One fine distinction
Buruma is at it again.
Dutch criminal law can be invoked against anyone who “deliberately insults people on the grounds of their race, religion, beliefs or sexual orientation.” Whether Mr. Wilders has deliberately insulted Muslim people is for the judges to decide. But for a man who calls for a ban on the Koran to act as the champion of free speech is a bit rich.
No, not exactly, and not necessarily. Being a champion of free speech does not necessarily mean being a champion of absolute free speech with no exceptions whatever. It can mean, for instance, defending free speech construed more broadly than to allow one anti-speech law but still more narrowly than to permit another. It’s not really particularly rich for Wilders to think, for instance, that the Koran has some dangerous content while Fitna does not. I (for one) think Fitna does have some dangerous content, but I think the Koran has more. I wouldn’t call for a ban on the Koran, for many reasons, but I think Buruma’s disdain is too easy.
Comparing a book that billions hold sacred to Hitler’s murderous tract is more than an exercise in literary criticism; it suggests that those who believe in the Koran are like Nazis, and an all-out war against them would be justified. This kind of thinking, presumably, is what the Dutch law court is seeking to check.
One, I think that reading is strained; I think comparing the Koran to Mein Kampf suggests that the Koran is like Mein Kampf. But two, which is more important, notice that Buruma says nothing to show that the Koran is not in fact like Mein Kampf. He says nothing to show that in the rest of the piece, either. Well – what if it is? If it is, then there may be a problem, right? If it is, then covering our ears and pretending it isn’t may not be the best idea. It wasn’t the best idea in the case of Mein Kampf and it may not be the best idea in the case of the Koran either. Yet Buruma seems to ignore that possibility.
One of the misconceptions that muddle the West’s debate over Islam and free speech is the idea that people should be totally free to insult. Free speech is never that absolute. Even — or perhaps especially — in America, where citizens are protected by the First Amendment, there are certain words and opinions that no civilized person would utter, and others that open the speaker to civil charges.
Yes; there are libel laws, for instance. But are there laws against ‘anyone who “deliberately insults people on the grounds of their religion [or] beliefs”‘? I don’t think so, because if there were they would probably be (and be found) unconstitutional. Do let me know if there are any such. If I’m right, it’s not a ‘misconception’ to think that free speech includes the idea ‘that people should be totally free to insult.’ Incite hatred against, no, perhaps not (depending on the circumstances etc) but just plain insult, yes. That is, indeed, part of free speech. Why? Well, because one might need to call some corrupt lying hack a corrupt lying hack, and there’s no way to have laws against insulting people while still protecting the freedom to call a corrupt lying hack a corrupt lying hack. In other words, free speech is a basic part of political freedom.
If Mr. Wilders were to confine his remarks to those Muslims who do harm freedom of speech by using violence against critics and apostates, he would have a valid point. This is indeed a serious problem, not just in the West, but especially in countries where Muslims are in the majority. Mr. Wilders, however, refuses to make such fine distinctions. He believes that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.
But Mr Buruma is perhaps making one fine distinction too many. That is because violence is not the only problem, and it’s either evasive or naïve of Buruma to imply that it is. There are Muslims who do harm freedom of speech by using laws or UN human rights bodies or rhetoric or threats of violence or social pressure against critics and apostates – so it’s just way too easy and too comfortable to pretend that the only problem is with actual overt physical violence. It’s hard to believe that Buruma has been paying too little attention to be aware of this.
Presumbably he’s worried about stirring up hatred of (and violence against) Muslims in general, and that is of course a valid worry; but he shouldn’t be evasive, because there are other valid worries in play.
In this connection I would put in a plug for Johann Hari’s ‘Stand up for the right to criticise religion’.
It’s at http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1439 .
“The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism – giving us the space to doubt and question and make up our own minds – are being beaten back by belligerent demands that we “respect” religion. A historic marker has just been passed, showing how far we have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed to be the global guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten – to put him on the side of the religious censors.”
