More forbidding and outraging and whying
Oh not this again.
Thousands of Islamists have set off on a protest march in Pakistan to demand Imran Khan’s new government sever diplomatic ties with the Netherlands over a “blasphemous” cartoon competition.
The march, organised by Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP), a political party dedicated to the punishment of blasphemy, presents the first major test of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) administration. Last year, a similar protest by the TLP shut down the capital, Islamabad, for almost a month.
In June, Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam MP who leads the Netherlands’ second largest party and has been found guilty of inciting hatred, invited submissions of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, which Islam forbids. The $10,000 (£7,700) competition is due to open in November, with 200 entries so far.
That phrase “which Islam forbids” is meaningless. Islam isn’t the boss of us, so it can forbid until it’s blue in the face but we don’t have to obey. In reality even Muslims don’t have to obey, it’s just that some of them choose to be under its domination, and others don’t exactly choose to be but aren’t really free not to be. The Netherlands, at any rate, in no way has to pay any attention to what Islam forbids, and even if it did, it couldn’t extend that to Geert Wilders, unless it passed some very repressive laws.
People in Pakistan can march up and march down, but they can’t stop people in the Netherlands drawing cartoons, nor should they be able to.
Khadim Rizvi, the firebrand cleric who founded the TLP, said that condemnation of the contest by the Pakistani government was not enough and “only jihad” was the solution.
Before Pakistan’s general election last month, Rizvi said if he had the power he would order a nuclear strike against the Netherlands if its government allowed the competition to go ahead.
The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, has termed the event “disrespectful” but defended the right to hold it on the grounds of freedom of expression.
On Monday, Pakistan’s senate passed a resolution condemning the competition and Khan vowed to take up the issue at the UN general assembly in September. He said Islamic countries should cooperate to create laws against blasphemy similar to those against Holocaust denial in European countries.
“If they [western countries] feel pained discussing the Holocaust, why haven’t we been able to convey to the west how much we feel pained when they do blasphemous things against Islam and our beloved Holy Prophet, peace be upon him?” said Khan.
Because it’s not the same thing, obviously. The genocide of millions of people is not the same thing, or category of thing, as a Special Feeling about a religious figure. That’s why.
Cue liberal westerners crying foul on the Netherlands if they allow the competition to proceed.
And I personally don’t think Holocaust denial should be illegal. It should be frowned upon, censured, condemned, and treated with disrespect, and deniers become pariahs, but it should not be illegal.
Think of the asymmetry here–a candidate for office of a nuclear power is threatening a nuclear first strike, which would almost certainly result in the destruction of his country (and large swathes of the rest of the world), because a politician in another country is saying something that the candidate doesn’t like. And thousands of supposedly-reasonable and empathetic and secular people will stroke their chins and nod and think that this is reasonable for the candidate to do, because the candidate’s religion is such a strong force in the candidate’s life, and the lives of the candidate’s constituents.
It’s…disgusting, and ultimately self-defeating. Because the reasonable, empathetic, secular people who are happy to live under threat of nuclear destruction for failing to conform to a different religion’s sensibilities (from shaking a woman’s hand to drawing a fictional character) won’t be spared if the religious zealots have their way. And the zealots are serious, or at least we have to take them at their word.
One day, hopefully, Muslims will understand the concept of liberal democracy. They’re not the ruling class in the West as they are in Muslim-majority societies and their cherished beliefs are just another superstition. They should realise (1) that we don’t care how pained they are and (2) there’s no crime of ‘blasphemy’.
Iknklast
I don’t agree with your definition of ‘liberal westerners’, true liberals would tell the Muslim supremacists to get over it. Many people described as ‘liberals’ are really quislings, they like a quiet life.
Oh, Khan wants to take it a tad further than a localised ban similar to the European holocaust denial laws.
Global, for pity’s sake.
https://humanism.org.uk/2018/08/30/new-pakistani-pm-imran-khan-pledges-to-revive-un-campaign-for-global-blasphemy-laws/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SocialWarfare
Yes, it’s been tried before. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has been trying for years to get a global ban on “blasphemy.” They sent something to the UN annually, although I think they may have given up for awhile. No doubt Khan is trying to wake it all up again.
I’d almost like them to try to forbid global criticism of all religion.
No more proclaiming that your religion is the one true faith. (That denigrates all the others.)
And that’s just for starters.
RJW, I should have put liberal westerners in quotes. I agree with you on the quislings.
An interesting mental exercise is trying to imagine a world in which nobody is allowed to offend or be offended, and any offence against anyone’s beliefs or sensibilities is sanctioned. So flat-Earthers may not be offended. Nor round-Earthers.
According to Pew research, only a minority of the followers of The Prophet (pbuh) believe Islamist terror acts to be justified. Ie, only around 10% of them world-wide.
So it could be worse.
Islam IMHO is fascism. Mohammad with his Koran beat Hitler and his Mein Kampf by around 1,300 years.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/muslims-and-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
It’s not even true that ‘Islam forbids’ images of Muhammad–it took me a few seconds to document:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depictions_of_Muhammad#Figurative_visual_depictions
[The section on images of ‘young Muhammad’ in contemporary Iran is interesting.]
Some sects forbid representative images of ALL living things–where are the threats about that?
Omar &8
“rarely or never justified”
Why combine the two attitudes statistically?
Separate results for ‘rarely’ and ‘never’ would be far more instructive and probably alarming to the Kuffars. I agree with you on the definition of Islam, it was a violent blood-soaked ideology from its invention in the 7th century. Christianity, initially, wasn’t. Muslims, and their Western apologists conveniently ‘forget’ Islam’s 450 years of aggression before the Crusades and the 800 years of oppression afterwards.
‘Respect’ for religion? International blasphemy laws?
The Quran states that Jesus was not crucified, and that there was no subsequent resurrection. This is blasphemy to all Christian sects. Let the government of Pakistan demonstrate ‘respect’ by banning the Quran.