Author: Ophelia Benson

Good, excellent, supa. Perfect. I was still worrying about the update because about 300 people signed up but about 700 didn’t. Google changed my ‘add’ to ‘invite’ (I suppose because it’s a big list, and they don’t know me, so for anything they knew it was all a scheme to enlarge the genitalia of everyone in the whole world, which would be irksome) and I worried that the email they sent looked like spam, so a lot of them could have been filtered and a lot more deleted unread. Plus there was a thing in the email about having to set up a Google account in order to view the group website, and I figured a lot of people would have thought they had to do that to subscribe and not wanted to. In other words [draws a deep breath] I thought those 700 people probably still wanted to get the update but didn’t really know about it. So I danced a stately minuet with the people at – with the Google Team, as they always signed themselves, for a few days, and finally we got everything lined up nicely and pressed the right buttons and hooray hooray, the 700 have been added. So B&W has its mailing list back (yaboosucks hacker) and it is a healthy thousand-plus strong and most important (this was really bugging me) almost no one has been accidentally left out. (There were five left out for cryptic reasons; I could always try to email them; don’t worry about it.) So that’s that.

(I’m really pleased. It has been bothering me [well you know how I get]. It’s nice to solve something that’s been bothering you. Champagne all around! On the house [not my house, but someone’s, I’m sure].)

Let’s think a little about this idea that there is a tension or conflict or contradiction between freedom of speech and religious freedom.

What is meant by religious freedom? One, individual belief. No problem. However, that does not entail protection and insulation from disagreement – from awarness of other people who don’t share one’s beliefs. That is not how we understand freedom. My freedom to run up and down hooting and waggling my fingers does not mean that other people can’t laugh and point and make remarks. Freedom just means freedom, it doesn’t mean freedom plus nice pleasant soothing feelings of calm self-satisfaction free of all disruptive challenge. If you want insulation from awareness of people who don’t agree with or unconditionally admire your religion, you have to enter a closed religious order. You have to insulate yourself, you can’t call on the state or international law to insulate you. Two, practice. That’s different, because it may affect other people (and other sentient beings). Familiar stuff – drugs, animal slaughter, education, pacifism and the draft, medical attention, underage marriage, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, caste systems, female subordination, punishment, law – and a great deal more. Practice is where religious freedom really can be in tension with other very important values and commitments, which is why disputes over the tension often end up in court. But the idea that freedom of speech and religious freedom are in tension seems to be about belief rather than practice. It seems to be about claiming that one is not free to believe what one wants to unless other people are prevented from interfering with that freedom by mentioning their refusal to believe the same thing. But an irrational belief that depends for its survival on the assent of everyone else is no kind of irrational belief at all; it’s just sissy stuff. Surely real zealots ought to be embarrassed at themselves for turning to the UN to help them hang on to their beliefs! True ‘faith’ comes from within, and laughs to scorn the idea that it needs outside help – especially from the UN of all places.

What a relief it is to read Kenan Malik after Doudou Diéne.

At the beginning it feels not so much like reading Kenan Malik as like stumbling into an echo chamber.

“I believe in free speech, but…” That has become the rallying cry for the liberal left in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy. The Guardian “believes uncompromisingly in freedom of expression, but not in any duty to gratuitously offend.” For Jack Straw freedom of speech is fine but not if it leads to an “open season” on religious taboos.

Part of the liberal left, I would urgently interject. Not all! By no means all. Not B&W and not Kenan to name two; not Nick Cohen and not the people who organized the March for Free Expression, not Maryam Namazie and not Norm – and so on. There are a lot of us, and we’re a talkative bunch. But his main point is – well, one I’ve made in almost the same words, so I agree with it.

So free speech is good, but has to become less free in a plural society. “If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict,” the sociologist Tariq Modood argues, “they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism.”

Well, there’s one of the more revolting ideas I’ve seen in awhile. One could take it as a mere banal definition, of course – he could simply be saying that subjecting fundamental beliefs to criticism can lead to conflict, can be seen as a kind of conflict itself. This unstartling observation can be followed with ‘and a good thing too’ along with the observation that fundamental beliefs that never get subjected to criticism are about as exciting and inspiring as one’s own pancreas. They’re just there, they’re inert, they’re like wallpaper; who cares. But that probably isn’t what Modood means. (If it were, Kenan probably wouldn’t have quoted it.) There is that ‘have to’ for instance – that has that familiar whiff of intimidation and coercion about it, that we’re all getting so immensely tired of. ‘You have to limit your criticism of my fundamental beliefs – limit it to zero, please – or else I will show you some conflict, if you get my drift.’