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, particularly against the creeping mediaevalism bound up in the idea that respect must be extended from rights of individuals to rights of their beliefs. Those many and varied beliefs are dead set to each take on a persona as actors on the world stage. Assaulting a belief, murdering a belief, stealing (credibility) from a belief and so on will finish up covered by the Crimes Act.
I linked to Johann’s piece a couple of days ago.
Johann linked to B&W at the end!
I was particularly concerned about Buruma’s response to the law professor who thought it strange that a man should be prosecuted for criticizing a book. This is Buruma’s response:
Three remarks. First, apparently Mein Kampf is banned in Holland. Second, the reason it is banned, presumably, is that it still has the power to move people to adopt dangerous and violent beliefs which may lead to dangerous and violent actions. Third, the koran is quite explicit about the rights of Muslims to act violently towards those who do not belong to the Muslim ummah. It is not wrong to enslave or to kill them, for instance, since they are not protected by Allah. Of course, the koran (or the hadith) allows for protection money, the jizya tax, so they may live in sufferance amongst Muslims, but it is by Muslim’s leave, not otherwise. In Saudi Arabia they are not permitted to signify their existence by the use of religious dress or religious rite. But it is clear from the koran that it is wrong for (Muslim) believers to have, as friends, either Christians or Jews. (5:51)
It really doesn’t matter whether billions of people hold this book to be sacred. It is an intolerant, and essentially racist and muderous tract. It underwrote an epoch of imperial conquest, that threated Europe until Muslim armies were turned back at the gates of Vienna in the East, and at Poitiers in the West. Strictly, it’s not racist, since anyone can be a Muslim, but inasfar as it marks out a specific people as in some sense pure, and others as impure (called dogs and pigs, I believe, in the koran), it is a racist tract as well as being intolerant and vicious.
What about the bible or the scriptures of the Jews? I think it would be fair to put those books under a ban too. They’ve caused enough harm in all conscience. But the koran is by far the most violent sacred book around. As you said, OB, it’s a real eye-opener for Muslims who have never read it. It turned my stomach the first time I read it. It’s an evil book.
I’m not sure it would help to ban it. But it would help, it seems to me, to point out how atrociously violent it is, and how unacceptable to the mores of democratic societies. (This goes for the bible, the pope, and a lot of other things as well.)
I suspect Wilders, rabid as he is, might make a good showing in court if he keeps his head and argues on the evidence alone.
I know, of course, that I don’t make the fine distinctions that you do, OB, but in my view all religions are evil, and Islam is more evil than most. And just as some people have said and should be able to say that the bible should be banned, I think it should be legal to say that the koran should be banned too. It’s a way of criticising dangerous books and writings. And in order for them not to be dangerous, they must be able to be criticised and scorned, no matter who holds them to be holy.
Buruma: “Mr. Wilders, however, refuses to make such fine distinctions.”
But then Mr. Buruma refuses to make the not-very-fine distinction between condemning a book, and condemning the people who believe in it.
Buruma again: “Comparing a book that billions hold sacred to Hitler’s murderous tract is more than an exercise in literary criticism; it suggests that those who believe in the Koran are like Nazis, and an all-out war against them would be justified.”
Really? So my hostility to Mein Kampf is equivalent to advocating the murder of members of the American Nazi Party?
When I was a child a local car dealer used to end his tv pitch with a stock Southernism: “no brag, just fact.”
If someone is corrupt and you say so, it is not an insult, just a statement of fact (assuming you can document it).
Interesting one. As, perhaps, more of a free speech absolutist than most (although I do draw a line around incitements to commit crimes of violence, at least in circumstances where that incitement is reasonably likely to actually result in a crime being committed) I would be horrified by any plan to actually ban the bible, the torah, or the koran. I also think people should be free to read and make up their mind about Mein Kampf (though – caveat – I haven’t actually read it and its possible I’d change my mind if I had). On the other hand, that doesn’t mean I’d want to stop people from advocating such a ban – especially where, as I suspect Wilders might be doing, he is essentially making a rhetorical point rather than setting out a government programme for book burning.
