The SPLC takes a cautious look at misogyny on the web.

The website Itsguycode.com was launched in 2008 as a “parody website for people who take their gender too seriously.” (It is not related to the MTV Reality Show Guy Code, which had its debut in 2011). Its impresarios describe themselves as “a group of men dedicated to preserving masculinity in a society trying to be pimped by feminism”; its name was inspired by a line spoken by Vince Vaughn in the 2003 movie “Old School”: “It’s guy code. Guys don’t tell on other guys. It’s something chicks do. You’re not a chick, are you?”

Hmm. Already I want to be elsewhere.

…the articles that appear under the heading “Women’s Studies” and “Whiny Feminists” are overtly political — and grossly misogynistic. “How to Smack a Bitch” by “Matt Stone” (many of the site’s pieces are bylined “Matt Stone” and “Trey Parker,” which presumably are pseudonyms) seems more like a specimen from a sociopath’s case file than a satire — and it suggests a definition of masculinity that is troubling, to say the very least. There’s an obvious similarity to some of the woman-bashing sites in the so-called “manosphere” of certain sectors of the men’s rights movement.

…

Most of the essay consists of deadpan descriptions of the characteristics of 10 different “bitch slapping” techniques, each illustrated with a color photograph of a woman’s swollen, bruised and bleeding face: “The Classic Bitch Smack”; “the Pimp Slap” (“if your woman was working and needed to be somewhat presentable the pimp smack takes place on the left or right side of the face without causing ocular damage”); “The Johnny Wad Slap” (“for those guys who are not pleased sexually in bed … first used in the early 1970s with female porn stars”); “The Where’s My Dinner Bitch Slap”…

Etc.

The way we live now.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Eric Posner has a rather limp article in Slate, sort of saying the Feds should do something about the “Innocence of Muslims” video and sort of not quite saying it.

Greg Lukianoff writes a much more interesting piece in the Huffington Post in reply.

…lately, it seems as though we’ve gotten so used to our First Amendment rights as a country that we take them for granted and forget the deadly serious reasons why we decided that these freedoms should serve as the building blocks for our society in the first place.

I don’t forget the deadly serious reasons. Maybe that’s because I pay so much attention to places like Pakistan and Russia.

Ironically, the institutions most likely to take free speech and/or other basic rights for granted in the United States are the institutions most reliant on free and open debate: our colleges and universities.

As I have reported for years in the Huffington Post and as I discuss at length in my forthcoming book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, I have seen students on college campuses get in trouble for the mildest imaginable expression. In other cases, students suffer for their politically relevant, but locally unpopular, speech.

So it was no surprise to me that when the trailer for “Innocence of Muslims” debuted on YouTube and Islamic militants all over the globe began using it as an excuse to attack American embassies and kill our diplomats, the first prominent people to rise up and say “see, I told you we were wrong about free speech” were college professors.

First, there was professor Anthea Butler of the University of Pennsylvania who wrote an op-ed in USA Today arguing that Sam Bacile (the video’s purported maker) should be thrown in jail.

I followed that last link. Guess what her field is. Religious studies.

Then, this week, similar criticism came from a much more serious source: University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner.

Posner, son of famous jurist Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, wrote in Slate that Americans foolishly overvalue free speech and that the violence committed because of the video should cause us to reconsider our free speech radicalism.

For those of us who work in First Amendment law, Posner relies on pretty tired arguments that I plan to address piece by piece in upcoming posts. But before I get too entangled in the details of what was so wrong about Professor Posner had to say, it’s important to take a step back and realize why punishing a citizen for offending a religion is so dangerous.

Allow me to interrupt and give my explanation of why punishing a citizen for offending a religion is so dangerous.

It’s because religions have a special kind of power, and we all need protection from that power. Everything about religion should be optional, because otherwise, it’s coercive and tyrannical beyond the dreams of ordinary secular institutions. Respect for religion or religions or any one religion should never, ever be made mandatory, because we need to be able to say No.

…if we start punishing people in the United States because they’ve offended the beliefs of people of other faiths, we will have put the United States government in the role of enforcer of a religious norm.

