Author: Ophelia Benson

Here’s a funny thing – there’s this old thread at Talking Philosophy, so old that it’s dated January 8 2008, so old that I’d entirely forgotten it. More than a year old. Long time ago. I found it because I googled ‘Bernie Ranson,’ and I googled ‘Bernie Ranson’ because that was the name on an email message sent to one of my correspondents by what I had thought was a new and unfamiliar troll named Kees but turns out to be a troll I have encountered at least once before, on this old thread at Talking Philosophy. His MO is a little different there, at least at first – which is revealing, because it means he could have done a better job here, but chose not to.

Anyway, there’s an interesting note of obsessiveness about the whole thing – about the two threads taken together. Well ‘interesting’ isn’t quite the right word. ‘Peculiar’; maybe that’s what I mean.

It’s noteworthy (or something) that in January 2008 and in the past week, I took ‘Bernie Ranson’/’Kees’ to task for telling me and others that we were lying – it’s noteworthy that his approach is very consistent in that way (and in others, too).

One substantive issue at the end of the recent encounter was whether it is consistent to defend the right to free speech and also delete comments on a website. Yes, of course it is. I publish this web site: publishers don’t publish everything they are offered, they are selective; I select what I publish here; that includes comments. I don’t delete or edit comments very often – but that is because I don’t need to. Most comments here are good, and worth reading and engaging with, so I don’t do anything to them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t do anything to cause them to happen. Comments here are good because B&W attracts people who make good comments, and B&W does that because it has good content, and B&W has good content because I select it. Obviously I select it. B&W has a subject matter, and a tendency, and a set of commitments, and its content reflects all that. The pope doesn’t write for B&W, nor does Robert Mugabe, nor does Ann Coulter, nor does Tariq Ramadan. That’s not censorship, it’s selection.

I thought you’d like to know that.

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.

The Vatican demonstrates its moral ugliness again.

A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication in Brazil of the mother and doctors of a young girl who had an abortion with their help…Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re told Italian paper La Stampa that the twins “had the right to live” and attacks on Brazil’s Catholic Church were unfair…Cardinal Re, who heads the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for Bishops and the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, told La Stampa that the archbishop had been right to excommunicate the mother and doctors. “It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated,” he said. “Life must always be protected, the attack on the Brazilian Church is unjustified.”

‘The twins’ did not yet exist as such; they were not yet persons, innocent or guilty; and their continued development inside a nine-year-old child would have been lethal to that child. That of course is obvious to rational observers, but to people who make a virtue of thinking that ‘the law’ of an invisible absent unaccountable god who doesn’t exist is ‘above’ that of the human beings who have to survive and function as best they can, it is so beside the point that it can be ignored. There’s a real child who has been horribly damaged, and the church in its wisdom wants to damage her further and end up by killing her – for the sake of ‘twins’ who don’t even exist yet. It’s classic theocracy, in a way – ignore the real needs of real people for the sake of purely notional needs of embryos or breathing corpses. Ignore the real world and focus on imaginary beings and imaginary scruples – and then bleat that it’s ‘unfair’ when the victims resist. Classic.

Hitchens ponders the UN resolution ‘Combating defamation of religions.’

Paragraph 5 “expresses its deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism,” while Paragraph 6 “[n]otes with deep concern the intensification of the campaign of defamation of religions and the ethnic and religious profiling of Muslim minorities in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001.”…In Paragraph 6, an obvious attempt is being made to confuse ethnicity with confessional allegiance. Indeed this insinuation (incidentally dismissing the faith-based criminality of 9/11 as merely “tragic”) is in fact essential to the entire scheme. If religion and race can be run together, then the condemnations that racism axiomatically attracts can be surreptitiously extended to religion, too. This is clumsy, but it works: The useless and meaningless term Islamophobia, now widely used as a bludgeon of moral blackmail, is testimony to its success.

Well maybe we should try the same tactic then. Maybe we should start complaining about atheophobia and secularophobia and rightsophobia. Catchy? No?

[T]he U.N. resolution seeks to extend the whole area of denial from its existing homeland in the Islamic world into the heartland of post-Enlightenment democracy where it is still individuals who have rights, not religions. See where the language of Paragraph 10 of the resolution is taking us. Having briefly offered lip service to the rights of free expression, it goes on to say that “the exercise of these rights carries with it special duties and responsibilities and may therefore be subject to limitations as are provided for by law and are necessary for respect of the rights or reputations of others, protection of national security or of public order, public health or morals and respect for religions and beliefs.” The thought buried in this awful, wooden prose is as ugly as the language in which it is expressed: Watch what you say, because our declared intention is to criminalize opinions that differ with the one true faith.

Yes, and furthermore, note carefully that rights of free expression which are subject to limitations as are provided for by law and are necessary for respect for religions and beliefs are not rights of free expression at all. That last phrase simply makes a nonsense of the very idea. A right of free expression that is subject to limitation by respect for religions and beliefs is a thoroughgoing oxymoron.