Which Vulnerable Minority?
Yes, what about that Francesca Klug article. It’s worse than some of the more obviously woolly commentary, because its subtlety makes it that much more persuasive. But she starts from a very dubious premise, and sticks with it throughout – without it she has no case. She starts from the assumption that the Danish cartoons ‘denigrate’ not the prophet M, but Muslims themselves. But – if that’s true, then why isn’t that what all the shouting is about? Has she not noticed that the shouting is in fact about something else? Does she think that’s just displacement or a smokescreen? Well, if so, she needs to say so, and say why. She doesn’t.
While some [of the cartoons] seem benign, others appear designed to stereotype Muslims as (literally) sabre-rattling terrorists…Instead, the newspaper cited the European Jewish Holocaust, not as an illustration of where pictorial denigration of minorities can ultimately lead, but as an example of western hypocrisy over free speech.
But are the cartoons examples of ‘pictorial denigration of minorities’? They don’t seem so to me – though I realize it’s debatable. The two sabre-rattling ones could be seen that way, at a pinch – but I do think that’s stretching things. It seems to me that the sabre-rattlers don’t stand for all Muslims or all of a particular minority, but rather for a violent and oppressive minority within the minority (or majority in the context of the cartoons) that bullies and oppresses everyone else. It’s not a bit clear to me that the sabre-guys are meant to be a synechdoche for all Muslims – and Klug spends no time at all arguing that they do, she just assumes it. Then she complains about confusion…
Confusion and obfuscation have clouded every element of this morass. Torrid debates about the right to mock belief systems versus the obligation to respect religious sensitivities camouflage the essentially racist nature of the cartoons in question. Take the publication by a German newspaper this week of a cartoon depicting the Iranian football team as suicide bombers.
Take? Take it where? And why? Why should we take the publication of a different cartoon in a different newspaper in a different country as evidence of (and surely that’s what ‘take’ is supposed to mean there) ‘the essentially racist nature of the cartoons in question’? That seems like a startlingly bald and unembarrassed non sequitur. I might as well say ‘Francesca Klug’s article is very silly, take this article by Tom Friedman in the New York Times.’ Eh?
And she’s wrong. The ‘torrid’ (torrid?) debates about the right to mock belief systems really are about the right to mock belief systems, they’re not camouflage. And the ‘essentially racist nature of the cartoons in question’ is, surely, at the very least debatable – especially since most of them aren’t even close. No, if we’re going to fret about confusion and obfuscation and camouflage, the real problem is this insidious, coercive, and false idea that attacking or mocking or criticizing a religion is exactly equivalent to, is the same thing as, attacking or mocking or criticizing people who believe in the religion. That idea just has to be stamped out, hard. It’s the death of all clarity of thought, of all ability to question or disagree with any ideas whatever. That death is well under way already: plenty of people really do think it’s bad manners or worse to disagree with anything that anyone ‘believes’, especially if the belief is fervent and irrational. That equation just will not do.
Analogies with the Rushdie and Behzti affairs, in this sense, are misleading.
Well, in that sense, maybe so, but since that sense is worthless, analogies with the Rushdie and Behzti affairs are not misleading at all. That doesn’t actually follow, but I’m arguing Klug-style.
Liberal secularists cite Enlightenment heroes such as Voltaire, Kant and Mill to underline their cause. But they fail to distinguish between free speech as an essential means to challenge state or church monopoly power and stigmatising vulnerable religious or ethnic minorities in the name of a free press.
Rhetoric. Heroes shmeroes. Don’t be so silly. And it’s still only an assertion that stigmatising vulnerable religious or ethnic minorities is what’s going on with the cartoons, and again: if that is what’s going on, then why isn’t that what all the motorbike-torchers and embassy-torchers say? They don’t talk about vulnerable minorities, they talk about the prophet. It’s no good just ignoring that inconvenient fact.
Who could deny that in the context of modern Europe it is Muslims who have reason to feel vulnerable when mass circulation newspapers publish images that deny their individuality and associate them with terrorism?
Well I certainly wouldn’t deny that Muslims have reason to feel vulnerable in the context of modern Europe in general, but I am not at all convinced that the cartoons ‘deny their individuality and associate them with terrorism’. In fact I’m so unconvinced that I think the equation of the two – of the cartoons with the imputation – is a sly bit of coercion aimed at telling people to shut up about Islam. But then Francesca Klug really, really, really ought to think hard about all the vulnerable people who desperately wish Islam would treat them a good deal more gently. Girls married off to strangers, for instance; girls forced to wear religious costumes when they don’t want to; girls kept at home; girls and women never free to make their own choices about their own lives. If Klug’s line of thought succeeds in making Islam immune from challenge, then what about them? And why doesn’t she worry about that?
