Offending culture, religion, traditions=murder
Staffan de Mistura is nuts. He’s barking.
…the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama), Staffan de Mistura, said during a visit to Mazar-e Sharif that the only person who could be blamed for the violence was the American pastor.
“I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghan. We should be blaming the person who produced the news – the one who burned the Koran. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from offending culture, religion, traditions.”
The only person who could be blamed. Not the people who did the actual killing, with guns; only the guy who made a point of pissing them off.
Please.
First!
I live in the US. The threat from these nutjobs like Jones is zero.
I think Christianity is absurd but the only threat is the dumbing down of our country.
I’ll take that every day over fanatical Islam or the European thought police.
Incredibly insane. Pastor Terry Jones is a bigoted asshole, but he’s just a bigoted asshole, not a serial killer. Surely we can tell the difference. Right? Right?!
All of the real murderers chose to take a mass-produced mess of ink, paper, and binding as having a value above that of real human beings. They then killed people that had nothing to do with the burning out of pointless, tribalistic rage.
There is no defense to this. There is no way to claim that somehow the combustion of an ordinary, mass-produced copy of some text compelled murders half a world away. If there is any set of beliefs or value system that represents pure, unabashed, loathsome, contemptible evil in this world, it is that a nonviolent act should be answered with the slaughter of innocents.
The Koran is not a thinking, feeling being. Islam is a concept, not a thinking, feeling being. Those dead people and their families were/are thinking, feeling, human beings.
To anyone who doesn’t understand my comment: you can laugh or you can cry, and I am too tired to cry.
He said, “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from offending culture, religion, traditions.”
Um, no, actually. That’s exactly what it does mean…
And check out PZ’s contribution to this discussion.
Ophelia, have you noticed that R. Joseph Hoffman is also nuts on this subject?
And Josh has a ‘me too’ post over at tfk
Once you commit absolutely to a lie (that a certain book is “holy,” for example), you are committed to an unbounded set of them.
Obama’s little speech “The desecration of any holy text, including the Quran, is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry.” is equally nuts. It’s okay to burn the complete works of shakespeare, of course, but not a holy text! Yes, it’s okay to burn holy texts, and it’s not intolerant nor bigoted. Apparently, extreme intolerance and bigotry does not apply to the US military which two years ago burned bibles in Afghanistan:
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/05/19/us-army-burns-bibles-in-afghanistan/
The loony pastor only burned the koran. Hamid Karzai helped to produce the news. Is Mistura thinking this through?
Mistura’s way of thinking is the norm among policy makers. Shashi Tharoor said much the same about Rushdie and the motoons in the youtube vid i linked to in the other thread. No surprises here for me.
By their logic, Mormons and Scientologists (as they are constantly mocked and humiliated) would not be responsible for beheading innocent bystanders. If anything, a Mormon would be even less culpable since insulting their beliefs is condoned.
Paul, yes. Deeply puzzling. JR’s on the other hand, not puzzling at all.
There is much to be said for a symbolic, ceremonial burning of books that promote hatred and injustice : nearly all the holy books, the protocols of the elders of zion, mein kampf etc qualify.
think Christianity is absurd but the only threat is the dumbing down of our country.
You are overly optimistic , naive and ill-informed on the pernicious and malignant nature of Christianity.
Maybe if we hadn’t been occupying their country for a decade and gunning down civilians on a semi-regular basis, Jones and his insult wouldn’t be added to a legitimate injury that will drive people to irrational and evil acts.
Joe: look at what happened in Indonesia after the motoons. It’s not ‘legitimate injuries’ which drive these people to irrational and evil acts.
Okay, here’s a job for Gideons:
Ship a couple of crates of their bibles to each muslim country so the idiots can burn them in retaliation for any Koran burning in the West. Surely that would be the appropriate response instead of killing people?
(And a better use of Gideons output as well.)
I had that very conversation last night with a good friend – who works for the UN! From what I can gather, offending another’s sensibility is about the worst thing any human can do to another in their official handbook.
“Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from offending culture, religion, traditions.”
That is exactly what it means. The “freedom” to say only inoffensive things wouldn’t be anything worth talking about.
