If everyone felt free
Ian Buruma is ringing the same old bell.
In civilised life, people refrain from saying many things, regardless of questions of legality…Mocking the ways and beliefs of minorities is not quite the same thing as taking on the cherished habits and views of majorities…[C]ivilised life, especially in countries with great ethnic and religious diversity, would soon break down if everyone felt free to say anything they liked to anyone.
So…what he appears to be hinting, albeit very cautiously, not to say evasively, not to say timorously, is that everyone should not feel free to mock the beliefs of minorities; in other words, everyone should not feel free to satirize or cartoonize or tell jokes about Islam, because where Ian Buruma is sitting Islam fits one definition of ‘beliefs of minorities,’ although of course in many other places in the world it constitutes beliefs of the majority and is often in fact legally imposed rather than freely offered. In other words Buruma is being, as usual, rather fatuously parochial (which is odd, because he’s not really parochial at all) about what is a minority and in what sense Islam can be considered ‘vulnerable’ in the way minorities can be vulnerable. In other, other words, he’s urging (again) special sensitivity about and protection for a very demanding coercive intrusive and often punitive religion, which has state power behind it in many countries on the planet, on the grounds that in some other countries on the planet it is a minority belief. Frankly I think that’s a bad and dangerous idea. We don’t think that way about Nazis, or Westboro Baptists, so why should we think it about any minority? I don’t think we should, and I think Buruma is woolly and mistaken.
Reading obsessively about the Holocaust a few years ago, trying to find where one might find meaning in such vast stretches of misery, one of the telling features, repeated again and again, was that the Jews had no one to speak for them, no state, no nation, no independent voice. So, wherever they were a minority, that’s what they were. There was no outside voice, no one who would leap to their defence.
Now, consider Buruma, who takes the Muslims of any Western country, to be in a minority, and so, statistically, they are. Yet that minority has an incredibly powerful bloc that speaks for them, the OIC, and any country that will, for regional or political reasons, vote with them.
It’s an incredibly vapid sense of ‘minority.’ Buruma should go back to his dictionary, and read it in terms of present realities, and history too.
Yes, but but but, Islam is violent, evil, misogynistic, backwards, from the 7th century, mutilaty, is often intended- especially by BNP types/bigots- to be interpreted as Muslims are… I have often had to correct people on this when they became a bit heated/ spittle-flecked and forgot themselves.
I don’t get. What is the supposed intellectual basis for not attacking/mocking/questioning the ideas of minorities as opposed to the ideas of the majority?
I would have thought that if an idea is to be questioned it should be done regardless of how many believe it.
Try “newsflash: belief in this nonsense just dropped below the 50% mark; gotta stop mocking it.”
But when he says ‘minorities’, he implicitly means ‘ethnic minorities’, which opens a whole other can of worms. Maybe shouldn’t, but does.
This bit, however, is particularly fatuous:
“[C]ivilised life, especially in countries with great ethnic and religious diversity, would soon break down if everyone felt free to say anything they liked to anyone”…
Has he not noticed that the ones who feel most free to insist on their right to say anything they like, including blanket condemnations of the moral universe of the society they inhabit, are those with the ‘strongest’ relisious identity, from the Phelpses to the Jihadists?
I am a minority of one. Since the privilege of belief is inversely proportional to the size of the minority that holds it, I must have the maximal amount of privilege for my beliefs available within society.
I believe that Ian Buruma should give me all his money, his car, his house, and in fact all his property and financial assets. He should then dress as a pantomime dame and go to work as a sanitary executive.
I hope that Ian Buruma won’t offend me by disagreeing in word or deed with my beliefs.
While I’m at it, I believe the same about Kees or whoever they are. This time, it’s my beliefs against the entire world, so presumably the privilege of my beliefs will be almost infinite.