[Vision2020] Exploiting the Prophet

Joe Campbell philosopher.joe at gmail.com
Mon Sep 24 09:00:59 PDT 2012


Nice article but I still disagree with the way this debate is sometimes
framed. The real question can't be (as Kristof suggests): "Should we curb
the freedom to insult religions that are twitchy?"

I don't think there is a "freedom to insult religions" or a freedom to
insult anything for that matter. Here is how I would characterize it: We
have freedom of speech. That freedom allows us to critique and criticize
whatever we wish, including religions. If the religious find that
insulting, too bad for them. My advice: stop listening to what you find
insulting.

How does this differ from Kristof's way of characterizing it? Later he
writes: "The freedom to be an imbecile is one of our core values." But that
makes it seem as if the "freedom to offend" is a positive freedom and with
that comes a dilemma: I have the freedom to offend; being intentionally
offensive is wrong; therefore I have the right to do wrong.

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 1:15 PM, Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com>wrote:

>  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
>
>
> <http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=9ffd2fe7/b2463ffc&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787510c_nyt5&ad=BOSW_120x60_June13_NoText_Secure&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fbeastsofthesouthernwild>
>
> ------------------------------
> September 22, 2012
> Exploiting the Prophet By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html>
>
> “PISS CHRIST,” a famous photograph partly financed by taxpayers, depicted
> a crucifix immersed in what the artist said was his own urine. But
> conservative Christians did not riot on the Washington Mall.
>
> “The Book of Mormon<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444450004578002010241044712.html>,”
> a huge hit on Broadway, mocks the church’s beliefs as hocus-pocus. But
> Mormons haven’t burned down any theaters.
>
> So why do parts of the Islamic world erupt in violence<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/world/middleeast/anti-american-protests-over-film-enter-4th-day.html?pagewanted=all>over insults to the Prophet Muhammad?
>
> Let me try to address that indelicate question, and a related one: Should
> we curb the freedom to insult religions that are twitchy?
>
> First, a few caveats. For starters, television images can magnify (and
> empower) crazies. In Libya, the few jihadis who killed Ambassador Chris
> Stevens were vastly outnumbered by the throngs<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/21/benghazi-anti-militia-protest_n_1903846.html>of Libyan mourners who apologized afterward.
>
> Remember also that it’s not just Muslims who periodically go berserk, but
> everybody — particularly in societies with large numbers of poorly educated
> young men. Upheavals are often more about demography than about religion:
> the best predictor of civil conflict is the share of a population<http://www.prio.no/upload/prio/ISQU_416.PDF>that is aged 15 to 24. In the 19th century, when the United States brimmed
> with poorly educated young men, Protestants rioted against Catholics.
>
> For much of the postwar period, it was the secular nationalists in the
> Middle East who were seen as the extremists, while Islam was seen as a
> calming influence. That’s why Israel helped nurture Hamas in Gaza.
>
> That said, for a self-described “religion of peace,” Islam does claim a
> lot of lives.
>
> In conservative Muslim countries, sensitivities sometimes seem ludicrous.
> I once covered a Pakistani college teacher who was imprisoned and
> threatened with execution for speculating that the Prophet Muhammad’s
> parents weren’t Muslims. (They couldn’t have been, since Islam began with
> him.)
>
> I think a few things are going on. The first is that many Muslim countries
> lack a tradition of free speech, and see ridicule of the prophet as part of
> a larger narrative of the West’s invading or humiliating the Islamic world.
> People in these countries sometimes also have an addled view of how the
> United States handles blasphemy.
>
> A Pakistani imam<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/21/opinion/watch-what-you-say.html>,
> Abdul Wahid Qasmi, once told me that President Bill Clinton burned to death
> scores of Americans for criticizing Jesus. If America can execute
> blasphemers, he said, why can’t Pakistan?
>
> I challenged him, and he plucked an Urdu-language book off his shelf,
> thumbed through it, and began reading triumphantly about the 1993 raid<http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/20/us/death-waco-overview-scores-die-cult-compound-set-afire-after-fbi-sends-tanks.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm>on David Koresh’s cult in Waco, Tex.
>
> More broadly, this is less about offensive videos than about a political
> war unfolding in the Muslim world. Extremist Muslims like Salafis see
> themselves as unfairly marginalized, and they hope to exploit this issue to
> embarrass their governments and win public support. This is a political
> struggle, not just a religious battle — and we’re pawns.
>
> But it would be a mistake to back off and censor our kooks. The freedom to
> be an imbecile is one of our core values.
>
> In any case, there will always be other insults. As some leading Muslims
> have noted, Islam has to learn to shrug them off.
>
> “Why should we feel danger from anything?” Nasr Hamid Abu Zyad<http://vimeo.com/33780689?action=share>,
> one of the Islamic world’s greatest theologians, said before his death in
> 2010. “Thousands of books are written against Muhammad. Thousands of books
> are written against Jesus. O.K., all these thousands of books did not
> destroy the faith.”
>
> A group called Muslims for Progressive Values noted a story in Islamic
> tradition<http://www.mpvusa.org/uploads/Press_Release_Condemnation_of_Riot___Killings__Video__9-12-2012.pdf>in which Muhammad was tormented by a woman who put thorns in his path and
> went so far as to hurl manure at his head as he prayed. Yet Muhammad
> responded patiently and tolerantly. When she fell sick, he visited her home
> to wish her well.
>
> For his time, Muhammad was socially progressive, and that’s a thread that
> reformers want to recapture. Mahmoud Salem<http://dailynewsegypt.com/2012/09/18/a-country-of-extremists/>,
> the Egyptian blogger better known as Sandmonkey, wrote that violent
> protests were “more damaging to Islam’s reputation than a thousand
> so-called ‘Islam-attacking films.’ ”
>
> He suggested that Egyptians forthrightly condemn Islamic fundamentalists
> as “a bunch of shrill, patriarchal, misogynistic, violent extremists who
> are using Islam as a cover for their behavior.”
>
> Are extremists hijacking the Arab Spring? They’re trying to, but this is
> just the opening chapter in a long drama. Some Eastern European countries,
> like Romania and Hungary, are still wobbly more than two decades after
> their democratic revolutions. Maybe the closest parallel to the Arab Spring
> is the 1998 revolution in Indonesia, where it took years for Islamic
> extremism to subside.
>
> My bet is that we’ll see more turbulence in the Arab world, but that
> countries like Egypt and Tunisia and Libya won’t fall over a cliff. A
> revolution isn’t an event, but a process.
>
> I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground<http://www.nytimes.com/ontheground>.
> Please also join me on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/kristof> and
> Google+ <https://plus.google.com/102839963139173448834/posts?hl=en>,
> watch my YouTube videos <http://www.youtube.com/nicholaskristof> and
> follow me on Twitter <http://twitter.com/nickkristof>.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
> art.deco.studios at gmail.com
>
>
>
>
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