I've written before about how Islam has slowly encroached into Britain's national imprint, through using the language of "freedom of expression" to defend the interests of its extremists.
As I wrote in that article:
"Islamofascists have been able to preach their violent, undemocratic and pernicious ideas under the protection of "free speech"; at the same time, they have also been allowed to conduct behaviour that could land any British non-Muslim in prison, while claim the right to religious expression; and most subversive of all, have denounced and threatened anyone who criticises their faith, ideas or behaviour with violence"
There are regular stories in the press about this, and another one this week (highlighted by Nick Cohen) displays to what extent the BBC, Britain's national broadcaster, and the Liberal Democrats (part of the government), have succumbed to the will of extremist Islam.
It is as though the very institutions of Britain and its ruling politicians have given up on the idea of real, universal, freedom of expression: freedom of expression is dying as an idea in Britain because no-one in authority believes it is worth fighting for, at least when it comes to Islam.
This seems to be how "freedom of expression" is defined in Britain these days: the state will defend your freedom of expression, unless your point of view questions something about Islam. Thus Islam holds the unique and vaunted position in The UK of being the only religion people are terrified of offending.
In this way, it has become the "default" religion of The UK, by virtue of its unassailable status.
A state within a state?
From a practical point of view, then, extremist Islam has been given almost free rein in The UK. While the police and intelligence services may closely monitor the more radical parts of Muslim society in Britain as part of the "War On Terror", on a day-to-day basis, the authorities do not interfere with the actions of the Muslim community.
On the surface, this may seem a good thing, but this also means that the authorities have been turning a blind eye to cultural practices that are clearly illegal in British law, and would get any non-Muslim in conversation with the police if they repeated the same behaviour.
When I talk about "cultural practices", I'm talking about domestic violence that goes unreported by battered wives; arranged (and underage) marriage that is got around in the Muslim community by being organised in Pakistan rather than in Britain; marriage between relatives, that creates children with deformities and cognitive dysfunction; there was the famous case of the "rape ring" in the Greater Manchester area, which suggests an endemic culture of misogyny; there is the incendiary rhetoric that goes on in the mosque and in the community (the police are paid to monitor this, however); and finally, the idea that all Muslims' first loyalty is to their faith, their family, and only lastly their country.
While the danger of the last point can be over-stated (if you compare this to the "Red Scare" back in the day), the effect that extremist Islam has had on British culture in the past ten years has been noticeable and undeniable. The policies of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey have been called "creeping Islamisation", but in a different way the same could be said of life in Britain.
Assigning blame
Ten years ago, for example, there was no stigma attached to criticising (or simply discussing) some aspects of Islam. In the light of the 9/11 attacks, shining a strong spotlight on Islam seemed like only the most natural thing in the world.
In Britain, this "critical eye" seemed not to last very long, though. Because Britain had had a culture of tolerance, its defenders said, it was unfair to overly-blame "every Muslim" for the terrorism of its extremists. This is a fair point, but at the same time every "ordinary" Muslim has a moral responsibility to stand up to the extremists and pick apart their false arguments and dangerous rhetoric. This has not really happened.
So on one hand the Muslim community has shown weakness as a whole towards its own radical brethren, and thus allowed the radicals to hijack the faith and hold the rest hostage. On the other, some in the British establishment have held up the historical "culture of tolerance" as a sign that Britain didn't really have "a problem" with Islam and its Muslim population; unlike, say, France.
This is complacent and it misses a crucial point, though. Historically, the wave of Muslim South Asians who came to Britain after the Second World War to fill in a weakness in the British economy and labour force: in other words, the arrival of these populations to Britain was a sign of Britain's fundamental weakness and failure of its Imperial model. The empire had collapsed in on itself, almost literally, from a population point of view.
I'm not saying this was a mistake; simply a sign of the times. However, it is possible that the relative weakness of the British state after the Second World War was simply storing up problems for later. While those South Asian immigrants who arrived were subjected to local prejudice, racism and (sometimes) worse for decades, from an official government point of view, they were allowed to live, culturally and religiously-speaking, much the same way as before.
And here begins "the problem" that the British establishment refuses to accept it created. The British government, by the Sixties and Seventies, believed it was creating something like a "multi-cultural" nation. But it some crucial cultural respects, especially in regards to the Muslim community, it wasn't: it was creating mono-cultural ghettos in towns and cities with sizeable Muslim populations.
