‘You have to respect’ 2006 version
We’ve been arguing over the Secretary General and his advice to temper free expression with ‘respect for all religious beliefs.’ This advice is not new – as the news item said, he ‘reaffirmed his predecessor’s line on cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.’ Let’s revisit some other people in high places who said the same thing back in 2006. There was Jack Straw:
Speaking after talks with the Sudanese foreign minister, Mr Straw said: “There is freedom of speech, we all respect that. But there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory. I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been insulting, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong. There are taboos in every religion…We have to be very careful about showing the proper respect in this situation.”
There’s a leader-writer at the Guardian:
The Guardian believes uncompromisingly in freedom of expression, but not in any duty to gratuitously offend…To directly associate the founder of one of the world’s three great monotheistic religions with terrorist violence – the unmistakable meaning of the most explicit of these cartoons – is wrong, even if the intention was satirical rather than blasphemous.
There’s the Vatican:
“The right of freedom of thought and of expression, as contained in the Declaration of Human Rights, cannot imply the right to offend the religious feelings of believers,” Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls said.
There’s the student union at the University of Cardiff:
A student union spokeswoman said Tom Wellingham, the editor of the paper, which won newspaper of the year at last year’s Guardian’s Student Media Awards, had been suspended alongside three other journalists. “The editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK, and are expected to exercise those freedoms with responsibility, due care and judgment,” she said…The students’ union very much regrets any upset caused or disrespect shown by the publication of the controversial cartoon and has taken immediate action by promptly withdrawing all copies of this week’s edition of Gair Rhydd at the earliest moment possible. The students’ union has launched an investigation into how the images came to be published in the paper, which has a potential readership of more than 21,000 students.
There is Franco Frattini:
Europe’s justice commissioner Franco Frattini has confirmed that voluntary rules are to be drawn up after talks with media bosses, journalists and religious leaders. He told the UK’s Telegraph newspaper that there was a “very real problem” in the EU of balancing “two fundamental freedoms, the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion”…Frattini is appealing for the European media to agree to “self-regulate”. “The press will give the Muslim world the message: we are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression, we can and we are ready to self-regulate that right,” he said.
There is State Department spokesman Sean McCormack:
Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images or any other religious belief. But it is important that we also support the rights of individuals to express their freely held views.
And there is, just as we were told, Kofia Annan:
Annan said he defends free speech, but insisted “it has to come with some sense of responsibility and judgment and limits. There are times when you have to challenge taboos,” he said. “But you don’t fool around with other people’s religions and you have to respect what is sacred to other people.”
I collected all these from the February 2006 page of Notes and Comment, where they’re all discussed with some heat. They make a pretty sickening display.
“Respect” has at least 3 meanings. In the TPM, Jean K. distinguishes between social and metaphysical respect. Social respect is when you have a positive evaluation of someone or of her abilities: for example, I respect OB’s thoughtful opinions. Metaphysical respect is the minimum we owe to each other, including animals and perhaps to ourselves, in the sense that if I don’t treat each other with respect, I am belittling or cheapening myself, I am turning myself into the kind of person who I don’t respect socially. There are limit cases, to be sure: I may not feel much metaphysical respect for the latest case of a mother who burned her baby with cigarettes, but as in the case of capital punishment, just as it’s best, in my opinion, to be against capital punishment without exception (even though there are cases in which I feel that the serial killer deserves to be hanged), so I think that metaphysical respect without exception is prudent. The third type of respect is what I’ll call primal respect: I respect the territory of the youth gangs in my neighborhood. It’s based on fear and prudence. Politicians are not philosophers and may not always analyze their use of words carefully. However, in the calls of Jack Straw (I recall him from the time that Pinochet was a prisoner in the UK and he appeared to be an intelligent fellow) and the UN General Secretary to respect all religious beliefs, they appear to speaking of metaphysical and primal respect, not of social respect. OB spoke of Munich and of appeasement in the other thread, but the analogy does not convince me. Hitler had the most powerful army in Europe and at Munich was asking for Czechoslovakia to cede part of its territory. Short of bombing all Islamic country back to the stone age (which did not work the last time the United States tried it, as some of you may recall: the phrase comes from U.S. General Curtis Le May in Viet Nam), we are going to have to live with militant Islam, including Pakistan with its atomic bomb, a picture which is complicated by the fact that Israel also has nuclear weapons and may well elect a more rightwing and warlike government in the next elections. That hardly means that OB should close down her blog or stop denouncing the atrocities committed by religion in the Islamic world and by the Christian right in the United States. However, it does mean that some primal respect for religious fanaticism may be prudent, because as I said before, conflicts tend to escalate, blood leads to blood, and as the 45 years of cold war show, a long shaky peace is far preferable to bloodshed.
‘…some primal respect for religious fanaticism may be prudent,’
Prudent? Bugger prudence, as my old grandad used to say.
Aaaaaaaaargh. amos, I know this isn’t Munich, and I didn’t say it was. I don’t need to be told why it isn’t!