Speech and expression that don’t offend, hurt or insult anyone do not need any protection. What needs protection is very categorically offensive speech. A genuinely free society confers to everyone the right to believe anything they want, however irrational, however delusional. But that privilege comes with a simple price – your beliefs are yours only, and nobody else is under any obligation to respect that belief or defer to it. Somebody offends your faith, you offend theirs. Somebody insults you, you insult them. Somebody draws a cartoon caricaturing you, you draw your own cartoon stereotyping them. As plain as that. Mistura doesn’t get that and apparently neither do a disconcertingly large number of self-professed liberals.
Wow. That is a staggering amount of idiocy coming from a UN official.
As the title aptly suggested that one needs to be extra careful not to offend the social cultural milieu of people that is not part of your own environment.
Actually it does mean that. That’s the time it matters – When we have to defend the unpleasant , bigoted crap speech.
Almost all of us think that the Pastor is a bigoted asshole – It doesn’t mean he bears responsibility for the violence.
@22 : What an exquisitely understated threat!
The most disturbing aspect of that tragedy in Afghanistan are the statements by Staffan de Mistura and other ‘useful idiots’.
Do they really want all our liberties to be held hostage to Islamic violence? The Islamists are not prepared to compromise their primitive values, so why should we surrender ours?
Idiots like Jones test us all,it’s depressing how many Westerners seem to have failed Democracy 101.
Just to play devil’s advocate for a moment, maybe I should offer an argument in partial defense of de Mistura. I said partial, because I really don’t agree with him. But UN personell do have to bend over backwards in order not to be offensive, or they’ll find working conditions impossible. And in particular, it was clearly important for the UN in Afghanistan to distance themselves from the Koran burners, although I would agree that de Mistura (if he was quoted correctly) seems to have taken the distancing too far. We need to remember, though, that he wasn’t speaking to us in the western world. He was speaking to Afghans, many of whom apparently have a hard time grasping the notion of freedom of speech.
FTFY
Goddamn strikeout didn’t work.
When I wrote “He was speaking to Afghans” I may have been mistaken. Upon a closer reading, I think maybe he was speaking to UN staff. And if so, that does put his remarks in a rather more unflattering light.
Andrew: I recommend the Preview button.
For some glitchy reason strikeout works in preview but doesn’t show up; but I can fix it after the fact.
Harald, yes, I can see why a UN official would need to say something placating – but as you say, he overdid it.
And then, he’s not just speaking to the locals. He’s also speaking to the world at large, and on that stage – well, he shouldn’t be saying things that make a nonsense of the UDHR, for instance.
I think those that blame Jones apply something like the following logic.
Could we reasonable assume that Jones was aware that there would be consequences and that those consequences might be dire, possibly leading to loss of life? Yes.
Could we therefore conclude that the Koran burning was an act of provocation? Yes.
Is Jones to blame? Obviously.
But the logic does not account for <i>why</i> the act would provoke said dire consequences. To paraphrase Sam Harris – the inflammatory act is one thing, but <i>why</i> are Muslims so combustible.
Some unhinged Michael Jackson fans might be extremely offended at the burning of a copy of Thriller, but would anyone blame the person burning it if they flew off in a rage and someone died?
It is only by virtue of the fact that Muslim sensibilities are <i>religious</i> sensibilities that anyone even considers giving them a pass.
Really? Why?
FresnoBob,
No actually a lot of people really do think that what Jones did was seriously and profoundly wrong – that it’s morally wrong to destroy something that is “sacred” to someone else. I asked one fella who holds this view if that applies to a swastika that a neo-Nazi considers “sacred” for instance.
I can think of some objects that can reasonably be seen that way:
And that’s about it. A very old beautiful Koran would decidedly belong there, as should the Bamyan buddhas, the Mayan codices, all the church art that Henry VIII had smashed, etc.
If only freedom of speech and human life were on their list.
Obama and de Mistura are feeding the flames. In my eyes they hold the most culpability because they are people who set the tone from the top down, and should absolutely know better. They should be explaining and defending the US principle of freedom of speech, which foreign countries don’t get a vote on.
Next in line for culpability is Karzai, for announcing the Qu’ran burning to a country that was largely unaware it happened, and stating that it was an outrage that needed to be answered. He also should know better and I’m led to agree with Jerry Coyne that the action was a malicious one.