When "multiculturalism" goes wrong
This form of so-called "multiculturalism" was mostly a sham when it came to the Muslim community, because they either tended to be encouraged to move to post-industrial towns in the North, or to poor inner city areas in larger cities, such as Birmingham and Leicester, to name two. And when immigrants are not encouraged to integrate, but allowed to stay together, the result is a closed-off community. When you introduce religion into the mix, you have a potential time-bomb on your hands, as Britain has seen post-9/11.
By the Nineties, "multiculturalism" had become part of the establishment's "PC" campaign, so that by the late Nineties, the Muslim community was one of many parts of Britain's "multicultural tapestry" that became "Cool Britannia". Britain was "cool" because it allowed different cultures and religions to freely exist without government sanction, or so it thought.
This brings us to the present day, where the British tolerance for "the other" has become almost a fetishisation in parts of the establishment, while the Muslim community has become increasingly dysfunctional. I say dysfunctional, but what I really mean is that the extremists have seized the banner for the whole of the Muslim community. A combination of weakness within the Muslim community, and the British establishment's weakness for allowing "culture" to trump freedom of expression (or even the proper application of the law), have brought us to the current situation.
It is not "multiculturalism" that has brought about this situation: it is the state actively allowing (even encouraging) mass mono-culturalism in some parts of Britain for decades, then congratulating itself on its own "tolerance".
Real multiculturalism does exist in some cities in Britain: places where there are dozens of nationalities living in the same neighbourhood. This is what multiculturalism really means: when people exchange their cultures freely while living in a third country, for example. But this tends to be where Muslims do not make up a noticeable chunk of the local population.
When you have a weak state and a weak community, you allow the social conditions for extremism to breed, take root, and finally control others through fear.
This is what has happened in Britain over the last ten years.
Showing posts with label free speech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free speech. Show all posts
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Monday, March 11, 2013
Censorship, religion, liberalism and the West
I've recently been reading the excellent book by Nick Cohen called "You Can't Read This Book"; though a more accurate title would be "You Should Read This Book".
Cohen tackles the long-overlooked issue of censorship in the modern era; specifically in the last twenty-five years since the publication of Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses". He focuses on censorship based on fear of reprisal from religious groups (including Islamists and Hindu extremists); he also looks at the ways that the rich and powerful use their influence to silence critics (in the workplace as well as in the media), in particular how the UK's absurd libel laws are abused to silence unwanted publications, and use such crippling financial punishments to keep others quiet.
As Cohen points out, we naively think that we are living in an unprecedented age of freedom. But there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
It's worth remembering what "freedom of speech" really means in the West, and what is needed to maintain it. "Freedom of speech" means you are free to say what you like: criticise, lambast, or insult, if the mood suits you. If a person doesn't like what you say, they are free to reply in a like mind. As long as what you say is not openly dishonest, "freedom of speech" means exactly that: the freedom to say what you like.
Of course, we are all human. If you say what you really think all the time, you may quickly run out of friends and get into fights with strangers. But when you live in a country that abides by the principle of freedom of speech, hearing things you don't like from time to time is the price you pay. As the saying goes: if you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen.
If you can't handle people's criticism, then go somewhere where you won't be criticised.
It is this basic principle that comes to mind when I think about the frenzy of hate that was first stirred by the publication of "The Satanic Verses", and more recently by the Danish cartoons that poked fun at Mohammed and Islamic Fundamentalism.
The rise of Islamic Fundamentalism put the West's liberal values to the test. The vast majority of Muslims in the West are moderate; many of those are non-practising Muslims born in the West, or brought up in the West, who have little in common with the way Islam is practised in the Middle East or Pakistan. But Islamic extremism in the West is a more recent phenomenon, one that has grown in the last twenty years or so, often as the children of Muslim immigrants became seduced by the simplicity of the "old culture".
This reverence of the "old culture" in Islam is a simple reversion to the tenets of Sharia law and a literal understanding of the Koran. There is no room for compromise; you either obey or are an infidel. In this mentality, Western liberalism was the enemy: "freedom of speech" was therefore an enemy of Islam.
The publication of "The Satanic Verses" was the first time that the liberalism and "free speech" in the modern era were tested by the reactionary forces of Islamic Fundamentalism, and were found sorely lacking. In his novel, Rushdie, in the middle of a contemporary tale about South Asians in Britain, he took a look at the origins of Islam, and drew his own conclusions. For doing that, a "fatwa" was pronounced upon him by Ayatollah Khomeini: in effect a declaration of war by Iran's supreme leader against the person of Salman Rushdie.
