppression. You can’t “liberate” women by criminalizing them, or by dictating to them how they must behave. But that’s a tangential issue which isn’t really relevant to the OP, although the burqa ban is mentioned in the article Ophelia linked.)
====
Trends,
No. This is a false equivalence. The difference is that most of us live in societies in which Christianity is the dominant and privileged religion, whereas Muslims are an oppressed minority. Mockery of Christianity is therefore a very different thing from mockery of Islam, because it challenges existing inequalities of power and privilege instead of reinforcing them. (Of course, this is context-dependent. The situation would be reversed if we were talking about a marginalized Christian minority in a Muslim-majority country, such as Christians in Pakistan.)
You’re also misunderstanding the argument. No one said it was inherently racist to lampoon Islam simply because of the ethnicity of most of its adherents. The argument is that, in practice, actions which contribute to the stigma and marginalization of Muslims will tend, in practice, to widen existing racial inequalities.
No. This is a false equivalence. The difference is that most of us live in societies in which Christianity is the dominant and privileged religion, whereas Muslims are an oppressed minority.
Islam is not a race. There are plenty of blond blue-eyed muslims in Bosnia.
Criticisng and denouncing the theocratic/fascist aspect of Islam is not tantamount to racism
And as for being oppressed?
The muslim communities all over the West are there voluntarily. Many chose to move to both Europe and America precisely to improve their lot and to escape oppression and marginalisation.
And in any case, the rules apply no matter your social standing.
Are we to excuse, say, the rape and murder of an innocent women simply because her murderer and rapist felt marginal, powerless and “oppressed”?
Are we to ‘understand’ and ‘forgive’ that rape and murder by better appreciating the context, the sense of powerlessness the perpetrator felt?
My right to criticse, lampoon and denounce the tenors of theocratic facsim is never contingent upon either the colour of my hide, nor the colour of theirs.
My right to do so is absolute provided I do not call for murder and mayhem in the exercise of that right.
And just one more note about “Piss Christ”.
Despite the fact its author was from Latin America, the work itself was aimed at a lilly-white, upperclass audience of cosmopolitan manhattenites who could then ridicule and lampoon a religion whose adherents are mostly non-white and quite downtrodden.
But hey! They’ll suck up to, and sympathise with, the likes of Tariq Ramadan, and so they’re OK.
“Muslims are an oppressed minority”
But then many Muslims are an oppressed minority (or in fact majority) within the set called “Muslims.” Some Muslims oppress other Muslims. Often this is done in the name of Islam itself.
Generalizations about “Muslims” tend to be worthless, because it just about always depends on which ones you mean.
Yes. As far as I can tell:
The total adverse impact of the existence of Islam on the non-Muslim people of the world has been massive. But I suspect most of that is the result of decisions and actions taken by non-Muslims, rather than directly by Muslims.
At the risk of being flamed: The world’s worst-ever terrorist attack killed less that 0.1% of the US citizens who died in 2001, and so less that 0.01% of US citizens who have died this century. (One day in 2001, the background 10,000 deaths a day rose to 13,000). Those deaths are tragedies for those involved, but not an existential problem for the USA or the rest of us.
But look what we (I include the UK) have done since then as a result. Our values have become a little less enlightened. Since Islam is an unenlightened ideology whose extreme adherents object to the Enlightenment, any loss of our enlightenment is a victory for them.
(I don’t claim to have an answer).
My view of mockery of Islam is the same as mockery of Christianity:
That is: it is in everyone’s interest that such mockery be normalized, not discouraged. Whether it’s flippant, silly, rude, juvenile, absurd, insulting, thoughtful, or whatever it might be, people need to get used to the idea that it’s going to be out there if you go looking for it.
And no, I don’t care who does it, how stupid it is, how ugly or stupid anyone thinks it is. Or not much. As in, no, I won’t be writing any asinine fart jokes about anyone’s prophet (tho’ mostly because I can’t make those funny anyway), and, absolutely, if something’s genuinely and clearly racist, yes, fine, I want that discouraged, too. That, I think, is more than fair enough.
But it’s not some abstract ideal that when someone wants to make fun of someone else’s god or prophet, they should absolutely be allowed, nor is it a chip you should even be imagining put on the table. And if someone gets killed because someone takes offense, no, the person who wrote the joke isn’t a murderer, however callous or cruel or even deliberate was the apparent incitement. If someone loses it and kills someone over the mockery of a mythologized god figure that’s been made sacred and declared protected from such excesses, that someone who held the knife or the gun or who lit the fire is the murderer, not the one who scrawled something lewd on the bathroom wall. And the first accessory I’ll be looking for is the one who told them such things are sacred and that such mockery is forbidden in the first place.
In the long run, again: normalization has to be the goal. We have to get to the point that when an extremist imam wants to whip up his flock into a proper rage over random YouTube video X, his protest goes off like a damp squib because they’ve become so used to this stuff, that it’s just not shocking or particularly upsetting to anyone anymore.
