Magic Statistics

Paul Marshall, Senior Fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom, has written a succinct summary of the unfolding controversy over the Mohammed cartoons and a brief reflection. A tireless advocate for the cause of religious liberty, he has played an important role in publicising the plight of persecuted Christians around the world.

Dr Marshall supports religious liberty in the current controversy and objects to what he sees as attempts by Muslim governments to impose their brand of censorship on European countries. They must not be allowed to dictate the framework of the debate in the West.

Defending freedom of religion and freedom of the press requires distinguishing who is being criticized, and distinguishing criticism from threats. It is one thing to condemn Jyllands-Posten for offending millions of people. It is a very different thing to criticize the Danish or other governments, since the criticism itself, even apart from invidious calls for cartoonists to be punished by the state, assumes that government should control the media. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and their authoritarian brethren, as well as jihadist vigilantes, are attempting to export and impose their media censorship and version of sharia on the world at large, using economic pressure, international organizations, or violence.

Dr Marshall further thinks that putting up with insults and blasphemy is preferable to foregoing our liberal freedoms.

Religious toleration means not insulting somebody else's religion, and it is a good thing. But religious freedom means being free to reject somebody else's religion and even to insult it. Government should want and encourage its citizens to be tolerant of one another, but its primary responsibility is to protect its citizens' rights and freedoms. The fact that people are sometimes insulted is one cost of freedom. The Jyllands-Posten affair calls us to uphold that principle internationally as well as domestically.

As Wilfrid McClay points out, this is a challenging teaching for anyone who takes religion seriously.

What Marshall is here putting forward is actually a hard doctrine for Christians, or any other believers, or even nonbelievers who revere anything at all, since it means they too must be prepared to endure seeing and hearing the worst kinds of blasphemies directed at the things that matter most to them, without ever being able to appeal to the state to do something about it.

That may indeed be the price of freedom in our time. I would rather not face a choice between, on the one hand, insults from witless television shows and blasphemous "art" exhibits and, on the other, embassy burnings and mob violence over cartoons. Given the real-world alternatives on offer, however, I’ll accept the insults.

Paul Marshall was one of the participants in this 2003 symposium on persecution of Christians in Islamic countries. Several of Dr Marshall’s articles are linked at the bottom of this page. His best-known book is Their Blood Cries Out.

It is, in my view, essential to remember why the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published those twelve cartoons in the first place. They did not suddenly appear in a gratuitous and unprovoked attempt to ridicule Islam, Mohammed, or Muslims. Kare Bluitgen, a Danish children’s writer, had written a book on the Koran and the life of Mohammed, but was unable to find an artist willing to illustrate it because all those he approached feared the wrath of Muslims. Many specifically cited the fate of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.

Upon learning of this, Carsten Juste, publisher of Jyllands-Posten, commissioned the cartoons in an attempt to counter fear-induced self-censorship. After the cartoons were published, Muslims began rioting in Denmark even while France was still burning. The French riots have died down, only now to be replaced by widespread civil unrest over the Danish cartoons.

Why have Muslims reacted with threats, intimidation, violence, and property destruction? Some maintain that Islam prohibits any representation of any living thing. But, says Charles Moore, as a blanket generalization about Islam, that appears to be incorrect.

I have beside me a learned book about Islamic art and architecture which shows numerous Muslim paintings from Turkey, Persia, Arabia and so on. These depict the Prophet preaching, having visions, being fed by his wet nurse, going on his Night-Journey to heaven, etc. The truth is that in Islam, as in Christianity, not everyone agrees about what is permissible.

Is the issue in this particular case, then, that the cartoons insult Mohammed? That would involve Middle Eastern Muslims in gross hypocrisy, for newspapers there publish, without protest, cartoons far more insulting and threatening to Jews and Israelis. Ruth Gledhill refers to this page at Tom Gross’s Mideast Media Analysis site, where a collection of such cartoons is posted. Since the page has been rendered inaccessible due to excessive internet traffic, we rely on Ms Gledhill’s description of one of the items:

One cartoon depicts the railroad to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau – but with Israeli flags replacing the Nazi ones. It is taken from the Jordanian newspaper Ad-Dustur. The sign in Arabic reads: "Gaza Strip or the Israeli Annihilation Camp." Gross writes: "This accentuates the widespread libel that Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians have been comparable to Nazi actions towards Jews."

How have government and cultural leaders in Britain reacted to the ongoing mob demonstrations in the streets of London? By paying lip service to free speech while criticising those who spoke freely and, in so doing, offended Muslims. Placards displayed in London are far more threatening and inflammatory than the cartoons, but the British government says nothing about them.

