Tolerating the intolerable
By William Rees-Mogg of the Times Newspaper.

Even Locke, our greatest prophet of liberty, would never have defended those offensive cartoons 
 
AS USUAL, the great John Locke got it right. The world ought to be more tolerant but some things remain intolerable. Locke, the 17th-century philosopher of liberalism, comes down to us through his great works on human understanding, politics and education, through the American Declaration of Independence, and through the American and French revolutions. Lockean revolutions were more benign than the Marxist revolutions of the 20th century, though the French Revolution led to the Terror and to Napoleon, two very un-Lockean deviations. 
Locke's first major publication was A Letter Concerning Toleration; it is one of those rare short books that changed the world. He originally wrote it in Latin, the language of European intellectuals. I have a copy of the 1690 second edition of the English translation. It is smaller than my pocket diary and by my calculation runs to no more than 17,000 words. 

I have been reading it because it so directly addresses the most difficult question of the moment: how can people with different beliefs live with one another in peace? Locke's first translator sums up the situation as it was in the 1690s: "This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the principal occasion of our miseries and confusions. But whatever has been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure. We have need for more generous remedies than have yet been made use of . . . absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty, is the thing we stand in need of." 

This last sentence was much quoted in the American Revolution, as though the precis had been written by Locke himself. But it was not, and it goes beyond what Locke himself believed. The criticism of "narrowness of spirit" is certainly Lockean, and so is the call for "generous remedies", but he was a physician and not a fanatic, even in the cause of liberty. He calls for liberty restrained by reason and law, rather than absolute liberty in all kinds and circumstances. That makes him more helpful to our age of contradiction. 

Locke argues that religion is a matter for the individual not the State. "The care of every man's soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself." The State ought to give equal protection to all churches and religious opinions. There should be no persecution on religious grounds, indeed: "We must not content ourselves with the narrow measures of bare justice. Charity, bounty and liberality must be added to it. This the Gospel enjoins; this reason directs; and this the natural fellowship we are born into requires of us." 

Locke did not believe in using force but in "the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. Such is the nature of the understanding that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force". His liberalism is based on the natural independence of the human mind. It is ultimately a psychological theory. 

So far, it looks as though Locke may indeed be establishing a theory of absolute liberty, if with the qualification that individuals and churches owe each other obligations of goodwill, based on their human fellowship. Yet he is also careful to specify when toleration becomes impossible. 

In recent years governments have repeatedly come up against these limits. Locke did not believe that governments could always tolerate "opinions contrary to human society, such as manifestly undermine the foundations of society". It is not clear what Locke had specifically in mind, but terrorism would surely be covered. In the 20th century both Nazism and Leninism were "opinions contrary to human society" in this sense - they were simply intolerable. 

He also warned against trying to tolerate certain doctrines that 17th-century Protestants attributed to the Jesuits. These included the teaching that "faith is not to be kept with heretics", and that "kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms". Locke thought that "a Church has no right to be tolerated" whose members have to obey a foreign prince because that would mean that the ruler allowed "his own people to be listed, as it were, as soldiers against his own Government". 

Seventeenth-century Islam was included in the criticism. "It is ridiculous for anyone to profess himself to be a Mohametan (sic) only in his religion, but in everything else a faithful subject to a Christian magistrate, while at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, who himself is entirely obedient to the Ottoman Emperor." Fortunately, the Papacy no longer claims the right to excommunicate and depose monarchs, there is no Ottoman Emperor, and if there still is a Mufti of Constantinople he certainly has no universal authority in Islam. But Osama bin Laden really is a dangerous man who does claim obedience of his followers. 

Modern liberals may be shocked at John Locke's final exception to the rule of toleration. "Lastly," he writes, "those are not to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all." Modern liberals do not much worry about oaths or atheism. 

Locke would not have wished to be read as though he were infallible, since he believed in reason, not authority. But his doctrine of general toleration is the more persuasive because he recognises that some things are not tolerable. These are views that are too destructive for society; one only has to read Hitler's Mein Kampf to recognise the possibility of that. 