This is hardly a new observation, I’m sure, but when complaints of racism towards Islam emerge, one has to ask, “Well, is Islam, being a semitic religion, restricted only to Arabs?” Obviously it is composed of Asians, Africans, Arabs, and Caucasians. The charge of racism is another canard.
(Though I grant the figures represented in the cartoons are Arab-Persian. Nonetheless, they are the point of reference. Can we contrive a race-neutral figure?)
OB, you write: “It’s not a bit clear to me that the sabre-guys are meant to be a synechdoche for all Muslims – and Klug spends no time at all arguing that they do, she just assumes it. Then she complains about confusion…”
So, what would be the criteria for making that argument?
I think Klug is definitely right about the motives of the Danish newspaper, and the reason I think so is that I don’t believe that you can look at the publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper without looking at the Danish context, and you can’t look at that context without being struck by the distortion of it promoted by the Jyllands-Posten. Given what we know if we make the effort to find out about the Danish context — a context in which the Queen of Denmark, last year, explained that Islam must be defeated, a context in which one party has members that have, often enough, claimed that Muslims should be expelled from Europe and that Muslims are a cancer in Denmark — how are we to parse the supposed “fear” that the Danish paper was responding to? Seemingly, the brave old queen, and the leader of one of the parties the prime minister depends on in parliament, are brave enough to openly be bigoted towards Moslems. Admirable, I’m sure.
The strict construction of the orginal meaning of the cartoons doesn’t give us their meaning as they have been republished, protested against, defended, etc. The meanings shift with the context. But I have still not read any defense of the paper’s own justification for printing them — that is, any examination of the disingenous claims put forth by Flemming Rose in his Washington Post op ed. Fleming’s seems as credible to me, about the European fear of offending Muslims, as David Horowitz is about the Leninist takeover of American universities.
The reason Rose gets away with it is nobody outside of Denmark is really going to pay attention to what the Queen says, or the leader of the DPP says, or the acts of vandalism committed against Muslims in Cophenhagen.
“This sinister-looking caricature bears a striking resemblance to some of the images in the cartoons published in September by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.”
It’s really handy, isn’t it, that the Guardian has decided not to publish the cartoons so that its readers will have to take Ms Klug’s word for it as to what they depict, and what they mean.
I think Europe got itself into a bad spot at least as long ago as 1989 when the EU passed its TV without Frontiers Directive which, albeit in the vague and ineffectual EU way, outlawed “incitement to hatred on grounds of race, sex, religion or nationality”. I don’t know when holocaust denial was made a crime but those laws, where they were passed, also helped to put us in the fix we are in even though in the short term they certainly did some good.
The problem is that we made it a crime to offend certain people in certain ways. And if it is a crime to offend those people in those ways, why is it not a crime to offend other people in other ways? Either the majority gets to decide what “offence” any given minority can claim protection against, or we all have to accept any minority’s claim of “offence” at face value. Neither of those paths lead anywhere useful.
Is a cartoon racist when it paints its subject as Arab and violent despite that fact that if it painted its subject as American and violent or Israeli and violent it would be anodyne? Is it “racist” because it mocks somebody’s holy man? Is the offence felt by followers of that holy man as legitimate as the offence felt by holocaust survivors when someone lies about the holocaust having happened? I don’t think any reasonable person in a secular society with recent memory of the holocaust would think it is. But not everybody affected by our laws today is from a secular society with recent memory of the holocaust. There are in fact people among us who see the two things as comparable.
If you don’t criminalise the causing of offence you don’t expose yourself to that quandry.
It was an easier matter to address even just 10 years ago. But all the world’s people are increasingly aware of each other and making comparisons that didn’t used to occur to them. Many of the comparisons don’t make any sense, but you can’t stop them from being made. That awareness demands of us an intellectual consistency whose absence went unnoticed when our laws and ways were not questioned from outside the frame of reference in which they were derived.