We need to stick our elbows out and create space for open discussion of all religions, Islam included. We have to make it harder and harder for people to be raised in a vacuum, unaware that there are no unbelievers, unaware anyone might mock, and utterly convinced that if someone does it’s somehow your prerogative to hurt people and break things. Get to that place, and the voices from the ancient books and the frothers in their pulpits can rage on and on about what a travesty this is if they like; the world will have moved on, and that is how those voices will be made irrelevant. Get to that place, and it opens up people’s lives and minds, gets people thinking, gets people talking. Push that door open, and eventually calm and fearless scholarly secular discussion of early Islam will be that much easier for the academics. Push that door open, and Channel Four can run all the documentaries it likes, and it doesn’t matter how ‘revisionist’ is the historian scripting it. Push that door open, and one more lever for driving people to excesses is taken out of the extremists’ hands.
Religion has ever done this ‘you must respect/you must hush yourselves’ thing. It always will, if you give it even half a chance. It keeps on trying even when it has no chance, because that is central to its survival. Give it any excuse, it will try to sneak through such restrictions on that excuse, and ‘people will get hurt’ or ‘those most insulted are already oppressed and this is additionally hurtful’ will also do just fine.
And the reality about normalization is: we’re partway there already. The increasing ubiquity and interconnectedness of the data networks has changed the game already. It’s been pointed out: those imams could probably find a steady supply of perfectly insulting videos for the purposes of incitement anyway, with very little effort, just through YouTube, right now; ‘Sam Bacile”s flatulent little mess of a trailer was nothing special, in this regard. The reality is probably also: we probably can’t even change this entirely if we were stupid enough to allow legislation directed that way. Such legislation would make a life a misery for those who got caught, and would be entirely unconscionable, yes, but the light would still sneak in around it, now.
Speaking of: while plenty of attention has been paid to the geopolitical dimensions of this, and yes they are significant, and yes there is real resentment that has little directly to do with religion, and yes there’s absolutely some justification, that dynamic of increasing interconnectedness and increasing closeness is also probably significant, here. The world is changing quickly because of it, and those extremists and those religions are fumbling around, trying to work out how to survive and how to work within it. They see opportunities, but the reality is: they also have much to fear: the old formula of hushing entirely dissent and driving it out by the force of social sanction and the plain old iron fist is now greatly complicated by the many additional avenues through which people can see around the monoculture of ideas they try to create, and into a larger world. That, too, is part of what’s happening here.
So they’re off balance, and real human freedom from their previously extremely effective techniques of trapping their flock within a bubble of unquestioned dogma is opening up as a real possibility. Letting the clerics dictate the terms, doing their work for them, joining in hushing the mockery and trying to cooperate and close up the space in which it can be made just because they manage to get a tiny percentage of their population (and yes: these protests are tiny, from my understanding, against, say, the scale of the Arab Spring, and the violent elements tinier still) angry enough about is just incredibly counterproductive, utterly against the interest of anyone who wants genuine freedom of conscience to prevail, and a huge step backwards.
So if they incite by screaming ‘thou shalt not mock’, focus your criticism on them. And, conversely, if the Copts want to make fun of the Muslims, or the Muslims want to make fun of the Copts, I say: shrug and say: that’s your right. Because it is. And it should be. And it’s in everyone’s interest that it should be.
Now: I am absolutely grateful to those trying to tamp down the discord, here get some calm restored, stop people getting hurt. I am beyond grateful to those who step up and say any statement is racist when it clearly is…
But as that former thing, I don’t think we need to compromise the longer view in doing so, at all, anyway. Remember: the protests are relatively small. The Salafists are making a power play, here, and it’s probably winning them a few more loyalists, but it’s costing them, elsewhere, too. There are a lot of people in the countries effected who are pissed off those who talked this stuff up, and just want things to calm down.
So it’s back as always to diplomacy and discussion. Calm. Keeping your sense of proportion. Keeping in mind the long view. You probably can’t often say ‘Great video, that’ (and as widely noted, it’s not, particularly, anyway), but you can absolutely say ‘Look, these are our laws, and that is anyone’s right under them’, and people will accept it. There are those of them who don’t see anything wrong with the larger direction I’m seeking here, anyway, others who may not much like it, but probably do realize and/or fear: that’s probably where the wind is going eventually anyway.
So summing up: fine, call out racism, where you really see it. But do not forget this larger direction, in doing so. And do not assist anyone trying deliberately to close in the boundaries of discussion around their sacred cows, whatever you do.
Mind if I make that a post AJ?
Ok I’ll take silence to mean consent.
Oh. Yes. Quite fine. Thanks, even.
Just got back to the net, is all. Takes a bit to type something like that. Recharge phase, y’know.