Conflicts of loyalty can turn people into traitors; Guy Fawkes was one example, and the July bombers another. Liberalism itself does not work as an absolute or authoritarian doctrine. There should always be charity and goodwill between different beliefs; toleration must be the norm, but even toleration has its limits. Locke would not have believed in insulting publications or in violent response
 

Source:The Times of London 6/2/06.

The Sunday Times February 05, 2006:- 

These cartoons don't defend free speech, they threaten it
By Simon Jenkins
I think, therefore I am, said the philosopher. Fine. But I think, therefore I speak? No way. 
Nobody has an absolute right to freedom. Civilisation is the story of humans sacrificing freedom so as to live together in harmony. We do not need Hobbes to tell us that absolute freedom is for newborn savages. All else is compromise. 

Should a right-wing Danish newspaper have carried the derisive images of Muhammad? No. Should other newspapers have repeated them and the BBC teasingly "flashed" them to prove its free-speech virility? No. Should governments apologise for them or ban them from repeating the offence? No, but that is not the issue. 

A newspaper is not a monastery, its mind blind to the world and deaf to reaction. Every inch of published print reflects the views of its writers and the judgment of its editors. Every day newspapers decide on the balance of boldness, offence, taste, discretion and recklessness. They must decide who is to be allowed a voice and who not. They are curbed by libel laws, common decency and their own sense of what is acceptable to readers. Speech is free only on a mountain top; all else is editing. 

Despite Britons' robust attitude to religion, no newspaper would let a cartoonist depict Jesus Christ dropping cluster bombs, or lampoon the Holocaust. Pictures of bodies are not carried if they are likely to be seen by family members. Privacy and dignity are respected, even if such restraint is usually unknown to readers. Over every page hovers a censor, even if he is graced with the title of editor. 

To imply that some great issue of censorship is raised by the Danish cartoons is nonsense. They were offensive and inflammatory. The best policy would have been to apologise and shut up. For Danish journalists to demand "Europe-wide solidarity" in the cause of free speech and to deride those who are offended as "fundamentalists . . . who have a problem with the entire western world" comes close to racial provocation. We do not go about punching people in the face to test their commitment to non-violence. To be a European should not involve initiation by religious insult. 

Many people seem surprised that a multicultural crunch should have come over religion rather than race. Most incoming migrants from the Muslim world are in search of work and security. They have accepted racial discrimination and cultural subordination as the price of admission. Most Europeans, however surreptitiously, regard that subordination as reasonable. 

What Muslims did not expect was that admission also required them to tolerate the ridicule of their faith and guilt by association with its wildest and most violent followers in the Middle East. Islam is an ancient and dignified religion. Like Christianity its teaching can be variously interpreted and used for bloodthirsty ends, but in itself Islam has purity and simplicity. Part of that purity lies in its abstraction and part of that abstraction is an aversion to icons. 

The Danes must have known that a depiction of Allah as human or the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist would outrage Muslims. It is plain dumb to claim such blasphemy as just a joke concordant with the western way of life. Better claim it as intentionally savage, since that was how it was bound to seem. To adapt Shakespeare, what to a Christian "is but a choleric word", to a Muslim is flat blasphemy. 

Of all the casualties of globalism, religious sensibility is the most hurtful. I once noticed in Baghdad airport an otherwise respectable Iraqi woman go completely hysterical when an American guard set his sniffer dog, an "unclean" animal, on her copy of the Koran. The soldier swore at her: "Oh for Christ's sake, shut up!" She was baffled that he cited Christ in defence of what he had done. 

Likewise, to an American or British soldier, forcibly entering the women's quarters of an Arab house at night is normal peacekeeping. To an Arab it is abhorrent, way beyond any pale. Nor do Muslims understand the West's excusing such actions, as does Tony Blair, by comparing them favourably with those of Saddam Hussein, as if Saddam were the benchmark of international behaviour. 