It’s a Rawlsian view of sorts, I suppose. A slightly bullying version of Rawls’s political liberalism. It depends among other things on what one means by ‘political space’. Does Modood mean literally, narrowly political space, where laws are made? Or does he mean the social world in general? If the former, it can mean (if I understand Rawls properly, which I’m not sure of) something like bracketing fundamental beliefs and disagreements about them for the sake of agreeing on something that needs doing. But if, as I suspect, it means the social world in general, it just means the same old crap. ‘Shut up because I don’t like what you’re saying’ – dressed up in grand talk about occupying space without conflict. Not a modification of free speech then, but its flat obliteration.

Ah, say the would-be censors, the problem is that you secularists simply do not understand religious believers’ depth of attachment to their faith, and hence their outrage at any insult to it…This argument reveals how little attached many liberals are to their own beliefs…There is no reason to treat Muslims – or, indeed, any religious believers – as special cases. Communists were often wedded to their ideas even unto death. Racists have a visceral attachment to their prejudices. Should I indulge them because their beliefs are so deeply held? Of course not.

Of course not indeed. Depth, intensity, passion, fervour, devoutness, warmth, zeal, profundity of feeling are no guide whatsoever to the merit of the object of the feeling. Absolutely none. Hitler was deeply attached to the mess he believed in, Timothy McVeigh was similarly attached to his, zealots in general are fervent and intense about what they believe; it does not follow and it is not true that what they believe is true or right or just or good for other people. The merit of the content of beliefs has to be evaluated quite separately from anyone’s emotional attachment to said beliefs.

In any case, I would challenge anyone to show me that my humanism is less intensely felt than the faith of a Muslim or of any other believer. There is something almost racist about the claim that Muslims are so different from everyone else.

I would just drop the ‘almost’, myself. I think it is exactly inverse racism (except that Muslim isn’t a race, but the people who go in for this kind of inverse racism are just the people who insist on pretending it is, and they certainly think about it as if it is). It makes a special category of Muslims and then treats them with special rules it would never apply to, say, the BNP or Fred Phelps. No matter what the depth of Fred’s attachment to his ‘faith’.

So the UN rapporteur explains what’s going on and whose fault it is. His report is apparently not available in English yet; this rather right-wing blog translates from the excerpts Politiken and Jyllands-Posten published.

Finally, the Danish government’s first reaction – rejecting to take an official position on the nature and publication of the cartoons while referring to Freedom of Speech as well as rejecting to meet with the ambassadors from the Moslem countries – is symptomatic not only for the political trivialisation of Islamophobia but also, due to its consequences, to the central role those politically responsible have for the national extent and the international consequences in the shape of demonstrations and expressions of Islamophobia…Judicially, the Danish government ought therefore, especially considering its international obligations, to have, respecting Freedom of Speech, taken a position not only on the consequences of the caricatures for its community of 200.000 Moslems but also for the protection of peace and order.

So it’s the Danish government’s fault. It should have met with the ambassadors from ‘the Moslem countries’ and – what? Agreed to arrest, prosecute and punish the cartoonists and editors? Pass new laws banning prophet-mocking? Sworn a great oath that no Dane would ever make a joke about anything to do with Islam from now until the ending of the world?

Their uncompromising defense of a Freedom of Speech without limits or restrictions is not in accordance with the international rules which are based on a necessary balance between Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion, especially to combat calls for racial and religious hatred, and which all the member countries of UN have decided are the basic rules for Human Rights. This attitude shows an alarming lack of sensitivity and understanding of the religious conviction and deep emotions of the groups of society in question.

There it is again. Just what Frattini talked about: the ‘very real problem’ of balancing ‘two fundamental freedoms, the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion’. The idea that freedom of religion requires silencing people who would mock or dissent from a particular religion – thus making freedom of religion itself a joke, and a very unfunny one at that, and making freedom of expression an empty phrase. The freedom of religion does not require the ‘freedom’ never to hear anything one might find irritating or disconcerting. That is not the meaning of freedom. That has never been the meaning of freedom. Translating it to that is a shortcut to theocratic tyranny. It takes considerable gall to name censorship and tyranny and silencing ‘freedom’. The idea that religious conviction and ‘deep emotions’ should determine which speech can be free is also not a very good idea.

There are more extensive excerpts here.

More later.

Boy, Conservative MPs don’t talk this way around here. Conservative MPs, conservative Representatives; whatever – anyway they don’t talk like that around here. We should be so lucky.