The liberal West's reaction was two-fold: publishers were terrified of publishing works that might be deemed offensive to Islam (which could mean almost anything that was not openly supportive or sympathetic); and Western liberals turned on those who were willing to speak their minds on the injustices of Islam, called them "racists", or criticised those authors for putting the lives of the wider public under threat by their irresponsible actions.
This tendency by liberals to misrepresent and black-mark those who are still willing to hold up the values of free speech is the most shameful way in which the West has turned its value of "free speech" on its head. For the meaning of "free speech" for the last twenty years, especially from some aspects of the liberal elite, has come to mean tolerating the views of those who wish to destroy and kill them. This might be justifiable if it meant that the liberal elite were at least free to equally deride and discredit the intolerant and hateful words of the Islamic Fundamentalism they indulge, but they were not.
The traumatic experience of Salman Rushdie's "fatwa" left the West's liberal elite too terrified to challenge the reactionary forces of Islamism, as they still are today. Thus it has given the extremists the "proof" that the liberal West was soft and decadent, there for the taking. If no-one in the West was ready to intellectually fight for its core values of free speech, while at the same time indulging those of Islamic extremism, what did that say for how strong they thought of their own?
Islamic Fundamentalism has grown around the world, and in the West in particular, on the back of the idea that Muslims are victims to a Zionist conspiracy, and that the West is a decadent and morally vacuous society in league with the Zionists. In this mindset, it makes "Zionism" and the West legitimate targets. If the West is to destroy this perception, its own values must be restored and fought for on the intellectual battlefield.
"Freedom of speech" is one of the West's most integral values. As said before, this means accepting hearing things that you won't like. To act violently whenever someone pokes fun at you or criticises you is not the act of an adult living in a civilised society: it is the act of a petulant child.
Islamists living in the West who are offended by cartoons that make fun of their religion are therefore entirely missing the point of living in the West. If they do not like, they always can choose to live where they know their views will not be challenged. In fact, it would be fair to say that for the West to recapture the full value of "free speech", such outraged Islamists should be encouraged to do so; the alternative is to create a state within a state where Islamists have complete control over their religion, and no-one is able to challenge them under threat of death. To an extent, in the UK in particular, this already exists in faith schools that clearly flout the basic tenets of Western values; possibly even the law itself. When there are imams that live in the UK that encourage violence against "infidels" what they are really saying is: I do not accept the values and laws of the UK. This is what the law, police and prison is for.
If religious extremists (of any faith) who live in the UK cannot accept criticism and advocate violence against Britons, they have no place in a free society. It is as simple as that.
The views here are not based on racism; and they are certainly not based on right-wing conservatism. The points made here are simply about free speech and rationalism. It is irrational and self-defeating to have a society based on free speech that is terrified of speaking freely about Islam, or any other religion. Similarly, it is irrational and self-defeating to have a section of a free society (such as Islamic Fundamentalists) that are against freedom.
The irony is that Islamic Fundamentalists come the the UK and other Western nations in order to take advantage of freedoms unavailable in their own country. The best method to fight against Fundamentalism is education and intellectually challenging its ignorant and prejudiced points of view. This is what should be done in countries such as Pakistan, as well as in towns and cities in the UK where Fundamentalism is growing in Muslim communities.
Where this method fails, the law should swiftly step in to prevent female exploitation, hate crime and worse.
Cohen tackles the long-overlooked issue of censorship in the modern era; specifically in the last twenty-five years since the publication of Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses". He focuses on censorship based on fear of reprisal from religious groups (including Islamists and Hindu extremists); he also looks at the ways that the rich and powerful use their influence to silence critics (in the workplace as well as in the media), in particular how the UK's absurd libel laws are abused to silence unwanted publications, and use such crippling financial punishments to keep others quiet.
As Cohen points out, we naively think that we are living in an unprecedented age of freedom. But there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
It's worth remembering what "freedom of speech" really means in the West, and what is needed to maintain it. "Freedom of speech" means you are free to say what you like: criticise, lambast, or insult, if the mood suits you. If a person doesn't like what you say, they are free to reply in a like mind. As long as what you say is not openly dishonest, "freedom of speech" means exactly that: the freedom to say what you like.
Of course, we are all human. If you say what you really think all the time, you may quickly run out of friends and get into fights with strangers. But when you live in a country that abides by the principle of freedom of speech, hearing things you don't like from time to time is the price you pay. As the saying goes: if you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen.
