by Charles C. W. Cooke April 28, 2015 5:45 PM
A few years back, when the American response to the horrors of September
11 reached its muscular zenith, dissenters from the cause liked to
issue a pithy cri de coeur. “You can fight a nation or a person,” they
would say with palpable indignation, “but you can’t declare war on an
abstract noun.”
The “War on Terror,” they would conclude, is little more
than a marketing exercise for a preexisting disposition.
At the root of this objection was the fear that governments that cannot
easily define what they are fighting will eventually come to be at war
with everyone and everything. What, after all, constitutes “terror” — an
inherently subjective term? How, pray, can we know when it has been
truly vanquished? And which borders — physical, philosophical, and
political — must we respect in the course of combat? These, I’d venture,
were fair questions. “The essence of tyranny is not iron law,”
Christopher Hitchens observed. “It is capricious law.” Now, as in the
time of King John, free people should demand some ground rules.
This debate came rushing back to mind this week after it was revealed
that a would-be prime minister of Great Britain, the Labour party’s
Edward Miliband, had promised London’s Muslim Times that he would seek
to outlaw and to punish “Islamophobia” if he were elected to high
office. “Although Islamophobia already falls under the Racial and
Religious Hatred Act of 2006#….#” The Independent recorded on Saturday,
“Mr Miliband’s proposal would allow authorities to hand down tougher
sentences for similar crimes.” Evidently, those sentences would be
harsh. At present, Britons who violate the Racial and Religious Hatred
Act are at risk of “up to seven years imprisonment” — not, you will
note, because they have actually hurt anybody, but rather because they
have uttered strings of opinion-laden words that the incumbent
government happens to disfavor. This, alas, is apparently not good
enough for the Labour party. Under a Miliband administration, The
Independent confirmed, Britons who caustically knocked Islam would be
guilty of an “aggravated crime.” “We are going to make sure it is marked
on people’s records with the police,” Miliband submitted, “to make sure
they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime.”
RELATED: Islamophobia Is a Myth
The presumption that the state has a role to play in the policing of the
human soul is an utterly terrifying one, running contrary as it does to
all the beautiful suppositions that served as scaffolding to the
Enlightenment.
If Ed Miliband believes that his fellow countrymen are
intolerant rubes, he of course has every right to lobby them to change
direction. That he has promised to marshal the police in disapprobation
is something altogether different.
The presumption that the state has a role to play in the policing of
the human soul is an utterly terrifying one.
Why? Well, because underpinning the notion of free and untrammeled
debate is the humble acknowledgement that the state cannot — and should
not — decide what is true and what is false. Naturally, governments may
have strong opinions on a corporate level. Individually their members
may, too. But, whatever they might come to believe, those governments
may not contrive to ossify or establish as legally impregnable a sole
definition of reality.
This, I’m afraid, is what Miliband is effectively
proposing. Seemingly, he has contrived a two-step process for
censorship: First, submit that criticism of Islam is beyond the pale
(that’s the “phobia” stuff, for phobias are irrational, remember);
second, because that criticism therefore has no value, move to prohibit
it.
RELATED: The Burdens of Thought Policing
In attempting to discern a limiting principle, critics will likely
pretend that this approach constitutes a radical departure from British
norms and should therefore be resisted on principle. Much as I might
like to pretend that this were the case, it represents no such thing.
Despite its proud history as a cradle of individual liberty, Britain
today boasts some of the most capricious, the most vague, and the most
far-reaching censorship laws in the developed world.
As of 2015, the
execrable Public Order Act of 1986 had been used to harass two-bit
singers, radical members of the media, drunken students, preaching
pastors, proselytizing Muslims, leafleting atheists, ignorant soccer
fans, and pretty much anybody else who stepped out line. During this
year’s election, moreover, aspiring members of parliament used it to
shut down criticism from their potential constituents. Can we really be
so surprised that the appalling Ed Miliband has jumped on the appalling
British Milibandwagon?