And of course the willing outrage factory:
“It was in the city’s exquisite Blue Mosque, where Jones’s Qur’an-burning was the subject of a Friday-prayers sermon, that the afternoon’s bloody sequence of events began to unfold. Upon leaving the mosque, worshippers found another set of religious leaders in a Toyota Corolla kitted out with loudspeakers urging people to join them at the burning of Jones in effigy.”
When it all went pear-shaped, they blamed the Taliban. Convenient.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/02/afghanistan-mazar-sharif-united-nations?INTCMP=SRCH
And the stupidity continues.
” the Afghan president, in a meeting on Sunday with the US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, and David Petraeus, the US commander of Nato forces in the country, demanded that the [US Congress] should condemn Jones.”
“Petraeus issued a statement with Nato’s Kabul ambassador, Mark Sedwill, condemning “any disrespect to the holy Qur’an and Muslim faith”.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/karzai-congress-pastor-jones-burning
Fresnobob –
Jones bears some responsibility. Here’s an analogy: say a raving gunman’s clamped a pistol to a hostage, and screams that if you step closer he’ll paint the walls with brain. If somebody wanders forward and, indeed, the bastard fires they’re responsible for engineering conditions likely to encourage harm. This doesn’t diminish the gunman’s responsibility – he’s as much an evil sod whatever has inspired the shooting – but it sads some for the bloke who was careless enough to vex him.
Sometimes we’ve got to defy threats, of course, but I don’t think that Walrus Features’ little stunt is a good example.
I guess I can see why US policy makers take this tack, but it makes me crazy. People are dead, and our congress is supposed to condemn “disrespect” to a religion, but not condemn the murderers? How about condemning the moral system that makes someone say “Someone on the other side of the planet has burned an inanimate object, therefore I should kill someone”?
Bensix,
there’s a fair bit of that crazed-gunman-holding-hostage scenario being presented as some kind of argument for Jones’ culpability. So you do think that muslims are crazed, psychopathic savages whose propensity for violence is inevitable, a law of nature? Jones deliberately cried ‘Boo!’ but someone else could innocently wander in on the scene and still set off the pycho gunman resulting in the same murderous outcome, right? The issue is not then the act of the ‘provocation’ but the gunman himself. Isnt there then a moral imperative to take out the gunman- who is a threat to all of us- by any means possible?
Apparently there are even arguments being made that burning the koran is worse than burning the bible.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/msnbcs-hardball-guest-explains-why-burning-the-koran-is-worse-than-burning-the-bible/
I am a cynical person but even I am beginning to hit my head against the wall. Jones is beginning to look like a hero to me!
Mirax,
What else do you expect from Bobby Ghosh? He wrote that fantastically inane ‘Is America Islamophobic?’ cover for Time.
Saikat,
I dont know the guy. How do these guys get their jobs as media pundits?
Not appearing to be Islamophobic. That’s exactly how anyone gets to be a liberal media pundit these days. That’s exactly how anyone can look at brazen acts of depraved violence and absolve the perpetrators. The difference between them and those who officially sign up to the ‘religion of peace’ is merely anatomical.
I also note that he is a Bengali – their intelligentsia tend to drip with condescension. There was a horror – Sunanda Datta Ray- who was shilling for the state media rag here in Singapore some years back.
There’s a category of Indian media pundits whom I find quite problematic – the arundhathi ros, pankaj mishras, praful bidwais …must now add Ghosh to the list.
Very true. Especially if they also espouse leftist politics. I should know. I grew up in their midst.
@BenSix
I think that the analogy is not very apt because the chain of cause and effect is not as clear or as certain.
What we really have is a few million people, each of which have a chance in a few million of killing someone, provided that someone somewhere in the world does something too offensive and they hear about it.
We’ve focused on Terry Jones because he’s a bigot and the media discussed him (so he fits the latter criteria). But the fact that the vast majority of Muslims, even apparently a great number of extremists, did not visibly react, seems to say something. The fact that we weren’t sure that anyone would really die at all, seems also to say something. The fact that specific religious leaders used this incident to fire their followers up, also seems to say something.
I simply don’t think that Terry Jones had enough knowledge of and control over the eventual outcome to be held responsible. The allegation that someone, somewhere in the wacky world of Islam might react badly? It’s really hard to say that, just because he knew that abstractly, he was responsible. He lobbed the ball into the court of over a billion Muslims. Most of them did not bother reacting, or reacted nonviolently. A few didn’t, spurred to action by religious leaders who sensed an opportunity.