If you can't handle people's criticism, then go somewhere where you won't be criticised.
It is this basic principle that comes to mind when I think about the frenzy of hate that was first stirred by the publication of "The Satanic Verses", and more recently by the Danish cartoons that poked fun at Mohammed and Islamic Fundamentalism.
The rise of Islamic Fundamentalism put the West's liberal values to the test. The vast majority of Muslims in the West are moderate; many of those are non-practising Muslims born in the West, or brought up in the West, who have little in common with the way Islam is practised in the Middle East or Pakistan. But Islamic extremism in the West is a more recent phenomenon, one that has grown in the last twenty years or so, often as the children of Muslim immigrants became seduced by the simplicity of the "old culture".
This reverence of the "old culture" in Islam is a simple reversion to the tenets of Sharia law and a literal understanding of the Koran. There is no room for compromise; you either obey or are an infidel. In this mentality, Western liberalism was the enemy: "freedom of speech" was therefore an enemy of Islam.
The publication of "The Satanic Verses" was the first time that the liberalism and "free speech" in the modern era were tested by the reactionary forces of Islamic Fundamentalism, and were found sorely lacking. In his novel, Rushdie, in the middle of a contemporary tale about South Asians in Britain, he took a look at the origins of Islam, and drew his own conclusions. For doing that, a "fatwa" was pronounced upon him by Ayatollah Khomeini: in effect a declaration of war by Iran's supreme leader against the person of Salman Rushdie.
The liberal West's reaction was two-fold: publishers were terrified of publishing works that might be deemed offensive to Islam (which could mean almost anything that was not openly supportive or sympathetic); and Western liberals turned on those who were willing to speak their minds on the injustices of Islam, called them "racists", or criticised those authors for putting the lives of the wider public under threat by their irresponsible actions.
This tendency by liberals to misrepresent and black-mark those who are still willing to hold up the values of free speech is the most shameful way in which the West has turned its value of "free speech" on its head. For the meaning of "free speech" for the last twenty years, especially from some aspects of the liberal elite, has come to mean tolerating the views of those who wish to destroy and kill them. This might be justifiable if it meant that the liberal elite were at least free to equally deride and discredit the intolerant and hateful words of the Islamic Fundamentalism they indulge, but they were not.
The traumatic experience of Salman Rushdie's "fatwa" left the West's liberal elite too terrified to challenge the reactionary forces of Islamism, as they still are today. Thus it has given the extremists the "proof" that the liberal West was soft and decadent, there for the taking. If no-one in the West was ready to intellectually fight for its core values of free speech, while at the same time indulging those of Islamic extremism, what did that say for how strong they thought of their own?
Islamic Fundamentalism has grown around the world, and in the West in particular, on the back of the idea that Muslims are victims to a Zionist conspiracy, and that the West is a decadent and morally vacuous society in league with the Zionists. In this mindset, it makes "Zionism" and the West legitimate targets. If the West is to destroy this perception, its own values must be restored and fought for on the intellectual battlefield.
"Freedom of speech" is one of the West's most integral values. As said before, this means accepting hearing things that you won't like. To act violently whenever someone pokes fun at you or criticises you is not the act of an adult living in a civilised society: it is the act of a petulant child.
Islamists living in the West who are offended by cartoons that make fun of their religion are therefore entirely missing the point of living in the West. If they do not like, they always can choose to live where they know their views will not be challenged. In fact, it would be fair to say that for the West to recapture the full value of "free speech", such outraged Islamists should be encouraged to do so; the alternative is to create a state within a state where Islamists have complete control over their religion, and no-one is able to challenge them under threat of death. To an extent, in the UK in particular, this already exists in faith schools that clearly flout the basic tenets of Western values; possibly even the law itself. When there are imams that live in the UK that encourage violence against "infidels" what they are really saying is: I do not accept the values and laws of the UK. This is what the law, police and prison is for.
If religious extremists (of any faith) who live in the UK cannot accept criticism and advocate violence against Britons, they have no place in a free society. It is as simple as that.
The views here are not based on racism; and they are certainly not based on right-wing conservatism. The points made here are simply about free speech and rationalism. It is irrational and self-defeating to have a society based on free speech that is terrified of speaking freely about Islam, or any other religion. Similarly, it is irrational and self-defeating to have a section of a free society (such as Islamic Fundamentalists) that are against freedom.