Pushing back against Milband’s proposal, a few critics have noted acidly
that the elite class’s obsessive focus on “Islamophobia” is peculiar
given that the most frequent victims of racially motivated crimes in the
United Kingdom are in fact Jewish. Well intentioned as that critique
is, however, I’d venture that it represents entirely the wrong way of
looking at the question.
No matter what the numbers say, nobody who
lives in a free country should be immune from harsh and even hateful
oppobrium — not Christians, not Muslims, not atheists, not blacks, not
whites, not anybody. Frankly, it is not the role of the British
authorities to police the verbal output of the people they serve, until
and unless that output is explicitly and deliberately brigaded to an
illegal action. If they are to be at liberty, men may freely exhibit
irrationality, fear, animadversion, disdain, acrimony, bitterness,
revulsion, and pique — and they may do so without their emotions or
their expressions being compared by the law to battery. If Ed Miliband
hopes to make physical assaults even more illegal, he has my blessing.
Until then, he must stay the hell away, lest he spur a recrudescence of
precisely the sort of illiberalism he purportedly intends to banish.
Writing yesterday in The Spectator, Douglas Murray struck a great blow
for common sense when he noted that if Miliband were to get his unlovely
way, almost everybody could find himself in the crosshairs:
If Ed Miliband were to become Prime Minister and were to decide to
make what people call “Islamophobia” illegal then I’m very happy to test
the law straight away. Indeed I will immediately put on a gathering of
academics, writers, Quranic-scholars and philosophers — Muslim and
non-Muslim — to discuss Islam. It is possible that some of those
gathered may disagree with the foundational claims of Islam. I, for
instance, may repeat my belief — not being a Muslim — that it is highly
unlikely that the Quran was “dictated” by God. This is not only my
belief. It is also the belief of Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Christians (some
Anglican priests excepted), atheists and ex-Muslims, to name only a few
minority groups.
Murray’s point strikes at the beating heart of the matter. In Britain,
in Australia, in France, and beyond, limitations on free expression are
typically justified with mawkish appeals to “multiculturalism,” to
“diversity,” and to the maintenance of the allegedly exquisite feelings
of the supposedly out-of-touch. And yet, as Murray subtly implies, this
is rather to put arse over elbow, for rather than creating an
intractable problem, freedom of speech actually is at its most useful
when the culture it serves is lacking in homogeneity.
Were all Britons
to adopt an ovine pose and to agree that the Church of England is the
correct religion and that its central claims are unquestionably true,
there would be little need at all for the protections of free
expression. While reasonable in and of itself, “Oh, I like the Queen,
too!” is clearly not the sort of opinion that requires the passage of
strictures guarding against the intrusion of the state. When a country
hosts a broad array of opinions, however — and when it is home to people
whose deep-seated beliefs directly contradict the deep-seated beliefs
of others — a legal framework that can accommodate sharp and pronounced
dissension is absolutely vital.
In Britain at present, almost all speech that is critical of Islam is
reflexively deemed to be “Islamophobic” — this, regardless of intent,
regardless of context, regardless of caveat or commonition. In
consequence, if the British government were indeed to crack down more
robustly in this area, it would not really be defending the “rights” of a
minority group against the pitchfork-wielding mob, but effectively
privileging one clique over another. How, one wonders, would it decide
what was beyond the pale and what was legitimate?
How would it conclude
whether the Islamic religion or Mr. Douglas Murray were the victim? How
would it distinguish between the imprecations of the imam and the
critiques of the atheist? Might it not be possible, perhaps, that this
is little more than a recipe for the sort of whimsy of which there is
too much in British life; and, further, that this is the sort of
thinking that has led to situation in which, a few days before a close
general election, one of the men who would instruct the bayonets has
ended up tendering special legal protections to a crucial, and
increasingly cunning, electoral bloc . . . ?
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417612/outlawing-islamophobia-would-be-folly-mr-miliband-charles-c-w-cooke
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417612/outlawing-islamophobia-would-be-folly-mr-miliband-charles-c-w-cooke
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