It is, I think, also possible that the Koran *is* like Mein Kampf, *and* that covering our ears and pretending otherwise might be the best way of dealing with this, given the sheer number of people in the world who are likely to take offence at such comparisons. The trouble is, its not an argument that anyone who sincerely believes this can make publicly. Although again, as a supporter of free speech, I would no more want to stop people making the comparison than I would want to prevent people being able to read the Koran.
patrick:
I don’t think you need to worry about that caveat, in fact if anything it makes the “free speech absolutist” case even stronger. How could you decide that a book should be banned if you’re not free to read it in the first place?
For your delectation, two quotes:
“For the truest democracy is not that in which the majority imposes its will on all minorities. It is surely that in which minorities are allowed to flourish, even at some expense to
the patience of the majority.”
— George Woodcock
“We should never relinquish, nor lightly value, our right, not to argue in the face of other people’s gods,but to fart.”
— Matthew Parris, The Times,
Feb.04, 2006
“…[T]here are certain words and opinions that no civilized person would utter…” but Mr. Buruma is one Dutch citizen who has. I’d almost like to see him prosecuted for “insulting” and “spreading hatred” against believers in free speech. Almost.
The problem with banning books is that it is completely ineffective. During 17 years of dictatorship in Chile, all banned books circulated in photocopies, and street vendors even made a good business peddling them, as they did censored music and videos. Internet makes the photocopy machine obsolete: it is not difficult to put the entire Koran or Mein Kampf online. Both the Koran and Mein Kampf are unreadable, completely boring. It never fails to amaze me that people can read them. The Bible, for all its philosophical defects, has beautiful passages: the reconciliation of Joseph and his brothers, Job, Ecclesiastes, some Psalms, etc., but the Koran is a literary wasteland.
The Koran is a literary wasteland, though it’s a meadow for fools. Amos, you’re right, there are some beautiful things in the bible, but there are some horrid and hateful things as well. I’m not sure they balance each other very well.
Of course, you’re right. There’s no point in banning a book. But there might be some point in saying that a book should be banned, and pointing out, while you do it, some salient parallels.
I have no doubt that Wilders is something of a racist, but I also have no doubt that he is alerting people to real dangers. Hitler and his band of thugs were not taken seriously at the beginning either, and a significant number of his supporters, I think, were surprised at the violence they had helped unleash. They hadn’t read Mein Kampf, and no doubt found it a literary wasteland.
Another good one, Neil.
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It would be quite amusing to see Buruma prosecuted for insulting believers in free speech, wouldn’t it.
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One of the problems with banning books is that it’s futile, but that’s only one, and really one of the least. There are also problems of principle which matter much more. (But they’re in tension with other important principles, so there’s no easy or quick or glib way to dismiss these battles, which is why Buruma’s always-incomplete accounts are so irritating.)
One practical reason in favor of not banning potentially dangerous books is that if they are legal, it is much much easier to keep track of who is reading them and thus, who may use them for dangerous ends: purchases in bookstores, library loans, etc.
it is much much easier to keep track of who is reading them…
Step away from my bookshelf.
I think the whole business of the question of what who is reading when is really irrelevant. The reasons of principle are more interesting and more important too.
However, there is a serious problem, far more serious than NB’s catching Buruma’s contradiction of condemning for speaking someone who was speaking. It all depends on what you say, I guess.
However, the problem is that very few are bringing the danger of the Koran to public attention. There are some who are doing Trojan service here, Ophelia and Jeremy not least. But wide public attention to the problem of Islam and its so-called holy book and its dangers is not being drawn by the only people who can do it, namely, the managers and editors and journalists of mass circulation media. As Christopher Hitchens says so powerfully in his piece, “Assasins of the Mind”:
The one thing that you can say about Wilders, if nothing else, is that he’s put it on the agenda. Possibly in the wrong way, and his kind of frothy demagoguery is always in danger of backfiring, as, arguably, was Theo Van Gogh’s and Ayan Hirsi Ali’s film, in which verses from the Koran were projected onto a naked female body. (Now that was in your face!) But if there’s no one willing to do this kind of outré thing, the Koran sits in the background, the unwelcome religious censor at every editor’s desk. Somehow we have to break this prohibition. I don’t know enough about Wilders to despise or admire him, but he’s doing something very few others are daring to do. Surely, this is no small thing.