Pre-cisely.

It’s become easy for American academics, elites and contrarians to scoff at the universal values of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from imposed beliefs. But while America may be almost alone as a nation in being relatively purist about these doctrines, this does not mean we are wrong. A nation and even a world where it’s safe for people to believe as they choose–or not to believe at all–is one worth aspiring towards.

Damn right.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Am I wrong to find this funny? A Catholic priest kicking the yoga people out of his church because it turns out they didn’t mean just Downward Facing Dog and Upside Down Candelabra, they meant “spiritual.” Or not, but they could have. You couldn’t be sure. You know how people are. They say it’s not spiritual, they say they just want to strike poses and watch the pounds melt away, but underneath, they’re plotting to do spiritual.

Instructor Cori Withell from Hampshire said her yoga and pilates classes at St Edmund’s Church building in Southampton were cancelled with 10 days to go.

Father John Chandler said that the hall had to be used for Catholic activities, and he banned it because it was advertised as “spiritual yoga”.

…

Ms Withell, from Eastleigh, said the church accepted the booking two months ago and she paid £180.

She was called later and told that yoga was “from another religion”, so she could not have the hall.

A separate pilates class she had booked was also cancelled.

Ms Withell said she did not use meditation in her classes, just exercises.

She added: “As a nation we have an obesity epidemic. I was trying to bring some exercise to the community and coming across blocks like this is frustrating.”

Yes but consider. There’s nothing about Jesus stretching in the bible. If Jesus had wanted people to bring some exercise to the community he would have said something about it while one of the stenographers was listening.

Ravindra Parmar, president of the Vedic Society Hindu Temple of Southampton, said yoga was “a form of exercise” and “not a religious type of activity”.

He added people were welcome to practice yoga exercises at the temple and said he felt “a little let down” because of the work the Southampton Council of Faiths does to “get all the faiths talking to each other”.

Ahhhhhhh yes talking to each other, but not doing yoga. There’s a difference, my friend.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It’s a day for bad lines, innit. For two bad lines in particular.

One is

In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.

The other is

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Pretend for a moment that you don’t know where they’re from, who said them or promoted them, in what context.

They’re just bad. On their own, with no further context, they’re bad. On the face – prima facie.

The word “savage” used as a noun is just stupid, and sinister. It borders on taboo, in the way “nigger” is taboo and “bitch” ought to be taboo but isn’t. It’s a relic of colonialism and it just reeks of ignorance and domination. Sorting people into civilized and savage has a terrible, blood-soaked history.

As for the second line – the concept of “slandering” a historical or quasi-historical human male called by his fans “the prophet of Islam” is meaningless outside Islam, and people who forbid us all to “slander the prophet of Islam” are trying to impose a religious edict on all people.

Two bad lines.

Now for the context and who said them and why. The first is perhaps even worse in context. The second is less terrible in context but it remains a wretched choice of words.

You already know the context. The “savage” line is from a poster put up in ten New York subway stations by Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative. Mona Eltahawy has been arrested for spraying one with purple paint. The context does nothing to make the ugliness of the wording look any prettier.

The “slander” line is from Obama’s speech to the UN.

It is time to leave the call of violence and the politics of division behind. On so many issues, we face a choice between the promise of the future, or the prisons of the past. We cannot afford to get it wrong. We must seize this moment. And America stands ready to work with all who are willing to embrace a better future.

The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians in Egypt – it must be claimed by those in Tahrir Square who chanted “Muslims, Christians, we are one.” The future must not belong to those who bully women – it must be shaped by girls who go to school, and those who stand for a world where our daughters can live their dreams just like our sons. The future must not belong to those corrupt few who steal a country’s resources – it must be won by the students and entrepreneurs; workers and business owners who seek a broader prosperity for all people. Those are the men and women that America stands with; theirs is the vision we will support.

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims.

Yes; yes; no. The third para goes off the rails. Yes sometimes vandalizing images of Jesus is done as incitement and a kind of ethnic cleansing, but not always. Separate the two. Don’t make it a matter of forbidding attacks on images or prophetic reputations; make it a matter of incitement and violencem. Separate the two, Barack.

