Author: Ophelia Benson

Consider Azam Kamguian in Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam, for instance. Page 216.

The very fact that people are forced to abide by laws based on something some god or prophet is reported to have said somewhere is a form of mental violence.

Page 219.

When I came to the West in the early 1990s, I was faced with the fact that the majority of intellectuals, mainstream media, academics, and feminists, in the name of respecting ‘other cultures,’ were trying to justify Islam by dividing it into fundamentalist and moderate, progressive and reactionary…For people like me, the victims of Islam in power, it was suffocating to listen to and have to refute endless tales to justify the terror and bloodshed committed by Islamic movements and Islamic governments in Iran and in the region.

She was tortured in Iran, while verses from the Koran were played in the torture chambers.

Western liberal and left-wing intellectuals have a strong sense of guilt about the West’s past colonial history and are apologetic to the Third World as such. They consider the Third World a given entity, where people are keen to suffer under the rotten rule of Islam, are happy to be deprived of the human civilization in the twenty-first century. To them, women desire sexual apartheid, girls love to be segregated, people hate civil rights and individual freedom in the Third World.

She calls that ‘inverted colonialism.’ One wonders if it’s also inverted colonialism that is causing all this communalism, this insistent shoving of people into certain communities and keeping them out of others, by labeling them as ‘members’ of some and not of others. One wonders, and one wishes people would notice what they are doing, and stop.

Sometimes my head swims. The room goes dark, spots dance before my eyes, there is a howling sound in my ear, bats seem to dart back and forth overhead, my hair tangles, the milk curdles in the fridge, frogs and ravens knock on the door. In short, I can’t make sense of it all. It doesn’t add up, or compute, as the sophisticates say.

Look, I’ll show you.

Here, for instance, is the BBC on Livingstone.

In a statement, the Board of Deputies of British Jews said it regretted the guilty result, but said Mr Livingstone had been “the architect of his own misfortune” by failing to recognise the upset caused. It added it had never sought anything more than an apology and an acknowledgement that his words were inappropriate for the “elected representative of Londoners of all faiths and beliefs”…Mr Livingstone has said he was expressing his honestly-held political view of Associated Newspapers, but he had not meant to offend the Jewish community.

And here is the BBC on the Best Bakery case.

Twelve Muslims and two others were burned to death when the Best Bakery was attacked by a Hindu mob. The riots had been sparked by the death of 59 Hindus after a Muslim mob allegedly attacked a train in Godhra. More than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed in the riots. Human rights groups put the death toll much higher.

And here is the BBC in 2002 on Gujarat.

Ahmedabad today is perhaps the most communally sensitive city in the country. In 1969, nearly 2,500 people were killed there in the region’s worst violence between Hindus and Muslims since the subcontinent was split into India and Pakistan in 1947. A series of communal riots rocked the city in the 1980s and again in 1992 following the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu activists in the north Indian town of Ayodhya. There followed a decade of relative peace, barring a few months of sporadic anti-Christian violence in the state’s tribal areas three years ago. But the bloodbath earlier this year again raised the question of why Gujarat has become so susceptible to communal conflict.

This is what I don’t get: it seems 1) blindingly obvious and 2) widely accepted that communalism is a bad, dangerous, them-and-us idea, and at the same time, it also seems to be widely accepted that it is in some way sensitive and kind and good to keep referring to entities such as ‘the Jewish community’ or ‘the Muslim community’ (though not ‘the secular community’ or ‘the atheist community’ or ‘the socialist community’ or ‘the capitalist community’ – why is that?) or ‘the Sikh community’ or ‘the Hindu community’. But if communalism is a bad idea, at least in Gujarat, maybe that’s not so clever after all, not so sensitive and kind and good after all. Maybe it’s stupid communalism, instead. And yet – that never seems to occur to anyone. Everyone seems to be just deeply enamoured of the formula ‘the ___ community’ when the ___ represents a certain kind of adjective – but not a great many others. The ___ is nearly always either religious or ethnic or both – in other words, pure communalism. People don’t talk about the poet community or the Tory community, but they do talk about the Bangladeshi community or the Sunni community. Well – maybe, just maybe, if communalism is not a great idea in Gujarat, that’s because it’s not a great idea anywhere. Maybe this constant reification of one of the myriad attributes people can have, and the constant insistence that that one attribute enrolls one in a ‘community’ whether one wants to be enrolled there or not, is much more productive of group hostility than it is of anything else.