The irony is that Islamic Fundamentalists come the the UK and other Western nations in order to take advantage of freedoms unavailable in their own country. The best method to fight against Fundamentalism is education and intellectually challenging its ignorant and prejudiced points of view. This is what should be done in countries such as Pakistan, as well as in towns and cities in the UK where Fundamentalism is growing in Muslim communities.
Where this method fails, the law should swiftly step in to prevent female exploitation, hate crime and worse.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Tucson, Arizona; free speech and incitement during the "War On Terror"
A lot of talk has been said about the effect that the toxic atmosphere of political partisanship in the USA of recent times can have on the psychology of the mentally unbalanced.
The left blame the right for the violent rhetoric of the Tea Party; the right say the killer was a lone nut. Whatever the case, his shooting of the Congresswoman was intentional; not just a random killing spree like Columbine, but more like the political shootings of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Those shootings were supposedly by lone nuts, too.
The blame has also been put on the gun laws. That's another issue that links all shootings, random as well as political. What I'm more interested in is the issue of "free speech" that moderates as well as the right-wing defend to the hilt. For it is the right to "free speech" that encourages political violence that is the key issue.
In the UK, "free speech" is a given right, but the previous Labour government also created the crime of "incitement to violence and religious hatred", which does not exist in the USA as far as I know. Free speech advocates criticised this law as a breach of human rights, but if conspiracy to murder is a crime, then why not incitement to commit violence? Is there really a huge difference? Yes, there may well be a difference between words and actions, but in a civilised society it is also up to people to take responsibility for their own words and actions.
Let's take another, also infamous, example: the offensive drawings of the Prophet Mohammed that caused so much anger (and inspired revenge attacks) in the Islamic world. At the time, some Western governments defended the right of the Danish cartoonist to be gratuitously offensive, saying that free speech shouldn't have to take account of people's sensibilities. Fine, then: why did they not simultaneously publish in their newspapers all the most hateful anti-Semitic cartoons, KKK propaganda, homophobic rhetoric and so on? Perhaps because those governments were not conveniently "at war" with Jews, blacks and homosexuals.
So this is the real issue: "civilised" people take account of the world they live in, and respect one another's views and culture. Respectable people and media do not publish content that would be gratuitously offensive, and certainly violent.
It is an unusual thing to say that the Tea Party and secular countries like France have something in common: defending till beyond the realms of sanity the idea of "free speech": even speech that can kill. The French and American right-wing are therefore singing from the same blinkered hymnsheet: these two countries born out of the same idealistic revolution now seem to advocate the most bloodyminded form of "freedom": the freedom to create chaos.
The left blame the right for the violent rhetoric of the Tea Party; the right say the killer was a lone nut. Whatever the case, his shooting of the Congresswoman was intentional; not just a random killing spree like Columbine, but more like the political shootings of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Those shootings were supposedly by lone nuts, too.
The blame has also been put on the gun laws. That's another issue that links all shootings, random as well as political. What I'm more interested in is the issue of "free speech" that moderates as well as the right-wing defend to the hilt. For it is the right to "free speech" that encourages political violence that is the key issue.
In the UK, "free speech" is a given right, but the previous Labour government also created the crime of "incitement to violence and religious hatred", which does not exist in the USA as far as I know. Free speech advocates criticised this law as a breach of human rights, but if conspiracy to murder is a crime, then why not incitement to commit violence? Is there really a huge difference? Yes, there may well be a difference between words and actions, but in a civilised society it is also up to people to take responsibility for their own words and actions.
Let's take another, also infamous, example: the offensive drawings of the Prophet Mohammed that caused so much anger (and inspired revenge attacks) in the Islamic world. At the time, some Western governments defended the right of the Danish cartoonist to be gratuitously offensive, saying that free speech shouldn't have to take account of people's sensibilities. Fine, then: why did they not simultaneously publish in their newspapers all the most hateful anti-Semitic cartoons, KKK propaganda, homophobic rhetoric and so on? Perhaps because those governments were not conveniently "at war" with Jews, blacks and homosexuals.
So this is the real issue: "civilised" people take account of the world they live in, and respect one another's views and culture. Respectable people and media do not publish content that would be gratuitously offensive, and certainly violent.
It is an unusual thing to say that the Tea Party and secular countries like France have something in common: defending till beyond the realms of sanity the idea of "free speech": even speech that can kill. The French and American right-wing are therefore singing from the same blinkered hymnsheet: these two countries born out of the same idealistic revolution now seem to advocate the most bloodyminded form of "freedom": the freedom to create chaos.
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