Fear of religious fanaticism is of course entirely understandable – but it also makes respect impossible. I don’t respect people who make death threats over cartoons and that’s all there is to it.
I’m starting to hate the very word. No that’s not true, I’ve hated it for years. But I hate it more now than I did a couple of days ago.
You did mention Neville Chamberlain.
I’m also a bit tired of the word “respect”, but one meaning of the word “respect” is closely linked to fear. So I don’t respect religious fanatics in the sense that I respect Julian B., but I respect them in the sense that I respect the neighborhood gangs. Since the UN Secretary General cannot say: “look, there are a lot of nuts with bombs loose in this world and don’t do anything to offend them because they might put a bomb in your local Jewish center or in your abortion clinic”, he says: “let’s respect all the nuts as long as they don’t actually set off their bombs or commit honor killings, etc.” “Respect” becomes a code word for “watch out for the fanatics or don’t offend them unnecessarily”. I see a difference between cartoons, which may be gratuitously offensive and the type of work you do in your webpage denouncing human rights abuses and other atrocities. It is important to continue with the work of denunciation and of education, but why offend a bunch of nuts with bombs? In my opinion, the cartoon people have every right to publish their cartoons, but it’s not the most sensible thing to do, given the nuts with bombs. On the other hand, to continue denouncing human rights abuses and other atrocities is not only sensible, but crucial.
I did mention Chamberlain, but not by way of strengthening the analogy.
The cartoons in question weren’t gratuitously offensive, or really very offensive at all. If it’s not sensible to do something like those cartoons for fear of violence, then that really would be a drastic crippling and silencing of intellectual and cultural life. It won’t do. We can’t give Rageboys a veto over everything they choose to make a fuss about. We can’t say serious discussion of human rights okay, cartoons not okay. That’s not all that sensible either.
Giving in to unreasonable (indeed, deranged) demands is not a good idea. All that happens is that the demands get bigger and bigger, and they arrive more and more frequently.
Amos it seems to me that you wish to feed babies to a crockodile in the hope that it will eat you last!
Amos
I know that we’re dealing with many different meanings but I’m with Ophelia – anyone who demands my respect using force as a threat loses it by default. Of course it might be circumspect not to point this out to them at the time…
I think the inclusion of the first two quotes is a bit harsh. Straw and the Guardian leader-writer both seem to be saying that freedom of speech doesn’t entail an obligation to provide a platform to anyone who has something to say.
Eh? Where does either Straw or the G. leader-writer say anything at all about providing a platform?
Giving into demands may bring more demands. It may not. One has to wait and see. I’m not sure if the sensitivity in the face of the cartoons was deranged, although the form that the protests took was. I’m the least Jewish of the Jews in religious terms, but cartoons mocking Jewish religious symbols would affect me negatively, although I’m not likely to try to burn an embassy in protest.
However, let’s say that our purpose is to promote human rights and enlightenment values among religious fundamentalists, be they Islamists, Orthodox Jews or Bible-belt creationists. A worthy cause. Mocking the sacred symbols of any culture is not a good way to win hearts and minds, as they say. Human rights and enlightenment values are compatible with moderate forms of religion, and so perhaps that should be our aim, if our goal really is to promote said values and rights, not just to laugh at strange cultures and feel superior to them. We are dealing with human beings, not with crocodiles, as someone suggests above, and in the case of Islam, with human beings, who, rightly or wrongly, feel that they have been exploited by the West. Let’s not offend them more. Let’s isolate the more extremist elements. Let’s offer positive values to the many who undoubtedly envy the Western way of life. Let’s remember that even oppressed groups within traditional religious cultures, for example, women and gays, may have sentimental attachments to symbols of their culture as well as a desire to liberated from their opression.
Well one can make an educated guess about whether or not giving in to demands will bring more demands. We can also notice that it seems already to have done that very thing.
I, for one, have a lot of purposes; promoting enlightenment values among religious zealots is only one of them. I don’t much feel like dropping everything solely for the sake of promoting enlightenment values among religious zealots by trying to figure out what will piss them off and then not doing it.
Have you ever seen the cartoons, amos? They are very mild. So when you say “Let’s not offend them more” I have to wonder why you think we’ve offended them any. The cartoons are simply not all that offensive. If they are the standard by which we have to decide what we can do – then there’s not much we can do. One of my purposes is not to give up doing most things simply on the off chance that it might offend a very small number of violent people.
Believe it or not, I think freedom of speech – real freedom of speech, not this terrified stripped-down version you’re urging on us – is a positive value. I’m happy to offer positive values to people, and that’s one of them.
I’m a woman, and I have no idea what ‘my culture’ (azza woman) or its symbols might be. Milk? Tampax? Aprons? I wouldn’t mind if anyone drew cartoons about those.
“I, for one, have a lot of purposes; promoting enlightenment values among religious zealots is only one of them. I don’t much feel like dropping everything solely for the sake of promoting enlightenment values among religious zealots by trying to figure out what will piss them off and then not doing it.”
Good luck with that, you crusader, you.
Define ‘promoting’