Radley Balko of Reason tweeted that the USA Today editors have "lost their fucking minds" for giving space to a marginal and extreme British 'imam' who explained why the Charlie Hebdo victims brought their fate upon themselves by deliberately offending Muslims.
I disagree. Far too often the first reaction of the progressive elites is to bleat about the likely over-reaction to Islamist outrages by the Great Unwashed in the West. Nick Kristof provides a uesful example of the "Islam means peace" genre with a column that, with minor changes, could have been written any time in the last decade:
Is Islam to Blame for the Shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris?
His answer will surprise you. Kidding:
Many ask, Is there something about Islam that leads inexorably to violence, terrorism and subjugation of women?
The question arises because fanatical Muslims so often seem to murder in the name of God, from the 2004 Madrid train bombing that killed 191 people to the murder of hostages at a cafe in Sydney, Australia, last month.
No mention of 9/11? Whatever. A quick list of outrages and then:
So, sure, there’s a strain of Islamic intolerance and extremism that is the backdrop to the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
...
Terror incidents lead many Westerners to perceive Islam as inherently extremist, but I think that is too glib and simple-minded. Small numbers of terrorists make headlines, but they aren’t representative of a complex and diverse religion of 1.6 billion adherents. My Twitter feed Wednesday brimmed with Muslims denouncing the attack — and noting that fanatical Muslims damage the image of Muhammad far more than the most vituperative cartoonist.
The vast majority of Muslims of course have nothing to do with the insanity of such attacks — except that they are disproportionately the victims of terrorism.
Yeah, yeah. He then makes the inevitable pivot to the deplorable blood-lust of the West:
The great divide is not between faiths. Rather it is between terrorists and moderates, between those who are tolerant and those who “otherize.”
In Australia after the hostage crisis, some Muslims feared revenge attacks. Then a wave of non-Muslim Australians rose to the occasion, offering to escort Muslims and ensure their safety, using the hashtag #IllRideWithYou on Twitter. More than 250,000 such comments were posted on Twitter — a model of big-hearted compassion after terror attacks.
Bravo! That’s the spirit.
Bravo indeed! When bitter-clinging Westerners profile all Muslims as terrorists on the basis of ongoing terror attacks around ther world (which virtually no one does), color us savages. When Muslims and Westerners profile the Great Unwashed as an angry mob with plenty of rope and lamposts and lacking only some useful Muslims, well, bravo!
Maybe Mr. Kristof will read the USA Today piece by Anjem Choudary and re-think the role of Islam in all this. OK, who's kidding now?
FWIW: The notion of the inhibition of free expression takes on a different coloring after reading about the various groups that Anjem Choudary founded in Britain that were subsequently banned for instigation, agitation and extremism. And the Wikipedia entry does note this:
In 2013 the British pressure group Hope not Hate presented a report which identified Choudary as "a serious player on the international Islamist scene", saying that although there was no evidence that he was directly responsible for instigating any terrorist plots, "he helped shape the mindset of many of those behind them" and "through his networks linked them up to terror groups and supporters across the world." Choudary dismissed the claims as "fanciful", that if they were true, UK security services would have arrested him.
Or this:
The Conservative Party leader David Cameron said that Choudary "is one of those people who needs to be looked at seriously in terms of the legality of what he's saying because he strays, I think, extremely close to the line of encouraging hatred, extremism and violence."[
I don't want to come within a million miles of condoning what the gunmen did in Paris. And of course, Choudray is operating in the UK and Charlie Hebdo is publishing under different laws in France. Still, if French authorities had disbanded Charle Hebdo for encouraging hatred and extremism, as the Brits disbanded various Choudray groups, we might be talking about the appropriate role of government censorship rather than the deaths of twelve people.
Obviously, that sort of hypothetical suggests that maybe I am the one who has lost his effign mind. If (I say IF) the response to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons mocking Islam had been (or might plausibly have been) a mini-Kristallnacht in Paris where right-wing neo-Nazis burned Muslim shops and killed Muslims, then yes, censoring Charlie Hebdo might look sensible. That is not where we are.
On the other hand, it is plausible to argue that the response to Islamist agitators is in fact violence by their followers, which may support some level of British censorship. A lot of fine lines.
MORE ASYMMETRIES: From the National Post in Canada:
The heads of two Canadian organizations promoting secularism will ask the Department of Justice to abolish a section of the criminal code that makes blasphemy illegal, following Wednesday’s attacks on Charlie Hebdo.
Section 296 of the Criminal Code makes “blasphemous libel” punishable by up to two years in jail in Canada.
No one been prosecuted under the law since 1935. As late as 1980, the law was used to charge the Canadian distributor of Monty Python’s film Life of Brian; the charges were later dropped.
...
The United Kingdom abolished its blasphemy law in 2008; the United States has never had one at the federal level. The French region of Alsace-Moselle does have one, dating back to its history as part of Germany, but it’s not easy to use. Last February, a group of French Muslims actually tried to sue Charlie Hebdo itself for blasphemy under the Alsace law, after it published a cover they’d found offensive. The suit failed because Alsace law only protects Catholicism and not Islam.
Meanwhile, Canada’s law has expanded in application beyond Christianity, to religion in general. The Canadian law was first used in 1892 and was originally intended to protect Christianity from blasphemy. Case law since then has broadened its application.
And an interesting related point:
“The conservative right gets bents out of shape about hate speech provisions because they see it as an unconstitutional restriction of their freedom of expression. But that’s exactly what people who are [irreligious] would say about the blasphemy prohibitions — that they cannot say what they want without freedom of prosecution,” Mr. From said.
A lot of US campuses have hate speech provisions - what, one wonders, is their stance on blasphemy?
Over at YouGov, we see that 51% of Democrats support "hate speech" legislation here in the US, as do 25% of Republicans; 21% of Dems and 49% of Reps are opposed. The poll question:
“Would you support or oppose a law that would make it a crime for people to make public comments that advocate genocide or hatred against an identifiable group based on such things as their race, gender, religion, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation?”
Genocide?!? But should inciting hatred that festers without leading to action be a crime? Dems say yes!
William Saletan of Slate was all over this back when the anti-Muslim video was sparking riots and getting a US filmmaker busted (on other charges). More on Europe here.
PILING ON: Nick Gillespie at Reason develops the hate speech theme.
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