None of these people eat beef then, right?
Burning Korans goes on all the time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What do you think goes up in smoke when you blow up a Shia mosque or a Sufi shrine?
When you set fire to a girls school in a religious islamic country which books do you think the libraries of these schools contain?
Is there ever a protest about those Korans?
Now we have Karzai saying that the US should get rid of its first amendment rights to free speech in order to ringfence his religion from ‘disrespect’.
Free speech rights are not universal and those in the US would do well to remember the valus of such rights rather than cave in to demands of the fundamentalists or begin to copy them by issuing Hoffwas against Jones.
LOL
I’m always reminded of a line from the BBC2 comedy Fist of Fun (with Stewart Lee and Richard Herring), from about 1993, i.e. while Salman Rushdie was still in hiding.
“People have noticed that we only ever slag off Christianity, and a viewer wrote to ask whether we would ever criticise Islam in the same way. No, no we wouldn’t. We’re atheists, we’re not stupid.”
Is there a term equivalent to “phobia” but meaning “well-founded fear of” rather than “irrational fear of”?
Mirax –
No, of course not – but some are. I’m not Dr Freud but if you’re going to behead someone for the awesome crime of being from a similar region as some guy who’s torched a book you’ve got to be more than a little savage, no? Call me Mr Judgemental.
Sean –
There were a lot of credible threats (ie. not some loser frothing on a messageboard somewhere). He knew that burning the Quran was liable to lead to harm. (If it had been something valuable there might be reason to defy the threat – as one may turn down a gunman’s demands – but that wouldn’t mean whoever makes that judgement’s not responsible.)
We live in a time when virtually half the planet has access to enough technology (a digital camera and an internet connected computer) to upload a youtube clip of themselves (anonymously) burning a Koran – or something they claim is a Koran. There is simply no way we can prevent the possibility of such things occurring. Probably nobody involved in the murders in Afghanistan had seen any evidence of the burning at Jones church. Our prime objective here must be to preserve liberties in the west being eroded by the current threats.
Sigmund @ #48:
Damned good point!
Of course, Pastor Jones if (presuming he is was not out of the same mold as the Islamic crazies – and that might be stretching it a bit) could get a bloody sight more than the normal 15 minutes ration of fame by following it up with a photo/video/audio opportunity par excellence. He could burn a copy of the Bible.
Now for a Christian pastor I think that would be a rather sophisticated thing to do. He could then say things like:
1. It is not the physical book that matters, any more than His physical body mattered to Christ. What matters are the ideas and message within, which cannot be destroyed by fire. In fact, the more those ideas are persecuted with such crude attempts at destruction, the more they have grown.
2. Book-obsession is a form of idolatry, and Mohammed was dead-set against that: even to the extent of prohibiting portraiture of himself.
3. Can’t you silly bastards see what fools you are making of yourselves?
4. Can’t you murderous idiots understand that this is what turns the rest of the world against you?
Can not having a protected liberty to say something which offends be distinguished from not having a protected liberty to say anything at all?
Can having a protected liberty to say anything which doesn’t offend be distinguished from not having a protected liberty to say anything which does not offend?
Does a protected liberty to perform an act have an effect if that act doesn’t offend? In what circumstances would it have an effect?
Sigmund’s #48 – der – I hadn’t thought of that! Compelling point.
Hoffwas. Ha!
…yes, and that 12-year-old girl who dressed like an adult (GASP) deserved to be raped. Can’t blame the perpetrators.
Why is it that only religion seems to think they get a free pass from this kind of thinking?
Again and again, we need to declare that your right to freedom of belief does not extend to mean that I must respect that belief. Or that such beliefs are then immune to criticism because they are somehow associated with some Bronze Age mythology (or more-modern versions with golden plates or souls trapped in volcanoes).
Declare homeopathy a religion, and it will still be just as much bullshit as it was beforehand.
The solution, I think is MORE “offensive” speech. Draw Mohammed every day. Name an entire line of Teddy Bears after him (Mo Bears). Pay a bounty on “consecrated” crackers that can be burned, smashed, ground up, nailed, pissed on…whatever. No matter what your religion, I want to “offend” it. Eat a cow – defile Hinduism. Heck, eat a bacon cheeseburger and offend Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and the 7th Day Adventists all in one fell swoop.