It is clearly hard for westerners to comprehend the dismay these gestures cause Muslims. The question is not whether Muslims should or should not "grow up" or respect freedom of speech. It is whether we truly want to share a world in peace with those who have values and religious beliefs different from our own. The demand by foreign journalists that British newspapers compound their offence shows that moral arrogance is as alive in the editing rooms of northern Europe as in the streets of Falluja. That causing religious offence should be regarded a sign of western machismo is obscene. 

The traditional balance between free speech and respect for the feelings of others is evidently becoming harder to sustain. The resulting turbulence can only feed the propaganda of the right to attack or expel immigrants and those of alien culture. And it can only feed the appetite of government to restrain free speech where it really matters, as in criticising itself. 

There is little doubt that had the Home Office's original version of its religious hatred bill been enacted, publishing the cartoons would in Britain have been illegal. There was no need to prove intent to cause religious hatred, only "recklessness". Even as amended by parliament the bill might allow a prosecution to portray the cartoons as insulting and abusive and to dismiss the allowed defence that the intention was to attack ideas rather than people. 

The same zest for broad-sweep censorship was shown in Charles Clarke's last anti-terrorism bill. Its bid (again curbed by parliament) was to outlaw the "negligent", even if unintended, glorification of terrorism. It wanted to outlaw those whose utterances might have celebrated or glorified a violent change of government, whether or not they meant to do so. Clarke proposed to list "under order" those historical figures he regarded as terrorists and those he decided were "freedom fighters". The latter, he intimated, might include Irish ones. This was historical censorship of truly Stalinist ambition. By such men are we now ruled. 
 
That a modern home secretary should seek such powers illustrates the danger to which a collapse of media self-restraint might lead. Last week there were demands from some (not all) Muslim leaders for governments to "apologise" for the cartoons and somehow forbid their dissemination. It was a demand that Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, commendably rejected. It assumed that governments had in some sense allowed the cartoons and were thus in a position to atone for them. Many governments might be happy to fall into this trap and seek to control deeds for which they may have to apologise. The glib assumption of blame where none exists feeds ministerial folie de grandeur, as with Blair's ludicrous 1997 apology for the Irish potato famine. 
In all matters of self-regulation the danger is clear. If important institutions, in this case the press, will not practise self-discipline then governments will practise it for them. Ascribing evil consequences to religious faith is a sure way of causing offence. Banning such offence is an equally sure way for a politician to curry favour with a minority and thus advance the authoritarian tendency. The present Home Office needs no such encouragement. 
 
A 'Freedom' Whose Home Is the Jungle
Ziauddin Sardar, The U.K.Independent Newspaper. 
  
"Fire!" a man yells to a packed theater audience. "What are you doing?" asks his incredulous companion. "I'm abusing free speech to prove it exists," comes the reply. The audience guffaws. Tom Stoppard's quip from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead brings the furor over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to life.

But the cartoons come alive not as philosophical whimsy but as tense battle lines. On one side, we have liberal extremists defending "freedom of expression" as a sacred and absolute territory. The right to offend is advanced as the essential liberty of a secular society. On the other side, we have bearded and masked men protesting against the outrage in the language of absolute fanaticism. Placards shouting "Bomb the West" and "Cut Their Heads Off" are vile and offensive. How freedom of expression is exercised is as important as how the outrage against an offense is demonstrated. Both are cast in the language of extremism and violence.

Let us be clear about one thing: This is not an issue of "freedom of expression." It is about power, domination and demonization. The offense is not just the representation of the Prophet Muhammad. The outrage is that the Prophet is represented as a terrorist with the clear implication that he preaches a violent creed and that all his followers are intrinsically violent. This is painting Islam and every Muslim in the conclusive colors of absolute darkness. No culture or people can accept such representation no matter how it is justified.