Hitchens murmurs a gentle reproach or two.

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark…is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability!…And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary – that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let’s be sure we haven’t hurt the vandals’ feelings.

Let’s be sure we surrender as abjectly as possible.

Denmark will host a conference next month to promote religious dialogue following the uproar over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons, the Foreign Ministry announced Thursday. The government will also give “a significant financial contribution” to a UN program aimed at overcoming prejudice between Islam and the West, and support an Islamic festival in Copenhagen, Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said in a statement.

Will that be enough? Can we go home now? No?

He said the government was planning a range of initiatives to promote “respectful dialogue,” partly drawing on advice given by Muslim countries. “In Denmark there is a genuine respect for the religious feelings of other people and we acknowledge that many Muslims felt gravely insulted by these controversial drawings,” the foreign minister said.

And so we will grovel and grovel and grovel just as hard and long as necessary until somebody finally tells us we’ve groveled enough. We’ve taken the phone off the hook – we may be on the floor for some time.

Back to ‘No groveling, thanks’ Hitchens.

Could things become any more sordid and cynical? By all means. In a mindless attempt at a tu quoque, various Islamist groups and regimes have dug deep into their sense of wit and irony and proposed a trade-off. You make fun of “our” prophet and we will deny “your” Holocaust…As it happens, I am one of the few people to have publicly defended David Irving’s right to publish, and I think it outrageous that he is in prison in Austria for expressing his opinions. But my attachment to free speech is at least absolute and consistent. Those who incite murder and arson, or who silkily justify it, are incapable of rising above the childish glee that culminates in the assertion that two wrongs make a right.

And then he zeroes in on the real problem.

Within a short while—this is a warning—the shady term “Islamophobia” is going to be smuggled through our customs. Anyone accused of it will be politely but firmly instructed to shut up, and to forfeit the constitutional right to criticize religion. By definition, anyone accused in this way will also be implicitly guilty. Thus the “soft” censorship will triumph, not from any merit in its argument, but from its association with the “hard” censorship that we have seen being imposed over the past weeks.

Or, I would say, that along with its association with the well-meaning but dead wrong idea that it’s ‘progressive’ and lefty and kind to defend religious zealots against their critics, provided the religious zealots in question are Muslim.

You may have noticed the recurrence of the term “One point two billion Muslims.” A few years ago, I became used to the charge that in defending Salman Rushdie, say, I had “offended a billion Muslims.” Evidently, the number has gone up since I first heard this ridiculous complaint. But observe the implied threat. There is not just safety in numbers, but danger in numbers. How many Danes or Jews or freethinkers are there? You can see what the “spokesmen” are insinuating by this tactic of mass psychology and mobbishness.

Yup! Remember the pope? He said the same thing. Insult, belief, billion, people. So what, you authoritarian overdressed fraud?

I feel terrible that I have taken so long to get around to this, but I wonder if anyone might feel like joining me in gathering outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, in a quiet and composed manner, to affirm some elementary friendship. Those who like the idea might contact me at christopher.hitchens@yahoo.com, and those who live in other cities with Danish consulates might wish to initiate a stand for decency on their own account.

If any readers are in Washington tomorrow and amble along to the Danish embassy at 3200 Whitehaven Street (off Massachusetts Avenue) between noon and 1 p.m., let us know how it goes. And give my regards to Mr Hitchens.