No. We do not have to respect your beliefs, any more than we have to respect the beliefs of the guy wearing the tinfoil hat who thinks aliens are trying to send him secret signals. Or the woman who consults her astrological sign to know when to go in for a reiki treatment.
It’s all nutty nonsense.
Of course, “Pastor” Jones is a dick, to be sure. So is Fred Phelps. So is the pope. So is every imam in every mosque who would defend the right to be offended at “sacred” symbols. No. There is no such right. Nothing is “sacred”. Nothing is “divine”. It’s all made-up — imaginary friend stuff.
I spoke with a couple people this weekend who told me that Jones really should be held legally accountable because he knew that Muslims would riot, and people would die. I just don’t get this.
First, I see no legal angle to use to pursue Jones (I studied political theory, not con law, so someone help me here if I’m wrong). Second, it seems ridiculous to think that Jones could know such a thing. Third, why is it that people automatically assume the Muslim reaction is by any means reasonable or respectable? And fourth, do any of these people realize the ramifications of such a move? Are we so easily swayed to give up very basic and fundamental human rights?
I wonder if people just don’t like Jones, and that’s why they don’t mind bending the law. Which is, of course, no excuse.
@#58
I increasingly suspect this. I keep finding people wanting to punish Jones, not because of any legal principle that would allow this, but because, well, he’s just such a bigot, and all those people died, and so forth. Never mind that we respect the rule of law in this country, and that we can only punish people under general principles, not because we think specific individuals are evil and want to hurt them. But that’s a minor detail, apparently.
(I saw the same thing with respect to the Westboro Baptist Church. Never mind that they have been obeying all the relevant time, place and manner distinctions, that their statements are primarily about warped theology and not sincere defamation, and that nothing they are doing is otherwise illegal. Admittedly, the WBC hasn’t provoked anyone to murder, AFAIK.)
@#51
Well, I would still contest that since Terry Jones did not know who would die, by whose hand, or in what country, or even if anyone would die for certain, it’s a very difficult thing to say that he was sufficiently aware of the threat.
But I also have to point out that the threat of violence, though it had been directed at Terry Jones, was also one case of a general threat that hangs over everyone who discusses Islam. I’m certain that millions of insults to Islam occur every day (and, of course, lots of people have burnt the Koran without incident or even significant media attention). It may be that Terry Jones in particular had been warned, but doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd that the questions being raised are about whether <em>he</em> was being irresponsible in burning the Koran? It strikes me that, although he certainly wanted to bring publicity upon himself, he’s rather been “selected” by commenters around the world as especially symbolic of Islamophobia, in a way which was beyond his control. As previously noted, no one reacted to his burning of the Koran until Islamic religious leaders resuscitated the story. I certainly don’t think Terry Jones could have expected (much less intended) that he’d be largely ignored until certain people found it convenient to use him as an easily demonizable enemy.
Michael,
Rieux gave a pretty detailed explanation of why there is no such angle, on Joe Hoffmann’s post, earlier today:
http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/arrest-terry-jones-the-abuses-of-blasphemy/#comment-2391
An excerpt:
Not to mention the provocative speeches of Karzai and a host of others.
Thanks Ophelia.
I think the issues here are hopelessly weird.
I think I agree with what BenSix and jay and others have been saying, which amounts to there being no law of conservation of blame—it’s not generally a matter of distributing or dividing up a given weight of guilt at all. Cases where the outcome is precisely known are disanalogous to this one, but they can clearly demonstrate that.
For example, suppose you’d be better off if a business competitor died. If you just go kill them, you’re fully a murderer.
If, to avoid getting caught, you make a deal that they kill your competitor for some favor in return, you’re both fully at fault if they do it. You’re both one hundred percent murderers, no less.
Similarly, if that person chooses to contract the job out to a professional assassin, that person is fully culpable as well and there’s three times the blame to go around.
Now consider a funny case like Jones’s, but suppose you know some particular sect in a particular place will murder somebody—whatever outsider is at hand—if you perform some particular desecration of some thing sacred to them.
And suppose you know that’s where your competitor is, because you tricked them into going there.
Now you do the descecration, remotely activating the fatal trap, using fanatical religious kooks as unwitting pawns, to kill your competitor for business reasons.
