The West has reached out to the Muslim world, offering apologies and a warm embrace. The theory was that, by showing more understanding of Muslim grievances, they would respond in kind. http://venitism.blogspot.com
It didn't turn out that way. Opinion polls in the Muslim world show the West's image there has not improved. In Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan - Muslim nations with which the West maintains close relations - views are more negative today than a year ago. Most Muslims disapprove of how the West has responded to the Arab Spring.
Fatwa is a pseudolegal opinion issued by a deranged ayatollah or bishop. They rule whether a given act is obligatory, permitted, or forbidden. Bin Laden appropriated fatwas to launch his attack on the West. Following the form of the fatwa, bin Laden combed religious texts including the Quran and the Hadith for anything to justify mass murder: Fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, seize them, and beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem. The head of al Qaeda vowed to fight as long as it took, never quit, and find any way he could to kill, humiliate, and dishonor the infidels.
In 1988, Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses was published in its English-language original edition. Its publication led the satanic Iranian State and its satanic leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa against Rushdie and offer a hefty bounty for his murder. This triggered several attacks on the novel's translators and publishers, including the murder of Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi. Millions of Muslims around the world who had never read a single line of the book, and who had never even heard of Rushdie before, wanted to see the death sentence against the author carried out.
If anything, paranoia about the West is worse today than it was a few years ago. Most Muslims surveyed do not believe that Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks! Indeed, the survey found no Muslim public in which even 30 percent accept the fact that Arabs conducted the attacks. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Kim Holmes points out a paradox emerges in these findings. The more Westerners try to accept blame for bad relations with the Muslim world, the more the Muslim world blames Westerners. Almost 30 percent of Westerners hold themselves responsible for bad relations with the Muslim world. Muslims mainly blame Westerners. Majorities in six of seven Muslim nations believe Westerners are mostly to blame. That figure goes as high as 80 percent in Turkey and Pakistan.
Which raises a question: If Muslim people are anti-Western because they believe, incorrectly, that Westerners are largely anti-Muslim, what can we do about it? Their grievances are so entrenched that very little of what Americans say or do will change their opinions because they are based not on reality, but on imagination. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Blasphemy is publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion. It's scary to think that a progressive state would drag out antiquated laws to suppress freedom of speech. Sometimes you have to shake your head and wonder how in this day an age a law that supports prosecuting detractors of a two millennia old fairy tale is allowed to be on the books.
Holmes notes that most Muslims also blame the West for their economic ills, even though their own economically oppressive governments are the root of the problem. West's support of Israel is a huge negative in their eyes, but so, too, is our support for the regimes that rule over them. This may be understandable, but Holmes doubt that a wholesale U.S. condemnation of regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Arab states would make Muslim publics any less antiwestern. After all, the West actually went to war to remove genocidal regimes in Bosnia and Iraq, and all we got for our trouble was widespread condemnation in the Muslim world, not to mention assertions that we did so mainly to kill Muslims.
Blasphemy violates no one's rights. To cave in to intimidation and not publish anything religuous freaks feel is offensive is to surrender the crucial principle of free speech. This clash is about respecting man's right to express his views, however unpopular, in the face of religious attempts to subordinate that right to mystical dogmas. Instead of appeasing the mobs who call for executing anyone offending their faith, the West must support those who share its political ideal of free speech.
Holmes laments the West can try to do the right thing like removing genocidal regimes and abandoning oppressive authoritarians such as former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, but it does little or nothing to change Muslim views of America. Muslims claim to want more democracy, of which America is the standard bearer, but their anti-American complexes and grievances are so huge that they are forever trying to find some third Muslim way that ignores hundreds of years of historical experience, born mainly in the West, of what works and what doesn't.
This is not about who's right or wrong. We can argue with Muslim nations all day long about our support for Israel, but it won't make any difference. In fact, Israel could disappear tomorrow, and we would still have a problem. The root of the problem is a great historical divide, going back centuries, which will not be easily manipulated by public diplomacy programs or expressions of good will.
This is a problem to be managed, not solved. No amount of Western engagement will change Muslim public opinion about the West. They hold their views for historically complex reasons, which more often than not are reflections of their internal problems rather than objective reactions to what we do. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Blasphemy laws are silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentivises religious outrage, and because Islamic States are already using the wording of blasphemy laws to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level. Blasphemy laws are unjust, because they silence people in order to protect ideas. In a civilised society, people have a right to express and to hear ideas about religion even if other people find those ideas to be outrageous. http://venitism.blogspot.com
Secular society is rejected by religulous freaks. They demand a special position, insisting on special consideration of their religulous feelings. But this is incompatible with freedom of speech, where one must be ready to put up with insults, mockery, and ridicule. Journalists should treat religulous freaks the same way they treat atheists, cultists, spiritualists, spirituals, politicians, philosophers, scientists, artists, and businessmen, integrating them into the Graecoroman tradition of criticism and satire, because they are part of society, not strangers. Blasphemy is including, rather than excluding, religulous freaks.
No comments:
Post a Comment