A cartoon is a satiric device. Satire holds a mirror to the powerful, speaking truth to power. But European Muslims can hardly be described as powerful. The Muslims of Denmark, France, Germany and Holland are among the most marginalized, unrepresented and voiceless of communities. They have no comeback. When the powerless are ridiculed in this manner, "freedom of expression" becomes an instrument of oppression.

As the editor of Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper where the cartoons first appeared, admits, the exercise was undertaken simply because it could be undertaken - to show there is nothing off limits to ridicule. In other words, it was an exercise to demonstrate power, and to illustrate that European liberal secularists have a superior right to define and determine how Islam should be seen and how Muslims observe their faith. The choice of so many newspapers across Europe to republish the cartoons is definitively a gauntlet directed at all Muslims. It is a practical demonstration of President Bush's diktat that you are either with us or against us - accept what we do and join civilization; object and be categorized as barbarians.

We have been here before. This is the same choice Europe gave to the Jews in 1920s and 30s. The parallels are uncanny. The Muslims are now being projected as the alien "others" with foreign values within Europe. They are being demonized with exactly the same vehemence. The blood rite has been replaced with notions of Muslim violence, backwardness, and fanaticism.

Right-wing extremism and fascism are on the increase. "Freedom of expression" has now become a precursor to the banality of evil. In other words, Muslims are being set up for the next holocaust.

It is time for mindless defenders of "freedom of expression" to realize that the kind of absolute freedom they seek belongs only in the jungle. In a civilized society, freedom always comes with responsibility. In many European countries, free speech does not extend to the denial of the Holocaust. Indeed, anyone denying even the methods by which Jews were put to death by the Nazis can end up in jail. We are not free to glorify child pornography. We are not even free to drive on the road the way we want to drive.

Moreover, the argument that the absolute and sacred territory of liberal secularism are superior to the sacred notions of other cultures is Eurocentric and arrogant. Such hubris, as the Danes have demonstrated so well, is a recipe for conflict and violence. It fuels extremism on both sides. Freedom of expression is not about doing whatever we want to do because we can do it. It is about creating an open marketplace for ideas and debate where all, including the marginalized, can take part as equals.

During the Rushdie affair, the question all Muslims faced was "have you read the book?" So far, everyone in Britain is arranging their angst and anguish over cartoons no newspaper has printed. Is Britain going soft? Are we once bitten, once bombed, and fighting shy? Or have we arrived at a different construction of the basic issues involved? Tom Stoppard's jest is based on the aphorism of an American jurist that asserts there are limits to free expression. In Britain we are learning the lesson that these limits are to be found in the social consequences, the potential harm to others of an exercise of free speech. Tolerance is easy if there is nothing to offend. We become tolerant only when we defer to the sensitivities of those with whom we profoundly disagree on matters we do not believe can or should be accepted. Forbearance is the currency of peaceful coexistence in heterodox society.

It would indeed be brave of me to suggest that Britain has arrived at a clear and settled forbearance. Especially in the week a British jury gave Nick Griffin of the BNP a get out of jail card. Griffin's free expression, he claimed, was speaking for millions, the verdict a blow for liberty. Am I the only one who can hear in his words the echoes of Germany in the 1930s? Are the Danish cartoons not merely Griffin's words in graphic form? It is not just Muslims who can see that liberty, due process before the law, stop-and-search powers, and a climate of suspicion verging on guilt by association are live issues in Britain today. Anti-terror legislation, the shoot-to-kill policy, possible connivance with extraordinary rendition - these are assaults on the basic liberties of all Britons that most directly affect British Muslims.

But British Muslims are not questioning anyone's right to argue about religion, or indeed to ridicule religion. But know who or what you are putting in a pillory. Prejudice is not a basis for defending liberty.

Ridiculing those whose liberties are most under threat is only adding fuel to wildfires our politics at home and abroad have unleashed. We all need to learn how to become firefighters, not arsonists. 
 
A Freedom Gone Too Far
Faisal Sanai, [log in to unmask] 
  
The Muslim community is seething. Last September, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten commissioned and printed offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), as an experiment in "testing the limits of freedom of speech". Not since Salman Rushdie penned the blasphemous "Satanic Verses" has the Islamic world faced such an act of religious provocation.

