Whatever
her views on other matters are, Pamela Geller is right about one thing:
last week’s Islamist assault on the “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest she
hosted in Texas proves the jihad against freedom of expression has
opened a front in the United States. “There is,” she
, “a war on free speech and this violent attack is a harbinger of things to come.” Apparently undaunted, Geller
to assassinate her. She and her cohorts came close to becoming victims, yet some in the media on the r
have essentially blamed her for the gunmen’s attack, just as far too
many, last January, surreptitiously pardoned the Kouachi brothers and,
with consummate perfidy to human decency, inculpated the satirical
cartoonists they slaughtered, saying “Charlie Hebdo asked for it.”
No.
But first, allow me a brief yet illustrative digression.
No one can deny the nobility of the sentiment that prompted Ben Affleck, on Bill Maher’s “Real Time” last autumn, to
of what he sees as an unjustly maligned Muslim population with his
outburst, as heartfelt as it was misguided, that it was “gross” and
“racist” of Maher and Sam Harris to denounce Islam as “the mother lode
of bad ideas.” It seemed par for the course that Affleck followed the
lead of so many progressives and conflated race and religion regarding
Muslims. The semantically unsound rubbish concept of “Islamophobia”
disorients well-meaning people and incites them to spout illogicalities
with a preacher’s righteousness.
One must, though, call out New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for backing up Affleck on the same show, and, later, in an
editorial.
Kristof, after all, should know better. He trades in words and ideas,
and his acceptance of the fraudulent term “Islamophobia” contributes to
the generalized befuddlement on the left about the faith in question and
whether negative talk about it constitutes some sort of racism, or
proxy for it. It patently does not. Unlike skin color, faith is not
inherited and is susceptible to change. As with any other ideology, it
should be subject to unfettered discussion, which may include satire,
ridicule and even derision. The First Amendment protects both our right
to practice the religion of our choosing (or no religion at all) as
well as our right to speak freely, even offensively, about it.
One
must, however, recoil in stupefaction and disgust at the consortium of
prominent writers who just signaled de facto capitulation to the
Enforcers of Shariah. I’m referring, of course, to the
recent decision
of 204 authors to sign a letter dissociating themselves from PEN’s
granting the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage
Award to the brave, talented surviving artists of Charlie Hebdo.
(Disclosure: I have friends among Charlie Hebdo’s staff.) The authors
objecting did so out of concern, according to their
statement,
for “the section of the French population” – its Muslims – “that is
already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is
shaped by the legacy of France’s various colonial enterprises.” A
“large percentage” of these Muslims are “devout,” contend the writers,
and should thus be spared the “humiliation and suffering” Charlie
Hebdo’s cartoons allegedly caused them.
Europe’s colonial past and
the United States’ current (endless) military campaigns in the Islamic
world, as well as prejudice against nonwhites in Europe, have
predisposed many to see, with some justification, Muslims as victims.
But apart from the blundering wrongheadedness of the PEN writers’
dissent (Charlie Hebdo’s undeniable courage won them the award, not
their artwork) and putting aside the question of whether France’s
Muslims are necessarily “devout” (French law prohibits religion-based
polling, so who could know?), or uniformly “humiliated” by Charlie
Hebdo, or necessarily “embattled,” one thing transpires with arresting
clarity from the authors’ declaration: Among the left, the confusion
surrounding Islam and how we should relate to it imperils the free
speech rights without which no secular republic can survive. We have to
clear this up, and fast.
There is no legitimate controversy over
why the Kouachi brothers targeted Charlie Hebdo. They murdered not to
redress the social grievances or right the historical wrongs the PEN
authors named. They explicitly
told us why they murdered
— for Islam, to avenge the Prophet Muhammad.
Progressives who think
otherwise need to face that reality. Put another way, the Kouachi
brothers may have suffered racial discrimination and even
“marginalization,” yet had they
not been Muslims, they would not have attacked Charlie Hebdo. They would have had no motive.
What
is it about Islam that simultaneously both motivates jihadis to kill
and so many progressives to exculpate the religion, even when the
killers leave no doubt about why they act? The second part of the
question is easier to dispense with than the first. Progressives by
nature seek common ground and believe people to be mostly rational
actors – hence the desire to blame crime on social ills.