In that case, I’d say you are 100 percent a murderer, too. The fact that the proximate killers are religious kooks doing things for very strange reasons doesn’t change the fact that you carried out a plan calculated to kill your competitor.
What does matter to your degree of guilt is your motive and intent—that you intended to kill someone, and why. It doesn’t matter that you used religious kooks in the mechanism, instead of, say, a hired human asssasin or a black market cruise missile, or just went over there and ran over them with your car.
Now consider a sociopath killing people for no reason except the joy of killing. Suppose they kill somebody in paticular, on purpose, or just put one bullet in a six-chamber revolver, spin the chamber, and point at a random somebody and pull the trigger. Suppose they keep doing that, pointing the gun at different people, until somebody loses the involuntary game of Russian roulette.
Are they any less guilty in the latter case? I say no. It doesn’t matter if they picked out a specific target, and just shot them dead, or played the odds against random targets until the killed somebody. Either way, they carried out a plan to kill somebody, and whether it was specific somebody is completely irrelevant.
Suppose that they instead chose to play three rounds of the game and stop, irrespective of whether the gun actually went off, reloading if necessary. They’d have a good chance of killing zero or one people, a small chance of killing two, and a slim chance of killing three.
Some people’s moral intuitions say that if they kill one or more people, they’re much more guilty than if it turns out they kill none, and they’re guilty of much worse if they kill two or especially three people; attempted murder is just attempted murder, but each successful murder is really murder. I don’t buy that—I think they’re guilty of taking that risk whether they get “lucky” or not, and their guilt can’t depend on random luck in that way. Each time they pull the trigger, they’re doing something very, very serious, and I don’t see how luck of that sort enters into how guilty they are.
Now suppose a sociopath decides to play a similar randomized killing game by imitating Pastor Jones, not to make a sincerely meant religious point, and not to exercise a right to free speech, but just as <i>a legal way of playing the murder game</i>.
By hypothesis, her motive and intent is the same as with playing a few rounds of Russian roulette—to take a risk of an unknown number of other people dying, and see how many actually do.
I’d say that’s morally just as murderous as the revolver game, which is a big problem.
Irrespective of how we think about religious kooks on either end of Pastor Jones’s game, if we have an absolute right to free speech of that sort, he’s just demonstrated to sociopaths how to get away with murder.
I find this dubious, partly because this has much larger implications than just applying to Jones. If you had someone whose only goal was to cause more people to die earlier, wouldn’t they already have ways to do this? Racist, misogynist, and homophobic speech already “plays roulette” with other people’s lives. Would you extend this example to say that, for example, a preacher who focuses on the homophobic passages of Leviticus, but doesn’t call for vigilantism, is nonetheless attempting murder in that someone in their congregation might take it too seriously and go kill someone?
For that matter, why bother make it an obvious “murder”? You could advocate for reduced safety regulations on drugs, maybe higher speed limits on the roadways, or maybe just promote smoking, or unhealthy foods. If someone did this purely because they like the idea of more people dying, is that murder? If they do so without regard for whether or not more people die (seeking other goals), are they morally equivalent to someone convicted of criminally negligent manslaughter?
Maybe you would answer yes. But if you answer no, I submit that the expected probability of death occurring really does make a difference. I think especially that a low expected probability of death <em>combined with</em> a low degree of intent have a multiplicative effect. As a (mostly) consequentialist, I mostly see the purpose of “blame” as a way of pointing out particularly dangerous individuals and behaviors. Invoking a sociopath who likes the idea of toying with people’s lives is rigging the contest, in that you are assuming a character who is by nature dangerous from the start. But a person with no particular desire for a violent result, and who does not really believe that they will probably increase the amount of violence in the world (whether or not they have considered it or think it <i>possible</i>) does not strike me as someone who should be considered dangerous, at least not on the same level as deliberate murderers.
And again, I have to wonder Terry Jones actually <i>did</i> increase the amount of violence in the world substantially, or whether someone else would have been so used in his absence. One can imagine a gunman with a hostage, who demands that Los Angeles be evacuated within a week, or else he will kill the hostage. Does everyone remaining in Los Angeles get held accountable for that murder, the same as if the gunman had insisted only that one particular person leave? This is a situation in which the number of people involved, and the unreasonableness of the request, certainly reduce some people’s culpability.