I would say more but Popehat got there first, so why bother.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A student journalist, Will Bordell, has a lovely interview with Anthony Grayling which I’ve just published at ur-B&W. Here’s a big chunk of it.

Spare a thought for philosophy: An interview with A.C. Grayling

What makes Grayling tick is “the fact that the world is so rich in interest and in puzzles, and that the task of finding out as much as we can about it is not an endless task but certainly one which is going to take us many, many millennia to complete”.  There’s a sort of childlike grin that beams out at me, as he affirms that “that’s exciting – discovery is exciting”.  Grayling joys in doubt and possibility, in invention and innovation: the tasks of the open mind and open inquiry.  It’s a mindset, he reveals, that “loves the open-endedness and the continuing character of the conversation that mankind has with itself about all these things that really matter”.

It is this that marks the line in the sand between religion and science.  The temptation to fall for the former hook, line and sinker is plain to see: “People like narratives, they like to have an explanation, they like to know where they are going”.  Weaving another string of thought into his tapestry of human psychology, Grayling laments that his fellow beings “don’t want to have to think these things out for themselves.  They like the nice, pre-packaged answer that’s just handed to them by somebody authoritative with a big beard”.  He looks down towards a small flower arrangement on the table, and plays with it contemplatively before continuing in an almost plaintive tone: “And that is a kind of betrayal, in a way, of the fact that we have curiosity but, most of all, we have intelligence and so we should be questioning, challenging, trying to find out”.

But the pessimism doesn’t persist for too long.  Grayling’s biting wit is never too far from the surface of his arguments, especially when he’s waxing lyrical about theology.  By tracing what he calls “a kind of Nietszchean genealogy of religion,” he adopts a storyteller’s tone: “You see a geography – and it’s an interesting one – in that the dryads and the nymphs used to be in the trees and in the streams,” from whence they evaporated into the wind and the sun.  The more humankind has discovered about the world, the more remote our gods have become.  “They went from the surface of the earth,” he observes, guiding me with his hands, “to the mountaintops, then into the sky, and finally beyond space and time altogether”.  Not only have gods and goddesses retreated into their extraterrestrial hiding-places, but they’ve also dwindled in number (generally) to only one or three, depending on your divine arithmetic: “So they’re being chased away bit by bit,” Grayling chuckles.

For all his cutting cogency, there’s an underlying empathy to what he says.  Grayling seems to be desperately trying to reach out to those he believes to be lost in an intellectual fog of their own making, attempting to lend a hand and pull them out.  But he’s worried – and rightly so.  The problem with extreme strands of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism is self-evident: “They force people to narrow their horizon of vision down so that they are almost blind, almost infantilised, almost in a straitjacket of captivity.  But every religion goes through a fundamentalist phase,” he acknowledges in his typically even handed manner, “and every religion leaves its fundamentalist rump; you can see this perfectly clearly in the case of Christianity”.

Will we ever grow out of religion, though?  He leans against the wall casually, stretching out his legs before responding with an assured brand of optimism: “It seems to me that in five or ten thousand years time when people look back (if there are any people) at this period of history, the two or three thousand years when Judeo-Christian influence in the world was considerable, they will collapse it down to a sentence”.  Just as we view the advent of Cro-Magnon humans to Europe in 40,000 BC and the disappearance of Neanderthals around ten thousand years after that as historical facts and nothing more, so future historians will consider religion as a mere artifact.  Indeed, according to Grayling, they will astutely recognise that “that was a bad time for human beings, because they were getting cleverer with their technologies, but they were no wiser”.