Unfamiliarity
with Islam’s tenets also plays a role, plus, I believe, the frightening
future we would seem to be facing as more and more Muslims immigrate to
the West, and the world becomes increasingly integrated. Best just to
talk of poverty and the like, or a few “bad apples.” But to respond to
the question’s first part, we need to put aside our p.c. reading glasses
and examine Islam’s basic elements from a rationalist’s perspective.
Islam as a faith would not concern progressives, except that some of its
adherents choose to act as parts of its dogma ordain, which, to put it
mildly, violates the social contract underpinning the lives of the rest
of us.
Islam is a hallowed monotheistic ideology, as are Judaism
and Christianity, the other two Abrahamic “anti-human religions” (to
quote Gore Vidal), that preceded it. From a rationalist’s perspective,
any ideology that mandates belief without evidence is a priori dangerous
and liable to abuse. This especially applies to monotheism.
Objectively, polytheism was better. Look back in time. The many gods
of Greek and Roman antiquity, by their very multiplicity, presupposed a
spirit of pluralism in their societies and even a certain ludic
variety. I worship Zeus, you Aphrodite; he follows Ceres, she Diana.
The classical gods quarreled and copulated, stirred the heavens to storm
and sent down rain on the crops, tossed earthward thunderbolts, and now
and then accepted propitiations from us humans, but otherwise, didn’t
do much to bother us.
Enter the God of the Israelites. Jealous
and vengeful, capricious and megalomaniacal, He issued His Decalogue.
What is Commandment Number One? “You shall have no other gods before
Me” — an absolutist order implicitly justifying violence against those
who haven’t gotten the memo. Even after “gentle Jesus meek and mild”
entered the picture,
Tyrannus Deus continued His brutal reign,
with legions of His Medieval votaries waging crusades against rival
monotheists in the Holy Land, hurling themselves into battle as they
cried
Deus vult! (God wills it!). And, of course, with Jesus
came (the highly non-gentle, non-meek, non-mild) idea of eternal torment
in hell as divine retribution for sin – surely no inducement to peace
and tranquility, either.
Recognizing no Holy Spirit or mediating,
moderating heavenly offspring, the Prophet Muhammad transformed the
Judeo-Christian Despot on High into an even more menacing, wrathful
ogre, whose
gory punishments meted out to hapless souls after death fill many a Koranic verse.
Shirk,
or associating another being with God, is, of course, a paramount sin
in Islam. Iconoclasm, or smashing asunder God’s rival deities as
represented in idols, was and remains a favorite pastime of Islamist
totalitarians, as was tragically demonstrated by the Taliban’s 2001
demolition of the awe-inspiring
Buddhas of Bamiyan, or
ISIS’s devastation
of ancient statues in Iraq. Such crimes are not perversions of Islam,
but actions based on its canon and a fanatical desire to emulate its
luminaries.
To wit, after conquering Mecca, none other than the Prophet
Muhammad (whose life Muslims hold to be exemplary) devastated the 360
idols of the Kaaba; and the Quran (Surat al-Anbiya’, 21:57-58) recounts
how the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham to Jews and Christians) broke apart
idols. Monotheistic Islam and destruction, thus, go hand in hand, along
with the (intolerant, divisive) proclamation that the Quran is the
Final Testament, God’s last word to humanity, superseding the previous
(equally preposterous) “revelations” of Judaism and Christianity.
The
meme “Islam – the religion of peace” might evoke snickering now, but it
was wildly inaccurate long before 9/11 and the plague of Islamist
terrorism. For starters, the Prophet Muhammad was a triumphant warlord
leading military campaigns that spread Islam throughout Arabia and
initiated the creation of one of the largest empires the world has
known. His was a messianic undertaking. He preceded his invasions by
demands that populations either convert or face the sword. Verses
sanctifying violence against “infidels”
abound in the Quran.
Even the favorite verse of Islam’s apologists, Surat al-Baqarah 2:256
(“There is no compulsion in religion”), prefaces a warning that Hellfire
awaits those worshipping anything besides God. The real meaning of the
word “Islam” is, in fact,
surrender — to God and the inerrant,
unchallengeable
path He lays out for us. Surrendering denotes war, groveling, and
humiliation – not exactly the kind of behavior liberals tend to value.