For two days now, hundreds of Muslims have been demonstrating outside the Danish Embassy in London. ‘Bomb bomb Denmark’ and ‘Nuke nuke Denmark they roared yesterday. Their placards screamed: ‘Exterminate those who slander Islam’, ‘Behead those who insult Islam’, ‘Europe you’ll come crawling when muhajideen come roaring’, ‘As Muslims unite we are prepared to fight’, ‘Europe you will pay, fantastic four are on their way’ (a presumed reference to last July’s suicide bombers in London).
. . .
This was outright and sustained incitement to violence and to murder. What action was taken against the perpetrators? Nothing. Let’s hear what Jack Straw said again, that freedom of speech carried no obligation ‘to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory’.

Even cultural leaders who feel free to insult Christ and offend Christians declare criticism of Islam beyond the pale.

On the Today programme yesterday, Stewart Lee, author of Jerry Springer: The Opera - in which Jesus appears wearing nappies - let the cat out of the bag. He suggested that it was fine to offend Christians because they had themselves degraded their iconography; Islam, however, has always been more "conscientious about protecting the brand".

The implication of the remark is fascinating. It is that the only people whose feelings artists, newspapers and so on should consider are those who protest violently. The fact that Christians nowadays do not threaten to blow up art galleries, invade television studios or kill writers and producers does not mean that their tolerance is rewarded by politeness. It means that they are insulted the more.

Mr Lee, even as he cravenly tries to back away from giving cause for offence, shows he doesn’t get it. Does he think that Muslims would react kindly to being told that their religion is a "brand", rather like Ford automobiles and Nokia cell phones? They would, of course, find that patronising, if not contemptuous.

If the riots in France last November did not make it clear, it is clear now. Islamists are implacably opposed to Western civilisation and its foundational principles of liberty. It is not cartoons as such they find offensive, but rather the freedom that allows all citizens, irrespective of political and religious perspective, to voice their opinions. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religion are under attack in Europe. The question is: Will the authorities defend liberty, or will they continue to mollify the Islamist enemies of liberal freedoms?

The choice may already be decided, for as Paul Belien at The Brussels Journal points out, Europe itself has undermined freedom of speech by outlawing criticism of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, and freedom of conscience by proposing to force doctors to perform abortions and euthanasia. If these anti-liberal measures are already being implemented, say some European Muslims, what principled reason is left for denying the restrictions we seek?

It may not survive much longer, says William F. Buckley. It looks set to disappear soon in Europe.

What we have seen [in the cartoon controversy] is an intimation of the strength of a mobilized Muslim community. And this is early on, in the great narrative of the growth of Muslim power in Europe, where national suicide is reflected in the birth rates of Italian, German, French and British non-Muslims (to call them Christians would be wholesale co-optation). These societies seem to be willing themselves to go out of existence, as the birth rate falls below the replacement rate.

There are Europeans who are satisfied that the tradition of press liberty is asserting itself in the current challenge but who are entitled to wonder whether five, 10 years from now — let alone 50 — any such frolic as that of Jyllands-Posten would in fact be tolerated.

The editor of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that first published the twelve cartoons, thinks the enemies of a free press have the upper hand already.

Carsten Juste, the editor in chief of Jyllands-Posten, said the principle to be drawn from the debate was that opponents of press freedom had secured a victory. "My guess is that no one will draw the Prophet Muhammad in Denmark in the next generation, and therefore I must say with deep shame that they have won," he said in an interview with the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tiden.

Buckley reference via Relapsed Catholic.

In a speech calling on the world to stop Iran's nuclear program, German chancellor Angela Merkel compared the threat of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to that of the pre-war rise of Adolf Hitler.

In a controversial reference to the rise of the Nazis under Adolf Hitler in the 1930’s, Merkel said that Iran stood on the cusp of becoming a great threat if measures were not taken before it became too late. "Now we see that there were times when we could have acted differently. For that reason Germany is obliged … to make clear (to Iran) what is permissible and what isn't."

She denounced Ahmadinejad personally.

"[A] president that questions Israel's right to exist, a president that denies the Holocaust, cannot expect to receive any tolerance from Germany."

Regarding the increasing violence arising from the publication of twelve cartoons of Mohammed in several newspapers in Europe and the Middle East, Merkel said she understands that Muslims find the cartoons offensive, but that does not legitimise enraged protests.

Merkel said it was "unacceptable" that the row was being used to justify violence.

"I can understand that religious feelings, particularly of Muslims, have been violated but I also have to make clear that I feel it is unacceptable to see this as a legitimization of the use of violence," Merkel said.

"But the state, the federal government sees no cause to intervene in this discussion," she concluded.

Merkel delivered her speech at the Munich Security Conference. The audience was made up of policymakers from around the world, inclusing US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

via The Pearcey Report.