But it’s crucial to Grayling’s philosophical outlook that when we lose faith, we don’t lose hope.  “Almost any religion can be explained to another person in about half an hour,” he claims, adjusting his imperious-looking gold-rimmed spectacles, “but to know anything about astrophysics or biology or anything that really gives us an insight into the real beauty of the universe?  That takes some years of study at least”.  Such logic allows the adversity of a world without faith to be rebranded as opportunity, oblivion as salvation.  He pauses briefly, before launching into one gem in his immensely vibrant stash of anecdotes and references: “There’s a writer, a man called J.B. Bury, who wrote a wonderful history of Greece a long time ago now.  He talks at one point about the Greeks’ own histories of their own city states, and he was talking about one in particular, the kings of which could be traced back to divine origin”.  I wait, as though anticipating the punch line of a joke, while he stalls for a second in his recollection.  “And J.B. Bury effectively said,” he goes on, “‘Oh it’s so boring.  It was only a god who founded this city.  But if it had been a real man who had struggled, fought against enemies and been ingenious in getting his people together, now that would be a really interesting story’”.  It’s an incontrovertible truth, and it highlights the contrast “between religion, which is very boring, and reality, which is much more exciting”.

Yet for as long as religion rules the roost, we can only undermine it inchmeal.  But challenge it we must.  “I think one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever heard is the remark that George Bernard Shaw made about the ‘golden rule’ – ‘Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you’ – and he said, ‘under no circumstances should you do unto other people what you’d like them to do to you because they may not like it’”.  A barrage of rationality and clarity storms through his argument, measured and incontrovertible: “It’s a very, very deep insight.  What you really have to do is understand the diversity of human nature and needs and interests, and try to see people in their particularity”.  For religious zealots, he remarks with a knowing shake of the head, this is nigh on impossible.  If there’s one right answer, one absolute truth, one correct way of living, “there can’t be any diversity because that’s heresy”.

Read more

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Salman Rushdie talked to Der Spiegel about his memoir of the fatwa years.

Some senior cops didn’t approve of him much.

I wasn’t like the others, those who deserved protection because they had done something for the country. I was someone who received protection because he had made trouble. In their view, it was my own fault that the Muslims were after me. Some members of the police, not all of them, didn’t understand how anyone could be willing to cause such a fuss for such an far-off issue. At least if my book had been about England …

SPIEGEL: The criticism wasn’t just coming from the police and Muslims, but increasingly from colleagues and intellectuals. Perhaps your sharpest critic, John le Carré, accused you of having attacked a known enemy, one that reacted as was to be expected, to which you cried “foul.”

Rushdie: I think he would probably regret having said these things, because it is a way of saying all intellectuals who have ever stood up against tyrants deserved what they get. García Lorca knew how brutal Franco was. Osip Mandelstam knew what to expect from Stalin. Should they just have kept their mouth shut? Raising their voices against known enemies is precisely what writers have done honorably throughout the history of literature. For le Carré to say that’s their own stupid fault is naïve at best. It dishonored the history of literature.

Exactly. We know what to expect, and we think it’s bad. Because we think it’s bad we think we should say it’s bad. We realize that when we say it’s bad, there will be reactions, bad reactions. That’s the very thing we think is bad! So it’s hardly a moral argument to say we shouldn’t say it’s bad because we know what to expect. The Mafia does bad things. Everybody knows that. That doesn’t make it morally wrong to resist them, but the contrary.

SPIEGEL: But perhaps attacking a religion isn’t the same thing as criticizing a dictatorship.

Religion is worse! Dictators come and go, but religion persists.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

There’s also an epistemological point in Michael’s post, which is interesting too.

The issue of the day is sexism/feminism and the debate is splitting down two rough sides: those who find religion immoral or irritating and want to campaign against it with no time devoted to anything else, and those whose objection to religion is part of a generally progressive agenda (frequently called ‘social justice’), and who feel that organised atheism is in danger of replicating the same old problems which religions have perpetuated.

Part of the problem here is that skepticism and feminism are coming from different traditions: feminism has historically been less concerned about evidence and more about consciousness-raising, while skepticism treats evidence as a gold standard and denigrates anecdotes (valued in feminism as ‘lived experience’) as meaningless. Many feminists treat a speaker’s identity as central to their credibility (this is where concepts like ‘mansplaining’ come in) while skepticism is about ignoring the identity of the speaker and focusing solely on the quality of evidence or logic they present. It’s easy to see how these different ways of looking at the world could magnify any argument and turn mild disagreements into longlasting bitter hostility, even before the current level of childishness, name-calling and abuse started.