The centuries-old wall of self-censorship was effectively breached as newspapers in Norway, Germany and France this week reproduced the cartoons in defiance of Muslim outrage. The question that now lies unanswered is: Where does freedom of expression end and media responsibility begin? 

The debate, in the context of religious sensibilities, is not unfamiliar or new. Moralists and free thinkers have been at loggerheads for decades and the tide, at least in the Western world, has turned in favor of free expression. For Christians, irreverent depictions of Jesus Christ have become commonplace. Caricatures of Christ frequently appear in the print media, and similar satirical portrayals surface in dramas and films. The Christian mind has been dulled on a gradual and piece-meal diet of such offenses. Victorian morality that had persisted in the West till the early 1950s has gradually been eroded by a bolder and uncensored press. Martin Scorsese's 1988 film, "The Last Temptation of Christ", tested new boundaries by its abysmal portrayal of Jesus Christ. The film was condemned by virtually every Christian denomination, and labeled an affront to conventional piety.

In the same year, Salman Rushdie published "The Satanic Verses" and incensed the Muslim community with its blasphemous content. There again followed a similar round of protests, but this time much more violent, with fervent calls for boycott and ending in the eventual Iranian fatwa against the life of the author. All this only managed to push up the sales of a book not worth the paper it was written on. How is it that attitudes between the Islamic and Christian world differ so much? For much of the Western world, and in effect the Christian one, attitude toward religion has been largely liberal and permissive. 

What separates us from the Christian and Judaic followers is not our sense of piety and reverence but our sentimental threshold. We are undeniably too sensitive and take offense easily. We are fiercely protective of our beliefs and value systems. But this is our prerogative. What shameful right does a Christian newspaper hold in patronizing us over a personal belief that neither defies basic human or moralistic values, nor infringe on cross-cultural sentiment? The idea of reproducing the caricatures is offensive and distasteful. In an era where the rift between Islam and the West is close to a "civilizational clash", there can be no justification for such provocation. Carsten Juste, the editor in chief of Jyllands-Posten, in a half-baked apology to the Muslims writes that "offending anybody on the grounds of their religious beliefs is unthinkable".

There seems to be a tendency to undermine this hurt and anger by citing ignorance of our sensitivity. Surely, ignorance of a people's sensitivity is not enough an excuse to trample on their religious sentiments. 

Freedom of expression is a privilege to be cherished and not a stick to abuse with. Unfortunately, the permissive European media seems determined to add salt to the festering wound. When Muslim sentimentality was already mortally bruised, there exists no rationale for other newspapers in Europe to reproduce these caricatures. Such an attitude smacks not of ignorance but a brutish disrespect for our values. Hiding behind freedom of expression does not absolve these papers of their responsibility but serves merely to polarize already-alienated peoples.

The debate can now go either of two ways - either the Muslims consider the damage already done and put up with it, or we ratchet up the rhetoric further and call for more stringent action. An unofficial boycott of Danish goods, although meaningless and pitiful, is already under way in Middle Eastern countries. However, now that other bigger and more politically important countries have stepped into the fray, it is doubtful if such a boycott is even feasible. And if attempted, precedents tell us that such boycotts are short-lived and doomed to failure.

Are we then destined to tide over such media arrogance as unfortunate collateral of free speech? Would we then not be opening the doorways to suffer more of such outrages? Certainly matters cannot rest here.

There has to be a system in place that, while acknowledging the privileges of free expression, has to safeguard our inherent values. These are the same values that make us a moralistic society and are the essence of our civilization. To well over four-fifths of the world that adheres to any given religion, it is faith per se that gives us our sense of morality, ethics and sense of righteousness. To abandon these in the face of extended freedoms of expression is senseless and defeatist.