“But if there’s no one willing to do this kind of outré thing, the Koran sits in the background, the unwelcome religious censor at every editor’s desk.”
Well I’m not sure that’s true. It may be, but I’m not sure it is. I think it’s probably more useful to keep working away with the calm reasonable argumentative approach – which would include for instance ‘Jesus and Mo’ which is teasing but also argumentative.
Well, OB, I’m not sure it’s true either, and I’m all for sweet reasonableness. Really I am! But it doesn’t get much attention out in the boonies, and, arguably, at the centres of power, either.
I think that was Hitchens’ point in the article you linked. This censorship has turned into self-censorship out of fear. And if that’s true, then it’s a big problem. It’s probably important to remember that Theo van Gogh was murdered, and Ayan Hirsi Ali is still afraid for her life, so Wilders’ claims don’t seem disproportionate. Isn’t that how Nazism spread? No one dared, after awhile, or the thugs (die braunen batallionen) would rough you up or kill you. How is this significantly different? I just don’t see quiet humour affecting the outcome in a big way, and I think we need something big to make a change here.
But, as you say, maybe I’m wrong. I hope so, because I don’t think there are enough people willing to stake their lives on this.
I never forget that Theo van Gogh was murdered and that Hirsi Ali is under permanent threat! How could I? It’s in the foreground of most of what I do.
But argument can expand and grow, and to some extent that is happening. Johann’s piece got a lot of attention, I think.
Cameras which ‘register’ customers? How? Cameras can only take pictures of people, can’t they? I’ve never heard of police sifting through bookstore surveillance tapes looking for pictures of people buying books; do they do that? It seems like a terribly labour-intensive speculative indirect form of surveillance. Besides, cameras are in (some) bookstores for the stores’ purposes, not for police purposes.
No, sorry, I don’t believe it; it sounds like paranoia; I don’t think Big Brother is watching cctv to find out what books we’re buying.
Oh dear, now I’ve offended you again, OB. I’m always putting my foot in it! But I didn’t mean to suggest that you didn’t remember these things, as, of course, I know you don’t.
I guess what I was trying to say is something like this. In order to counter the trend that began with Salman Rushdie and continued with Theo van Gogh and Ayan Hirsi Ali, I think more people are going to have to step into the breach. And not only in the way that Johann Hari’s very important piece does. Hari argues, convincingly, that we should be able to criticise religions and offend people, but he doesn’t really step over the line into real offence.
That’s all I meant by remembering van Gogh and Hirsi Ali. Since your original publisher wouldn’t publish your (and Jeremy’s) book, I assume that you have taken a step in that direction. We need a lot more. Papers and magazines all around the democratic world should be doing this, because it’s going to take a critical mass before the point is made that you just can’t kill us all. But I take seriously the title of Christopher Hitchens’ piece, “Assassins of the Mind.” They are killers, but so far mainly minds have been killed. That way we lose our freedoms in the end. And I don’t think any amount of quiet reasoning is going to change that. I really don’t.
However, I did not mean to insult you. I know how much you remember, and how much you care.
No you haven’t Eric! That was an exclamatory exclamation point, not an irritated one. See…you can tell that because I go on to say things in a perfectly ordinary tone.
Heehee.
Tone can be difficult to read, of course. I was just exclaiming, that’s all. I’m very effervescent.
Can I point out one thing? Salman Rushdie is now walking free and you can buy The Satanic Verses from Amazon. In fact it’s in my local library, (as is Mein Kampf.
Sure. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not walking free, and the Danish cartoonists are under threat, and the UN HRC is screwed up, and self-censorship is alive and well.