I hope skepticism doesn’t treat anecdotes (and/or lived experience) as meaningless for all purposes and in all contexts. If it does, that sounds like what people mean by “scientism,” those who use the word without quotation marks, which I never do. Anecdotes are out of place in science, but they’re not meaningless in all senses and for all purposes. Anecdotes and their larger cousin, fiction, are often very meaningful. Imagine life without them!

Also, feminism is political while skepticism is epistemological. One is about what we value and how we think things should be; the other is about how we can figure out what there is and what we can know. They’re not radically different – feminism can be seen as skepticism about traditions and rules, for instance – but they’re not side by side in the library.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Headline just seen on the LA Times website.

Romney hits Obama for calling Middle East troubles ‘bumps in road’ 09/24/2012, 2:17 p.m.

Guys…take it outside.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Pakistan is working hard to model mindless slavish submission to religious mandates for the rest of the world, and to bully everyone else into doing the same.

Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf ordered Internet service providers to block YouTube — all of it, not just the offending videos. Interior Minister Rehman Malik has asked Interpol to take up the matter. And he wants the United Nations to develop international legislation to stop the circulation of material deemed blasphemous.

Think of all the religions in the world. What a lot of material could meet the description “deemed blasphemous.” Just imagine a world in which all such material was forbidden to circulate. Just imagine the mental poverty.

…it’s not just Islamist extremists and radicals who are offended by the video. One of the groups marching to the US consulate in Karachi on Friday will be the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf. The party is lead by Pakistani cricket legend Imran Khan, and boasts a significant following among the country’s Western educated upper class. Arif Alvi, the party’s Secretary General, said the western, Christian world should understand that Pakistanis, and Muslims in general, have a distinct way of thinking.

“You can’t come in to a society and say ‘this should be painful and this should not be painful.’ What is painful to us is painful to us. And we expect countries to recognize that,” Alvi said.

That’s an appalling, self-destructive thing to say. You don’t want to claim a “distinct way of thinking” – it’s an invitation to contempt. You don’t want to claim it’s a national characteristic to get upset about farfetched offenses to a long-dead human being.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Michael Nugent tells me a bit of news I didn’t know – that the EU has joined the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab League and the Commission of the African Union to release a statement “expressing ‘the importance of respecting all prophets’, and ‘strongly committing to take further measures’ to work for ‘full respect of religion’.”

What?!

The joint statement begins by saying that ‘we share a profound respect for all religions,’ and absurdly adds that ‘we believe in the importance of respecting all prophets, regardless of which religion they belong to.’

Or to put it another way, we believe in theocracy, and if you don’t we want you to keep quiet about it.

Why is the EU teaming up with the OIC to do anything at all?

The world has gone mad.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

They’ve added a great new blogger at Talking Philosophy, Claire Creffield. Alert readers will figure out quite quickly that she is a woman, a type which is generally in short supply there. She’s a dazzling writer, with interesting thoughts.

She is wasted on some of the he-man commenters there, like Michael Reidy.

The question is: What is it like to be woman? Is there a what it is like’ness to the consciousness of a woman? This is a deep question. Is there such a thing as female qualia? Is there inversion in the moral spectrum so to speak? These are bold speculations which led philosophers and others to perhaps consider whether women were ready for the onerous task of voting and the grave responsibility that property brings in its train. You can’t be too careful to whom you allow free speech.

Hawhaw; by jove old chap; pass the cigars.

I’m not allowed to comment there but you are; make her feel less amid the alien corn, if you have a moment and feel like it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Speaking of Maryam, she has her talk yesterday at the NSS conference posted. Richard Dawkins said on Twitter that she was on good fiery form.

A taste -

Hiding behind ‘rights’ and ‘choice’ to excuse misogyny is a betrayal of human principles. After all, years ago, certain men only had the ‘right’ to vote and own slaves.