The whole climate in which religion is discussed has chilled notably in the past few months. After the Danish cartoon controversy, the momentum is with those people who use their particular, narrow faith to silence other voices. If you doubt that’s so, just ask why no British newspaper felt that it could reproduce those cartoons. And reflect on why the British and American governments had to apologise for the offence caused. What were governments doing saying sorry for the independent actions of free citizens? Bending before a very ill wind.

Exactly. And not only apologizing for the independent (and legal, and in the view of rational people, moral) actions of free citizens, but telling us we mustn’t do them. Telling us we were (technically, if we insisted) free to do them, but we mustn’t, that it was unacceptable. That we ‘enjoy’ normal freedoms but that if we exercise them we will be suspended and our newspapers will be seized and shredded. That we have freedom of expression but no duty to gratuitously offend. Not so much bending before an ill wind as falling face down on the ground and then burrowing their way into the earth until nothing but a centimeter of buttock remained visible, before an ill wind.

When the House of Commons debated the Religious Hatred Bill, the argument was made that criminalising what one said about faith would have a chilling effect on debate overall. And, even without the law having been passed, one section of our community has succeeded in just that aim…I’m sure that Trapped in the Closet is wildly offensive. I certainly hope so, anyway. Because the one thing that Scientologists need more than anything else is ridicule. A religion founded by a science-fiction writer in the 1950s which invites its followers to believe in an inter-galactic tyrant called Xenu and offers them the chance to control time itself by becoming “Operating Thetans” deserves nothing less.

It’s funny the way people keep on using the word ‘faith’ without quotation marks. It’s such a horrible word – wouldn’t you think everyone would want to sneer at it with sneer-quotes? But no, people keep on taking it seriously. That’s odd.

So that’s how it went.

On 3 September 2002, the first day of the autumn term, the respondent (then aged nearly 14) went to the school with her brother and another young man. They asked to speak to the head teacher, who was not available, and they spoke to the assistant head teacher, Mr Moore. They insisted that the respondent be allowed to attend the school wearing the long garment she had on that day, which was a long coat-like garment known as a jilbab. They talked of human rights and legal proceedings. Mr Moore felt that their approach was unreasonable and he felt threatened…The young men said they were not prepared to compromise over this issue.

Who was the other young man, and how was he explained to the assistant head teacher, one wonders. How was his presence explained? How was his interest in the matter explained? How was it made clear why it was any of his business what an unrelated thirteen-year-old schoolgirl wore to school? ‘This is a friend of mine’? ‘This is our imam’? ‘This is Knuckles’? ‘This is our “spiritual advisor”‘?

The school was anxious to establish contact with the respondent’s guardian and accordingly, on 4 September 2002, a member of the support team telephoned her house and spoke to a male member of the family who said that the respondent had seen her solicitor and was going to sue the school. On 5 September 2002 Mr Moore telephoned and spoke to the respondent’s brother. Mr Moore inquired why the respondent was not in school. The respondent’s brother told Mr Moore that he (the brother) was not prepared to let the respondent attend school unless she was allowed to wear a long skirt.

He didn’t say whether the other young man was prepared or not. The other young man seems to have disappeared from the story. I wonder what he thinks about it all.

I’ve noticed something interesting. Ever read any Deborah Tannen? Differences in the way women and men use language? Women say ‘sorry’ a lot more than men do, that kind of thing? Somewhat worrying, a tad too similar to the Gilligan-Harding school of feminism which is too inclined to characterize women as big soppy soft-headed damp-palmed lachrymose huggy squishy melty getOFFme fools – but interesting all the same, and she is better at both gathering data and thinking about the data once she’s gathered. Anyway – differences in the way men and women use language. I think I’ve noticed a new one (new in the sense that I hadn’t noticed it before, though Tannen probably has). Here is my theory. [protracted pause to cough and clear throat] When men report on something they’ve done in collaboration with someone else they say ‘I’ve done this (with X).’ Women say ‘X and I have done this.’ I find that really profoundly interesting, and indicative of something or other. (Well, it’s fairly obvious of what, but it would be unkind to spell it out. snigger, snerk.) It reminds me of a guy I used to work with at the zoo. He once did a written report of something we had worked on together – and he used the pronoun ‘I’ throughout. ‘I did this, I did that.’ I pointed out to him that actually we had done this and that – and he was entirely uninterested. There’s something hilariously funny about that, in a tragic sort of way.

(And no, that still does not mean that Mileva Marić collaborated with Einstein!)