Nick linked to a piece by Mehdi Hasan so I just had to go read the whole thing. I do not like it. I never do like what Mehdi Hasan writes or says.
He frames this as an open letter to “Dear liberal pundit” – which is annoying. Should we reply “Dear conservative Muslim pundit”? Or should we play at being grown-ups.
The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it “a war declared on civilisation”. So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a “clash of civilisations” and referred to “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”.
In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)?
Yes of course it fucking was, you buffoon. Do you think writers who criticize Islam feel safer today than they did on January 6th? Do you think the Charlie Hebdo massacre sent no message at all?
It’s easy for Mehdi Hasan to be smug, isn’t it, because he knows no one is going to burst into his office or study and machine gun him to death.
Yes, the Charlie Hebdo massacre was indeed an attack on free speech. Of course it was.
Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.
Yes, that’s right – and drawing the line at “anything critical of Islam” is miles and miles from the right place.
Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif'” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted?… Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?
I’m glad you asked me that. Yes, I do. Of course I do. No they would not have seen that lone individual as a hero, but also no, they would not have torn him limb from limb. Then again it’s an imaginary, so neither of us knows, so it’s not a particularly compelling argument.
Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an “Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over” the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on “members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power”.
That depends on which corridors of power we’re talking about. The ones in Jiddah, Karachi, Mogadishu? The ones in households where brothers and fathers and sons tell the women what to do? Gay bars? The offices of satirical magazines?
You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.
A handful of extremists is an existential threat to free speech when it murders five journalists in one attack for doing something they don’t like. It’s a threat because it’s…you know, a threat. A literal, forceful threat. The fact that they’re a handful of extremists doesn’t make them less frightening, it makes them more so – anybody could do what they did.
Weren’t you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the “unity rally” in Paris?
Somewhat, yes, but you know whose attendance grossed me out much more? The officials from Saudi Arabia who attended. Why aren’t you talking about them, Mehdi?
I feel dirty now.
The only way you could see “an attack on free speech” and “a war declared on civilization” as identical is if your viewpoint is rather…racist.
I completely agree you about foot ball.It seems to have a almost cult following.It is also violent and dangerous.I believe that many people get off on seeing players get injured.Also, people seem not to care about the long term issues associated with head injuries.As a Humanist,I oppose such forms of “entertainment”.
Mehdi Hassan is a twit. Excuse my spelling. There is one religion that is protected, and guess what, surprise, surprise it’s his. But what can you expect of a man who actually believes that Mohammad flew on a winged horse! The winged horse nonsense by the way, only a child would require the horse to have wings to make sense of nonsense. A magic horse, which presumably is what it was, would be able to fly without stuck on silly and anatomically useless wings. Twit.
Good article by the way. But a bit depressing to think that this guy pops up in Oxford debates! In the 21st century! Just to add to the silliness of the winged horse rubbish, when it kicked off from whichever bloody rock it was, it left a hoof print! I suppose it needed a good kick off to get it going, because presumably the horse at least had the sense to know it wasn’t built for flying. Even with a prophet on its back.
Okeefine. Lines. So what do we do if people cross those lines? If they’re lines for the purposes of law and order, well, then, we arrest those line-crossers and bring them up on legal charges. Let the court system sort them out – that’s what it’s there for. In the case of taste/decency lines, if those are crossed, well, then, we can all condemn those darn line-crossers in the strongest possible terms. We can refuse to speak to them. We can express outrage, we can take umbrage at whatever it is, we can even take to the streets in protest.
In no case is anyone empowered to take another’s life. Let’s all be very aware of that essential point. Murder/execution is NEVER the correct response.
Blanche:
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I think that now is the historically appointed time for me to reveal to the world and the Universe beyond Omar’s Law of Religious Coherence:
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Preamble: the coherence of a religion is its tendency not to cetrifugate in all directions like the mud off a fast-spinning car wheel; or otherwise disintegrate and fall apart at the drop of a hat; drop of a blasphemy or of some disrespectful irreverent utterance of any kind.
A mortal sin is one for which the penalty is death in this life;
a postmortal sin is one for which the penalty is everlasting torture in the next life;
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The Coherence (C) of any religion is inversely proportional to the product of the number of postmortal sins (P) and the number (M) of mortal sins (raised to the ninth power) it proclaims to be the penalty for irreverence to itself. That Coherence is likewise inversely proportional to the square of the number of virgin women (V) promised as reward in the next life for any young testosterone-raddled male believer who defends the honour of the religion by murdering however many apostates, infidels, and raspberry-blowers.
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Coherence = 1/P.(M^9).(V^2)
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NOTE: Islam emerges from this as the most incoherent religion of them all. The supercomputers are still processing the others to determine their order of incoherence. We will post results as soon as they become available.
I always feel dirty after reading something by Mehdi Hasan. Why has no one noticed that he is an Islamic supremacist, and that his liberalism is all for show? How does he get to be published in the New Statesman, when no one would ever consider publishing something by Al-Quaradawi, whose views are not completely different from Hasan’s. That may seem like an extreme statement, but if you watched the video of Hasan speaking to Muslims (in India, I believe, a few years ago) and about the difference between the morality of Muslims and the Kuffar, it is quite clear that he is, fundamentally, an Islamo-fascist, and yet he seems to be considered to be as cuddly as a stuffed toy by the liberal press. Amazing!
I was glad to see, by the way, Ophelia, that you took note of Nick Cohen on the pope. The pope’s claim that if I insult his mother he would punch me in the nose, is either so much hokum, or it brings his credentials as a Christian into question. What happened to: “If they persecute you, rejoice and be glad”? (Matt. 5.12) And now that he is in the Philippines his true conservative colours are starting to show in all their lurid hues. So much for the soft and cuddly pope as he brings down his dogmatic hammer on those who caricature the church, as well as on gays and lesbians. Bah, Humbug!
Eric – oh it’s not that no one has noticed – lots of people have noticed, but for some baffling reason the New Statesman and the Huffington Post and many other ostensibly liberal and/or lefty outlets have not – or are deluding themselves, or think Islamist supremacism is somehow lefty.
Why that is, I will never really understand. I can create or consume lists of reasons, but they never add up to understanding it. It baffles.
@6 Omar: >>Blanche’s head implodes<<