Remember good old fashioned international solidarity – how I miss it – when we actually joined forces with those suffering under racial apartheid in South Africa for example.

Nowadays, many liberals and post-modernist leftists side with those imposing apartheid – sex apartheid – because it is considered the ‘right to religion’…

It’s a betrayal of human solidarity.

And this solidarity is fundamental particularly given that Islamism and Sharia law have killed a generation in what I call an Islamic inquisition. There is a difference after all between Christianity today and one during the inquisition.

Under an inquisition, there is no personal religion. You are merely told what to say and do and if you don’t abide you will pay the price for your dissent.

And then there’s Islamophobia. I keep telling people – it’s not just me…

When the Saudi government arrests 23 year old Hamza Kashgari for tweeting about Mohammad, it doesn’t accuse him of racism, it accuses him of blasphemy – an accusation punishable by death.

But that same government will accuse critics of Saudi policy at the UN Human Rights Committee as Islamophobic and racist.

What I’m trying to say is that Islamists and their apologists have coined the term Islamophobia – a political term – to scaremonger people into silence.

These bogus accusations of Islamophobia and offence serve Islamism in the same way that Sharia law serves them where they have power. It helps to threaten, intimidate and silence criticism, solidarity and dissent.

They work like secular fatwas and are used not to defend Muslims from bigotry but to defend Islam and Islamism.

Good old fashioned international solidarity. Link arms, comrades.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Marianne (Noodlemaz) tweeted a very nice picture from the Free Expression rally organized by Maryam in London last February;  it’s of her and Rhys. She gave me permission to post it.

She has a great post on the rally, full of pictures and videos. In the second video there’s Rhys telling about his adventure in censorship-by-being-offended, and there’s Richard Dawkins in the background, cool in shades.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Thomas Nagel explains about Alvin Plantinga and his goddy epistemology.

You know how it goes. Having reliable cognitive faculties as a result of natural selection is not credible, while having them as a result of goddy selection is. (But then explain God. I know, that’s old news, but still – if the first thing isn’t credible, why is God credible? Why is the first any less credible than the second?)

We form our beliefs in various reliable ways – perception, rational intuition, memory. Also one more way.

So far we are in the territory of traditional epistemology; but what about faith? Faith, according to Plantinga, is another basic way of forming beliefs, distinct from but not in competition with reason, perception, memory, and the others. However, it is

a wholly different kettle of fish: according to the Christian tradition (including both Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin), faith is a special gift from God, not part of our ordinary epistemic equipment. Faith is a source of belief, a source that goes beyond the faculties included in reason.

A special gift from God? Not part of our ordinary epistemic equipment?

Why? Why make it a special gift? Why do it in that patchwork way? Why not include it as part of the standard equipment? Why make it a special upgrade?

And if it’s a wholly different kettle of fish, why include it as another basic way of forming beliefs? Why treat it as basic at all?

God endows human beings with a sensus divinitatis that ordinarily leads them to believe in him. (In atheists the sensus divinitatis is either blocked or not functioning properly.)

Uh huh. It’s the same old cheat. If you don’t believe in “God” (meaning the local God, because of course it’s not good enough to believe in the wrong one), something is broken. It’s not part of the ordinary equipment, but on the other hand if yours doesn’t hook you up to the right god then the only explanation is that something is amiss.

If all this is true, then by Plantinga’s standard of reliability and proper function, faith is a kind of cause that provides a warrant for theistic belief, even though it is a gift, and not a universal human faculty.

Well, so you say, but it looks to me like just plain having it both ways. It’s basic but special, and it’s universal but it’s often broken. Giving it a Latin name doesn’t solve the problem.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Yes but. Yes it’s good to point out that “Muslim rage” about the video is actually a tiny fraction of Muslim opinion on the subject, as Avaaz does. But it’s not so good to sort Islamists into the bad radical ones and the “moderates,” as Avaaz also does. Moderate theocracy is still theocracy, and it’s bad.