Many
know that “jihad” means both spiritual and non-spiritual striving in
the name of Islam, with the latter connoting holy war. As we speak, the
violent are bearing it away, rendering the peaceful definition
irrelevant. The Charlie Hebdo massacre and the shooting at Geller’s
“Draw Muhammad” contest attest to how extremists are determining our
discourse about Islam, and compelling us to deal with the religion at
its worst. Even though the majority of Muslims in the West are hardly
on the warpath, the overarching aim of jihad, of the messianic mission
launched by the Prophet Muhammad, remains Islam’s conquest of the planet
— the most illiberal goal imaginable, threatening to every aspect of
Western civilization.
The
canonical glorification
of death for the sake Islam, or martyrdom, similarly belies those who
would argue that the religion’s nature is pacific. If you, as a
progressive, do not believe in the veracity of the Quran, then you have
to accept Arthur C. Clarke’s diagnosis of those who “would rather fight
to the death than abandon their illusions” as complying with the
criteria of “the operational definition of insanity.” Insanity hardly
engenders peace.
All those who, à la Reza Aslan, maintain that
Muslims today do not necessarily read the Quran literally have lost the
argument before it begins. What counts is that there are those (ISIS,
say, and al-Qaida) who
do, and they are taking action based on
their beliefs. To the contention, “ISIS and al-Qaida don’t represent
Islam!” the proper response is, “that’s what you say. They disagree.”
No single recognized Muslim clerical body exists to refute them.
When
“holy” books and their dogmas dominate, societies suffer. Whatever
Islam did for scholarship in the Middle Ages, the dearth of top-quality
institutions of higher education in Muslim countries today stems at
least partly from the reverence accorded to, and time spent studying,
Islam and its canon. Says a respected
report, the highest-ranking university in the world within the
Dar al-Islam occupies the 225th spot.
Islam’s
doctrinaire positions on women are infamous enough to merit no
repetition here. Their sum effect is to render women chattel to men, as
sex objects and progenitors of offspring, and foster the most
misogynistic conditions on the planet: nineteen of twenty of the worst
countries for women,
according to the World Economic Forum,
are Muslim-majority. Some Muslim countries are deemed more progressive
than others, but their progressivity varies inversely with the extent
to which Islam permeates their legal codes and customary laws – the
less, the better. Not liberal at all, that.
The above are the
stark doctrinal and practical realities of which no honest progressive
could approve, and which form the bases of the religion. Regardless of
what the peaceful majority of Muslims are doing, as ISIS’s beguiling
ideology spreads, we are likely to face an ever more relentless,
determined Islamist assault. We can delude ourselves no longer:
violence is an emergent property deriving from Islam’s inherently
intolerant precepts and dogma. The rising number of ethnically
Europeans mesmerized by Islam who set off to
enroll in the ranks of ISIS
attests to this; and may prefigure serious disruptions, especially in
France, the homeland of a good number of them, once they start
returning. There is nothing “phobic” about recognizing this. Recognize
it we must, and steel ourselves for what’s to come.
This is no
call to disrespect Muslims as people, but we should not hesitate to
speak frankly about the aspects of their faith we find problematic. But
it’s not up to progressives to suggest how an ideology based on belief
without evidence might be reformed. Rather, we should cease
relativizing and proudly espouse, as alternatives to blind obedience to
ancient texts, reason, progress, consensus-based solutions, and the
wonderful panoply of other Enlightenment ideals underpinning our
Constitution and the liberties characterizing Western countries.
The
only path to victory in this war in defense of free speech lies through
courage. We cannot wimp out and blame the victims for drawing
cartoons,
writing novels, or
making movies. We need to heed Gérard Biard, Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief, who
declared,
as he received the PEN award, that “They don’t want us to write and
draw. We must write and draw. They don’t want us to think and laugh.
We must think and laugh. They don’t want us to debate. We must
debate.”
In doing as he urges, we will give the terrorists too
many targets to attack and convince them that we will not surrender, not
cede an inch. That means the media needs to begin showing Charlie
Hedbo’s Muhammad cartoons. We must stop traducing reason by branding
people “Islamophobes,” and start celebrating our secularism, remembering
that only it offers true freedom for the religious and non-religious
alike. And we should reaffirm our humanistic values, in our conviction
that we have, as Carlyle wrote, “One life – a little gleam of time
between two eternities,” and need to make the most of it for ourselves
and others while we can. There is nothing else.
This is not a battle we have chosen; the battle has chosen us.
It’s time to fight back, and hard.
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