I think it could be argued that the demands being made against Terry Jones are of a similar nature. The demand is not “Hey, Terry Jones, don’t burn the Koran or we’ll start killing people.” The demand is “Hey, all you hundreds of millions of people in ‘The West’, every time any one of you gets too offensive regarding Islam, some of us will consider killing random people.” Every few months they are bound to find someone, somewhere crossing that line. This might not, by itself, exonerate Jones, in that he knew that he was being singled out in particular. Still, it makes it clear that assigning blame to people who are too “offensive” is a fairly hopeless strategy for addressing the problem. There will never be a shortage of such people. We’d be better off if the media gave less attention to such melodramas in the first place, but (especially since every incentive is on the media to keep mentioning such things) the biggest problem is, of course, the idea that being offended is an understandable justification for killing others.
For this last reason, I think focusing on Terry Jones is counterproductive. If we say “Terry Jones is a bigot, but that’s not a good reason for the violence that occurred, but really he should have known this would happen.”, we are diverting attention away from serious cultural problems, including the perceived entitlement of religions to constant deference, and the equation of inanimate symbols with human lives, in order to focus on an inane sideshow of a man. Problem number one is the presence of the threat that was the “mechanism” for his supposed murders.
Me:
Sean:
Yes, of course it does. And the moral problems are going to be very weirdly dependent on motive, and that’s a hard problem for the legal system IMO.
I think you may be reading things into what I’m saying that are not there. I’m not saying that something being morally murder if done for sociopathic reasons implies that it’s murder if done for non-sociopathic reasons. It generally does not, but it raises hairy questions.
I can’t think of other ways that are as easy and allow you to clearly see the consequences of your actions, and take the credit, and still get away with it. For a narcissistic sociopath, it’s pretty close to the perfect crime. (If I think of other ways easily doing all that, I’ll probably keep them to myself.)
Regular incitement to riot is a crime. If you incite a homophobic crowd to murder somebody, you can get caught and put in prison for it. If you do it out in the open with lots of witnesses, and brag about it, you very likely will.
There are millions of sociopaths out there, in the US alone—about one or two in a hundred men, and about quarter as money women—and some significant percentage of them are narcisstic thrill-seekers. (I don’t know if those commonly-cited figures are accurate, but even if they’re too high by a factor of no more than 10, there are a lot of sociopaths out there—hundreds of thousands in the US alone.) Most of them are inhibited by fear of getting caught. They like to fuck things up, and they like attention, but they dislike punishment even more—they’re self-centered enough that their other-destructive and attention-seeking tendencies are mostly kept in check. (Excepting a big, mostly low-functioning fraction of sociopaths with such poor self-control that they spend most of their lives in prison; they generally give themselves away early, before they cause nearly as much damage as they’d like. Higher-functioning sociopaths are more likely to be on the loose, waiting for opportunities to fuck things up and get away with it.)
IMO, that’s scary.
Paul I love your posts but I do not think this analogy fits, Ive been reading hundreds of posts and I don’t think anyone trying to argue that Jones is culpable has used a proper analogy, perhaps there isn’t one.
Without defending Jones, because I do not like the man, unless he knew, and I mean really knew, not just thought it a possibility, that people would die, then he has no reasonable culpability in this. We have all been living under the general threat of islam for years now, those in the public spotlight much more than your average person of course. I wonder how many times people have died for things said and done in western media that its not reported or not known, small riots where only locals are killed over imagined or real slights.
Condemn Jones for being a bigot, and book burning for racist or bigoted reasons, condemn him for being a hypocrite who is blind to the horrors of his own holy book, but don’t try to assign him blame that belongs to other people because as much as we can say it doesn’t reduce the blame of those who committed the crime, it kinda does. I don’t agree that its quite like blaming the victim because he isn’t a victim, but it is kinda like blaming pornography for the actions of rapists.
David,
As I said, I think you’re reading things into what I wrote that I’m NOT saying.
I am not saying that Jones is culpable. I’m not sure what I think—I haven’t been able to think that far—but I think of him as much closer to PZ in terms of having legitimate motivation than to a sociopath inciting killings just for the hell of it.
Of course I think PZ’s reasons are much, much better than Jones’s, but free speech isn’t just for people you agree with—it’s mostly an issue with people you don’t agree with.