Like everyone else, many Muslims find the 13 minute Islamophobic video “Innocence of Muslims” trashy and offensive. Protests have spread quickly, tapping into understandable and lasting grievances about neo-colonialist US and western foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as religious sensitivities about depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. But the news coverage often obscures some important points:

1. Early estimates put participation in anti-film protests at between 0.001 and 0.007% of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims – a tiny fraction of those who marched for democracy in the Arab spring.
2. The vast majority of protesters have been peaceful. The breaches of foreign embassies were almost all organised or fuelled by elements of the Salafist movement, a radical Islamist group that is most concerned with undermining more popular moderate Islamist groups.

That looks alarmingly like a wedge strategy, or a move the window strategy – separate the “more popular moderate” Muslim Brotherhood from the Salafists so that the MB will seem not so bad after all. The MB is still so bad after all! Especially if you’re a woman, or gay, or a Christian or an atheist or an “apostate.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

In Pakistan, a government minister offers a reward for committing a murder.

That’s right.

In Pakistan, a government minister offers a reward for committing a murder.

A Pakistani government minister has offered a $100,000 (£61,616) reward for the death of the maker of an anti-Islam film produced in the US.

Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour told reporters that he would pay the reward for the “sacred duty” out of his own pocket.

He suggested the Taliban and al-Qaeda would be eligible for the reward.

His comments came a day after at least 20 people died in clashes between anti-film protesters and police.

“I announce today that this blasphemer who has abused the holy prophet, if somebody will kill him, I will give that person a prize of $100,000,” the minister said.

Just like that. “This blasphemer” made a movie, and a government minister is saying “somebody please murder him, and I’ll give the murderer a hundred grand.” That’s Pakistan, land of the pure.

Richard Dawkins pointed out a 2010 Pew poll on Muslim views, on Twitter. One item is “harsh punishments.” In Pakistan approval for stoning people to death for adultery is 82%. Approval for whippings/cutting off hands for theft is 82%, for death for apostasy 76% (how liberal!)

That’s purity for you.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A comment by AJ Milne of Accidental Weblog on “Of course, however”:

My view of mockery of Islam is the same as mockery of Christianity:

That is: it is in everyone’s interest that such mockery be normalized, not discouraged. Whether it’s flippant, silly, rude, juvenile, absurd, insulting, thoughtful, or whatever it might be, people need to get used to the idea that it’s going to be out there if you go looking for it.

And no, I don’t care who does it, how stupid it is, how ugly or stupid anyone thinks it is. Or not much. As in, no, I won’t be writing any asinine fart jokes about anyone’s prophet (tho’ mostly because I can’t make those funny anyway), and, absolutely, if something’s genuinely and clearly racist, yes, fine, I want that discouraged, too. That, I think, is more than fair enough.

But it’s not some abstract ideal that when someone wants to make fun of someone else’s god or prophet, they should absolutely be allowed, nor is it a chip you should even be imagining put on the table. And if someone gets killed because someone takes offense, no, the person who wrote the joke isn’t a murderer, however callous or cruel or even deliberate was the apparent incitement. If someone loses it and kills someone over the mockery of a mythologized god figure that’s been made sacred and declared protected from such excesses, that someone who held the knife or the gun or who lit the fire is the murderer, not the one who scrawled something lewd on the bathroom wall. And the first accessory I’ll be looking for is the one who told them such things are sacred and that such mockery is forbidden in the first place.

In the long run, again: normalization has to be the goal. We have to get to the point that when an extremist imam wants to whip up his flock into a proper rage over random YouTube video X, his protest goes off like a damp squib because they’ve become so used to this stuff, that it’s just not shocking or particularly upsetting to anyone anymore.

We need to stick our elbows out and create space for open discussion of all religions, Islam included. We have to make it harder and harder for people to be raised in a vacuum, unaware that there are no unbelievers, unaware anyone might mock, and utterly convinced that if someone does it’s somehow your prerogative to hurt people and break things. Get to that place, and the voices from the ancient books and the frothers in their pulpits can rage on and on about what a travesty this is if they like; the world will have moved on, and that is how those voices will be made irrelevant. Get to that place, and it opens up people’s lives and minds, gets people thinking, gets people talking. Push that door open, and eventually calm and fearless scholarly secular discussion of early Islam will be that much easier for the academics. Push that door open, and Channel Four can run all the documentaries it likes, and it doesn’t matter how ‘revisionist’ is the historian scripting it. Push that door open, and one more lever for driving people to excesses is taken out of the extremists’ hands.