But note that it is not a lack of moral consistency that is the problem. The inconsistency is in how we have implemented our morality, not in how we formulate it. The non-Jewish European majority rightly owed — and still owes — it to the Jewish minority to stop the pain caused by holocaust denial. But had we upheld free speech and made the effort to treat the holocaust-denial problem in a more wide-ranging way, rather than just banning it, we would be in a better position to deal with this outrage over present-day caricatures of an aggressive minority’s holy man.
Free speech would certainly be in better shape. And I think holocaust denial would attract less attention than it does today.
But the problem with Holocaust denial is not mere offence, is it? It is offensive, of course, but is that the only reason Germany and Austria make it illegal? Don’t they also see it as dangerous, at least for Germany and Austria?
Juan, is that directive a law, or is it simply rhetoric? If it is a law, I’m astonished that it passed.
The more philosophical problem, here, is that the state should regulate offense, or mandate respect, dies hard. This used to be a major state function, and it is always being revived by one group or another – from the Catharine MacKinnon inspired laws in the U.S. in the 80s to the cries of some Moslem clerics today.
The idea that offense is an illegitimate mode of communication has both puritanical and authoritarian roots. And it synthesizes those two impulses by calling on some given set of victims’ pain, as if it is the state’s job to guard their sensibilities.
On the other hand, we can all make judgments about the motives of offense, and should. Criticizing the Pope in Texas and criticizing him in Belfast are speech acts susceptible to two wildly different interpretations. Knowing this, if I really want to criticize the pope in Belfast, I should know how to do it without associating myself with Ian Paisely. It isn’t that hard.
And if you want to criticize the pope in Belfast, you should at least not do it while marching with the Orange Order through a Catholic neighbourhood. That’s a pretty clear example of context making a large difference. (Well, I think it’s clear, anyway.)
Deborah Lipstadt’s blog is very interesting reading this evening.
I think they did see it as dangerous in Germany and Austria, OB. And I suppose it was and perhaps still is. But banning it was not their only option. They could have treated it rather as the US Dept. of Health treated claims that cigarette smoking didn’t cause cancer.
Roger, the original Directive has the quoted phrase in Article 22.
The Commission is now working on a “modernisation” of that directive which aims to strengthen that part by requiring the country of origin of the broadcast to take responsibility for preventing “incitement to hatred”.
Prohibition of “incitement to hatred” appears to be a well entrenched European law concept.
I agree that some Muslims, namely Islamic chauvinists, are trying to force their way into the status of a victimised minority, ironically on the back of Islamic chauvinist violence. And it’s harder to fight that off so long as we criminalise offending people.
Several issues here:
‘Incitement to hatred’ is not a matter of giving offence, it is whether one’s speech is deemed by a court of law to have had the intention of actively causing hatred in third parties for persons, not ideas. Without this concept, the voices preaching the racial inferiority of non-whites would, I suspect, be 100 times louder in Europe than they already are.
Google ‘germany neo nazi’ for a sense of why these countries feel they need these laws.
Ian Paisley is by far the most popular politician in Belfast, sad but true, so using him as a negative example is problematic.
Comparisons re. the US and broadcasting freedom are also tricky — a bare nipple is apparently beyond the pale on network TV, after all….
And finally, today the Guardian [UK] reports that creationism is on the rise here too — and it’s Muslims as much as Xians peddling it…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1714169,00.html
Conclusion — personally I can’t wait for the bird flu to get round…
It’s all too easy for us to see this issue (Holocaust denial laws) only in the context of free speech in the 21st century. There’s nothing wrong with discussing the continuing validity of it now, but these laws in Austria and Germany were enacted at a time when keeping Nazis out of the new governments was a much more pressing problem than freedom of speech. I don’t know when exactly the laws were enacted, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t right away. That’s one of the things the deniers don’t tend to address: how come denial didn’t begin immediately, if the accusation was a false one?
This is what I’m saying. I don’t think incitement to hatred laws are self-evidently wrong or absurd – and it seems to me that a quick look at Rwanda and the Balkans explains why they’re not. Incitement to hatred does work, and can and does result in mountains of fresh corpses. The issue isn’t what is or isn’t offensive, it’s what does or doesn’t get people killed by the thousands and hundreds of thousands.
I crossed with Nina – was answering Dave and Stewart. Interesting (and depressing) post, Nina. It looks to me as if both things are going on, and reinforce each other, in destructive and harmful ways – victimization and bullies wrapping themselves in the flag of victimization – which pisses people off so there is more victimization, more flag-wrapping; repeat. What a mess.