In the case of either somebody like PZ, taking a stand for free speech itself (and maybe against particular illiberal ideologies), or somebody like Jones, taking a stand for a particular different kooky ideology, its obviously a free speech issue, at least to a very large extent. In the case of a sociopath doing it just to get people killed, it’s not.
The killer sociopath’s speech is not being used to get across an idea the speaker particularly values, or necessarily even believes—it’s just a convenient way of taking advantage of what other people believe to get them to kill each other. (E.g. suppose an nonbelieving sociopath posed as a kooky Christian like Jones when burning the Koran, to make it seem like it wasn’t just provocation for provocation’s sake, and to make it seem more like Christians declaring holy war on Islam.)
Unlike the sincere stand for free speech and liberal principles, or for Christianity, that does seem very much like yelling “FIRE!” in a crowded theater just to cause a stampede. It’s only intended to provoke people in to doing something disastrous, even if ideas are used incidentally as a means to a non-ideological end.
—
It gets even hairier if you think about using ideas to intentionally provoke a murderous response that is itself intended to illustrate ideas.
Consider the French Resistance under Nazi occupation, with the Nazis having a policy of reprisals—if you kill a Nazi soldier, they’ll kill 10 civilians.
Is it immoral to kill a Nazi soldier, knowing full well that as a result 10 civilians will predictably die?
Quite arguably no, and many people would go much further—they’d say that it’s immoral not to kill Nazis just because of that. That would be letting the terrorists win by using civilian hostages, and you have to take a stand against that—you have to show that you will not be cowed by it, and that it will backfire by showing how evil they are and strengthening your side’s resolve. The only way to do that is to go ahead and resist, knowing they’ll retaliate against innocent civilians, and keep resisting until they give up on that strategy, because it keeps backfiring, or somebody loses the war.
I think that’s a very hairy and also rather relevant example. It’s not clearly wrong to do something knowing that it will trigger somebody else doing something very wrong, with collateral damage to innocent people, and the latter fact may even weigh in favor of doing it, to make them show their stripes and inflame resistance, and ultimately lose because they do it, and because you ensure that it backfires.
If Pastor Jones is sincere, I’d guess he thinks he’s in that kind of situation, and sees it much that way—a situation where it’s a good thing to show what kind of response you get from hyper-violent Muslims, to strengthen people’s resolve to fight Islam. Like a hardcore French Resistance fighter, he thinks he’s fighting a just war, and that such means are justified by very important ends. If the enemy uses innocent civilians as pawns, you should fight on anyway, to show your side just how important it is to resist them, and to show their side that such tactics don’t work against your side.
Yikes.
I used to think that cultural relativist leftists who made excuses for slaughtering people because of a book-burning were made up. A right-wing myth, if you will.
I recently discovered otherwise: http://www.distantocean.com/2011/04/burn-them-all.html#comments
Plotline: (1) I discover leftist anti-imperialist blogger John Caruso, who (sensibly) posts bashing religion for leading to slaughter based on insult to beliefs.
(2) Commenters, notably one “QuizmasterChris,” blame the Quran-burners and (bonus!) the woman who did the blasphemous cartoon-drawing, and justifies it by “cultural diversity.”
(3) My head hits the desk, repeatedly.
(originally posted this on the next post by accident–my apologies)
Sorry Paul, I did misread you. My own fault I came here after reading Pharyngula for a few hours I must have conflated your post with a different one.
Paul @ #67,
It is hard to see how the Nazis could have been fought in any theatre of WW2 if there was a greneral disinclination to kill Nazis for fear of what they might do in reprisal.
The classic hostage situation is the one in which children and/or other close relatives of the Nazi-killer are the ones picked out to be killed in reprisal. Is it easier to resist on, knowing that those likely to be killed in reprisal will probably be total strangers?
Probably is. Sadly.
Thanks for that link, Jenavir.
I really hate Staffan de Mistura I blame him for the deaths of the UN worker. He had gived the Gurkhas order not to shot to protect them selves when attacked. I almost puked when I saw him help carry the coffin with the Swedish UN-worker, it’s a insult. Then he only blame a nutcase 1000 miles away and the crime, burn a fukkin comic book. If I will ran into this miserable piece of shit here home in Stockholm I will beat his ass blue and yellow. I hope the worst for him.
Richard, if you do beat him up, he will face charges for the assault on himself, as he made you angry.