Religion has ever done this ‘you must respect/you must hush yourselves’ thing. It always will, if you give it even half a chance. It keeps on trying even when it has no chance, because that is central to its survival. Give it any excuse, it will try to sneak through such restrictions on that excuse, and ‘people will get hurt’ or ‘those most insulted are already oppressed and this is additionally hurtful’ will also do just fine.

And the reality about normalization is: we’re partway there already. The increasing ubiquity and interconnectedness of the data networks has changed the game already. It’s been pointed out: those imams could probably find a steady supply of perfectly insulting videos for the purposes of incitement anyway, with very little effort, just through YouTube, right now; ‘Sam Bacile”s flatulent little mess of a trailer was nothing special, in this regard. The reality is probably also: we probably can’t even change this entirely if we were stupid enough to allow legislation directed that way. Such legislation would make a life a misery for those who got caught, and would be entirely unconscionable, yes, but the light would still sneak in around it, now.

Speaking of: while plenty of attention has been paid to the geopolitical dimensions of this, and yes they are significant, and yes there is real resentment that has little directly to do with religion, and yes there’s absolutely some justification, that dynamic of increasing interconnectedness and increasing closeness is also probably significant, here. The world is changing quickly because of it, and those extremists and those religions are fumbling around, trying to work out how to survive and how to work within it. They see opportunities, but the reality is: they also have much to fear: the old formula of hushing entirely dissent and driving it out by the force of social sanction and the plain old iron fist is now greatly complicated by the many additional avenues through which people can see around the monoculture of ideas they try to create, and into a larger world. That, too, is part of what’s happening here.

So they’re off balance, and real human freedom from their previously extremely effective techniques of trapping their flock within a bubble of unquestioned dogma is opening up as a real possibility. Letting the clerics dictate the terms, doing their work for them, joining in hushing the mockery and trying to cooperate and close up the space in which it can be made just because they manage to get a tiny percentage of their population (and yes: these protests are tiny, from my understanding, against, say, the scale of the Arab Spring, and the violent elements tinier still) angry enough about is just incredibly counterproductive, utterly against the interest of anyone who wants genuine freedom of conscience to prevail, and a huge step backwards.

So if they incite by screaming ‘thou shalt not mock’, focus your criticism on them. And, conversely, if the Copts want to make fun of the Muslims, or the Muslims want to make fun of the Copts, I say: shrug and say: that’s your right. Because it is. And it should be. And it’s in everyone’s interest that it should be.

Now: I am absolutely grateful to those trying to tamp down the discord, here get some calm restored, stop people getting hurt. I am beyond grateful to those who step up and say any statement is racist when it clearly is…

But as that former thing, I don’t think we need to compromise the longer view in doing so, at all, anyway. Remember: the protests are relatively small. The Salafists are making a power play, here, and it’s probably winning them a few more loyalists, but it’s costing them, elsewhere, too. There are a lot of people in the countries effected affected who are pissed off those who talked this stuff up, and just want things to calm down.

So it’s back as always to diplomacy and discussion. Calm. Keeping your sense of proportion. Keeping in mind the long view. You probably can’t often say ‘Great video, that’ (and as widely noted, it’s not, particularly, anyway), but you can absolutely say ‘Look, these are our laws, and that is anyone’s right under them’, and people will accept it. There are those of them who don’t see anything wrong with the larger direction I’m seeking here, anyway, others who may not much like it, but probably do realize and/or fear: that’s probably where the wind is going eventually anyway.

So summing up: fine, call out racism, where you really see it. But do not forget this larger direction, in doing so. And do not assist anyone trying deliberately to close in the boundaries of discussion around their sacred cows, whatever you do.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)