Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (68 page)

If this continues, no longer would the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be understood as obliging states to ensure respect for rights of the individual to freedoms of religion and expression. Instead it would be inverted to mandate the use of state power to coerce individuals to respect specific religions. Western leaders would be in the dock at UN bodies, while Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Sudan, and other states would be legitimized, even lauded, for upholding international human rights, as they, in the name of fighting religious insult, persecute religious reformers and political dissidents. Conversely, there would be no international human rights basis for other nations to come to the defense of such dissidents.

Since laws prohibiting blasphemy and heresy against Christianity have become all but obsolete, it seems far-fetched that the West should now be contemplating a retreat from its freedoms on behalf of the demands of some members of another
religion. But censorship, book-burnings, and their modern equivalents—blog-purging and the seizure of computer hard drives—are back.

In many Western countries, there are already lawsuits and criminal prosecutions concerning issues involving religion, politics, and society that have customarily been open to debate. Since the mid-1990s, prosecutors in Finland, the Netherlands, and Canada have trawled the websites of anti-immigration advocates looking for evidence that Islam’s Prophet may have been mocked or for some other anti-Islamic comment. The Dutch government has taken the added precaution of establishing a standing “Interdepartmental Committee on Cartoons” to monitor irreverent treatment of Islam. In France, Canada, Norway, and Italy, publishers, editors, and authors have been tried for inciting religious hostility and insulting religious sensibilities with their critiques of Islam and Muslim immigration. In Austria, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted for her lecture before an anti-immigration political party criticizing Muslim practices she observed abroad. In Germany, a man was convicted for the sacrilegious treatment of the
word
“Koran,” not the Islamic sacred text itself. Despite France’s “laïcité” system of strict separation of religion and politics, national icon Brigitte Bardot, in her animal-rights advocacy, has been convicted and fined five times under hate-speech laws for denouncing Islamic slaughter practices, as well as for other derogatory statements against Muslim matters.

As in much of the Muslim world, the ambiguity of such laws erodes due process and basic principles of fairness. An Australian lower court found two Christian pastors guilty of “vilifying” Islam in a private religion class and issued a lifelong gag order against their speaking about the Qur’an. Under Norway’s hate-speech laws, a handful of political organizations are empowered to bring legal complaints against negative commentary on Islam. A British jury was instructed to ignore whether or not impugned assertions were factually correct. A Helsinki court ruled that an argument made by the defense in a Muslim blasphemy case was inadmissible because “[l]ogic and so-called arguments of reason have no true significance in debating religious questions.”

These problems have led to growing legal criticism in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, including by some disillusioned former proponents. Amir Butler, of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs Committee, no longer favors religious hate-speech laws because “at every major Islamic lecture I have attended since [hate speech] litigation began against Catch the Fire Ministries, there have been small groups of evangelical Christians—armed with notepads and pens—jotting down any comment that might be later used as evidence” against the speaker. Vilification laws thus become “a legalistic weapon by which religious groups can silence their ideological opponents, rather than engaging in debate and discussion.”
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Alan Borovoy, an architect of Canada’s human rights commissions and general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, now laments that, when he labored to create the commissions, “we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech.… No ideology—political,
religious or philosophical—can be immune.… A free culture cannot protect people against material that hurts.”
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Nevertheless, the effort to punish anti-Islamic hate speech is moving forward in both regional and international systems. In 2008, the Council of Europe issued new hate-speech guidelines for the entire region, which specified that, in addition to the offending author or artist, those to be prosecuted will include “those who have directly or indirectly contributed to the circulation of such statement or work of art: a publisher, an editor, a broadcaster, a journalist, an art dealer, an artistic director or a museum manager.”

Although so far there have been few convictions, these laws, and the cases they give rise to, chill speech and are a measure of the diminishing value placed by society on freedom and fairness. Western democracies still subscribe to the fundamental importance of freedom of expression. Yet free expression is itself compromised, perhaps fatally, by religious hate- speech bans. To understand why, one has only to look at the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission vague and subjective standards, which state that, with respect to religion, “there is no right to offend,” that “gratuitously offensive” speech is not protected, and that there is a new “right of [religious freedom of] citizens not to be insulted in their religious feelings.”

Apart from attempted legal prohibitions, governments have sought to regulate language and themes that could possibly touch on Islam.
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In a 2005 report, England’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, Anne Owers, criticized prison staff in Wakefield for wearing tiepins showing St. George’s cross, the national flag of England, claiming that they could be “misconstrued” as symbols of the Crusades. Some local Muslims found Ms. Owers’s concerns “petty.” Indeed, some manifestations of this repressive impulse have been comical, with educators and officials in the United Kingdom continually scrapping pig themes and stories. Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra and other Muslims responded that neither they nor “the vast majority of Muslims” had any objection, and that while Islam forbade Muslims to eat pork, “there is no prohibition about reading stories about pigs”—in fact, such acts by authorities actually worsened the situation of British Muslims: “Every time we get these stories Muslims are seen more and more as misfits.”
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In 2008, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the State Department instructed their employees to avoid the words “salafi,” “wahhabist,” “caliphate,” and “jihadist” as offensive to Muslims when used by non-Muslims. On the advice of unidentified Muslim consultants, the word “liberty” was also dropped in favor of “progress.” That year, the U.K. Home Secretary also dropped the term “Islamic
terrorism” and instead instituted “anti-Islamic activity.” In 2009, the U.S. Homeland Security secretary dropped “Islamic terrorism” in favor of “man-made disasters.” The May 2010 U.S. National Security Strategy document, which in previous years had said, “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century,” dropped any reference to “Islamic extremism.”
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Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Religions, points out that this creates security challenges: “[T]he failure to nail the problem squarely by name … leads Washington to think of American solutions to terrorism more so than Muslim ones.” Senator Joseph Lieberman noted that dropping such words detracts from “important policy questions about how to combat the ideological dimensions of the war that is taking place within Islam.” Muslim activist Zuhdi Jasser asks, “If our government officials cannot even employ the terms ‘Islamism’ or ‘Salafism’ in their discourse, it remains entirely unclear how they will be able to facilitate this contest of ideas [with Islamist extremists].”
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Even apart from the effects of the law, some who dare to discuss Islam have to change their names or go into hiding. Many come from Muslim backgrounds, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who fled the Netherlands after her coproducer van Gogh was assassinated and a death threat against her was staked with a knife to his corpse. Writer Paul Berman notes:

When I met Hirsi Ali … she was protected by no less than five bodyguards. Even in the United States she is protected by bodyguards. But this is no longer unusual. [Ian] Buruma himself mentions in
Murder in Amsterdam
that the Dutch Social Democratic politician Ahmed Aboutaleb requires full-time bodyguards. At that same Swedish conference I happened to meet the British writer of immigrant background who has been obliged to adopt the pseudonym Ibn Warraq, out of fear that, in his case because of his Bertrand Russell-influenced philosophical convictions, he might be singled out for assassination. I happened to attend a different conference in Italy a few days earlier and met the very brave Egyptian-Italian journalist Magdi Allam, who writes scathing criticisms of the new totalitarian wave in
Il Corriere della Sera
—and I discovered that Allam, too, was traveling with a full complement of five bodyguards. The Italian journalist Fiamma Nierenstein, because of her well-known sympathies for Israel, was accompanied by her own bodyguards. Caroline Fourest, the author of the most important extended criticism of [Tariq] Ramadan, had to go under police protection for a while. The French philosophy professor Robert Redeker has had to go into hiding.
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The West could not have been more unprepared for this new call for censorship on behalf of Islam. Whereas in 1989, Western politicians and intellectuals instinctively sided with Rushdie, by 2007, the announcement that the Queen of England would confer a knighthood on him was met with controversy. Several British Labour and Conservative parliamentarians, journalists, and others publicly denounced the decision. Berman notes this shift: “How times have changed! The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, compared unfavorably in the press with the Islamist philosopher who writes prefaces for the collected fatwas of Sheik al-Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb.… During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism.”
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Fear is now shaping how we discuss Islam, or whether, apart from platitudes, we dare say anything at all. It has also affected how we view others who, by their expressed ideas, arouse the ire of OIC governments and Islamist extremists. In 2006, Borders and Waldenbooks stores refused, on security grounds, to stock the Council for Secular Humanism’s
Free Inquiry
magazine because it reprinted some of the Danish cartoons. Officials at Utrecht University, citing fear of violence from Muslim students, demanded that retiring Professor Pieter W. Van Der Horst omit a passage concerning Islamic anti-Semitism from his valedictory address, even though there had been no threats by Muslim students or anyone else.
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There have been some notable exceptions to this pattern: for example, in September 2010, the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium, in a ceremony keynoted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and attended by editors and publishers from Europe’s top media companies, awarded its prestigious media prize to Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for his “unbending engagement for freedom of the press and freedom of opinion” and for his courage to defend these democratic values despite threats of death and violence.
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For the most part, however, in the West’s most prominent institutions and associations, there is a growing reluctance to criticize even some of the most extreme manifestations of things done in the name of Islam.

The common Western response of restricting expression about Islam coincides with arguments that such restrictions are necessary to create a social climate that protects minorities from possible discriminatory practices and violence and that religious freedom includes a right to be protected from ridicule, criticism, or dissent; or it springs from an exaggerated sense of multiculturalism. While these rationales are given frequently by policy makers and diplomats, it is actually fear of violence that is the explanation commonly given in the specific incidents. Explicitly citing fear of violence, the British private watchdog group, Index on Censorship, in 2009 declined to show any Danish cartoons when running an interview with author Jytte Klausen on Yale’s decision not to publish the cartoons in her book. British political satirist Rory Bremner commented: “When [I’m] writing a sketch about Islam, I’m writing a line and I think, ‘If this goes down badly, I’m writing my own death warrant there.’ … Where does satire go from there, because we like to be brave but not foolish.”
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Christopher Hitchens correctly discerns: “a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table. He never speaks. He doesn’t have to. But he is very well understood. The late playwright Simon Gray was alluding to him when he said that Nicholas Hytner, the head of London’s National Theatre, might put on a play mocking Christianity but never one that questioned Islam.”
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A letter to the
Boston Globe
neatly skewered that paper’s claim that it was sensitivity to offense that led to its decision not to publish any Danish cartoons in its coverage of them: “I find all of your editorial cartoons deeply offensive, morally, religiously, philosophically, and spiritually. In fact, I don’t like your editorials, either. And the editorializing in your news coverage is annoying as well. In keeping with your cowardly policy not to offend anyone, kindly cease publication at once.”
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The Bart Simpson television cartoon put it more simply. Referring to a death threat causing the creators of the irreverent animation series
South Park
to censor its depiction of Muhammad, the kid Bart, on the Simpsons’ website, is seen writing on a blackboard, “South Park—We’d Stand Beside You If We Weren’t So Scared.”
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