A stand must be taken. It must be emphasized in no uncertain terms that our religious values and beliefs take precedence over individualistic and subjective rights. There has to be concerted action along the lines of the Arab League and the OIC's initiative to seek a UN resolution banning contempt of religious beliefs. Diplomatic pressure in the form of severance of political ties or official sanctions should be an option when countries fail to take steps against their erring media.

If the law of a country, as in the case of these European nations, allows such publication, then it is a law that needs to be amended. This debate is not so much about subjective civil values that countries like Denmark hold in high esteem, as it is about acknowledging others' values. It is not enough that these countries pass legislation against racial discrimination, slander or incitement to violence - for some of us blasphemy laws are equally important!

Self-censorship is not entirely a wrong concept and it is the media's responsibility to understand its limits. While it is true that self-censorship is a slippery slope against freedom of expression, we must shun irresponsible and provocative testing of boundaries. As Edgar Bronfman, the New York president of the World Jewish Congress said in an article reproduced here last week: "We need to restrict ourselves. Otherwise, in the end, we will be restricted." Finally, has the Danish experience of wading in filthy water taught us what filth is?

There Are 101 Ways to Skin a Cat
Amr Al-Faisal 
  
There has been a great to-do in recent days concerning the cartoons published by a Danish newspaper. 

A friend of mine I met at the gym was disturbed that other European nations were joining in with the Danes in insulting our beloved Prophet (peace be upon him).

He was worried that Muslim countries would have to boycott the products of all European countries and not just Danish ones.

I understand that this is a concern for many Muslims; therefore I will propose, for them, a suitable response to our European friends and allies.

I do this, however, with the presumption that Muslims are serious in their desire to stop the Europeans from continuing in their assault on the dignity and honor of our Prophet.

This has not been the case in past incidents of Western aggression against Islam and Muslims, the most recent incident being the desecration of the Holy Qur'an at the hands of Western troops in their prison camps around the world.

Muslim response has to date been less than inspiring.

Nevertheless, I shall assume that this time we mean business.

Let me step back for a moment to give a little background information that may help you make better sense of what is happening.

For a number of years now Western nations have suffered from a growing doubt; they fear that the global hegemony the West has enjoyed for the last couple of centuries is finally coming to an end.

This uncomfortable realization is by no means confined to Westerners; in fact most non-Western people have come to believe this as well.

So a gradual, but perceptible, fading of their global hegemony coupled with a growing fear of an uncertain future motivates Western society to intimidate weak nations in an attempt to keep their power unchallenged and intact.

A US neocon put it very succinctly when he said (I am not quoting exactly): "We must periodically find a weak country, hold it against the wall and slap it around to impress others".

The ideal target for Westerners has been the Muslim world, due to its extensiveness and perceived weakness.

The current assault on our Prophet by the Danes and other Europeans must be seen within this context.

What can we do?

We Arabs have a saying: "What cannot be attained as a whole should not be abandoned as a whole."

Therefore, the first thing we need to do is to cool down and take a deep breath.

I recommend that we utilize a gradual and escalating approach to boycotting Western goods and services. Starting with luxury items and easily replaceable products as a first step that can be quickly and, relatively painlessly implemented.

We may then move on to more complicated items that require finding alternative sources and working with them to produce goods that match our specifications.

Finally we move on to products that we will need to build our own factories to produce.

This serves several purposes: One, it allows our businessmen to find alternatives to Western products in an organized way. Remember, it is not an easy task to rearrange trading patterns that have been in place for decades, if not centuries.

Second, it allows our economies to realign and adjust to the changed trading environment with a minimum of difficulty. 

Third, it allows our non-Western trading partners to adjust their production to fulfill our needs.

Fourth, it allows the West time to back down and apologize for the insults they have heaped upon our beloved Prophet and to make sure it never, ever happens again.

This proposal is predicated on the seriousness of the resolve of Muslims around the world to defend the honor of the Prophet.

If that is not the case, then Muslims around the world must prepare to eat not only Danish cheese, but their own pride as well.
 

 


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