Citizen Warrior

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The Importance of Blasphemy

Posted: 19 Oct 2020 11:56 PM PDT
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The following was written by Daniel Greenfield, creator of the Sultan Knish
blog. He makes a vital point: We need to allow blasphemy. The only religion
threatening violence against blasphemers is Islam, and so if we wish to
keep the freedom of expression which is so vital to all the other freedoms
we cherish, blaspheming against Islam is not just a good idea, but
necessary.

As a deeply religious person, I have no fondness for blasphemy. My religion
and its holy books are sacred to me. And I understand perfectly well why a
Muslim would not relish a cartoon of a naked Mohammed.

But the debates over freedom of speech and the sensitivity of religious
feelings also miss the point.

Blasphemy is the price we pay for not having a theocracy. Muslims are not
only outraged but baffled by the Mohammed cartoons because they come from a
world in which Islamic law dominates their countries and through its
special place proclaims the superiority of Islam to all other religions.

Almost all Muslim countries are theocracies of one sort or another as a
legacy of the Islamic conquests which Islamized them.

Egyptian President Sisi’s gesture of attending a Coptic mass was so
revolutionary because it challenged the idea that Egyptian identity must be
exclusively Islamic.

And Egypt is far from the most hard line of Islamic countries in the Middle
East, despite a brief takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath
of Obama’s Arab Spring.

In a theocracy, not only is government Islamic from the top down, but
society is also Islamic from the bottom up.

Citizenship is linked to religion and even in countries such as Egypt,
where non-Muslims may be citizens, there are fundamental restrictions in
place that link Islamic identity to Egyptian citizenship. For example,
Egyptian Muslims who attempt to convert to Christianity have found it
extremely difficult to have the government recognize their change of
religion by issuing them new identification cards.

While we may think of blasphemy in terms of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons,
each religion is mutually blasphemous.

Muslims argue that the West should “respect prophets” by outlawing insults
to Mohammed and a panoply of prophets gathered from Judaism and
Christianity. But the Islamic view of Jesus is equally blasphemous to
Christianity. And Islam considers Christianity’s view of Jesus to be
blasphemous.

If we were to truly prosecute blasphemy, the legal system would have to
pick a side between the two religions and either prosecute Christians for
blaspheming against Islam or Muslims for blaspheming against Christianity.
And indeed in Muslim countries, Christians are frequently accused of
blasphemy.

Malaysia’s blasphemy laws were used to ban Christians from employing the
word “Allah” for god and to seize children’s books depicting Noah and
Moses. The reason for seizing the children’s books was the same as the
reason for the attack on Charlie Hebdo; both were featuring cartoons of
prophets.

While Charlie Hebdo pushed the outer limits of blasphemy, every religion
that is not Islam, and even various alternative flavors of Islam, are also
blasphemous.

It isn’t only secularist cartoonists who blaspheme against Islam.

“Mohammed seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure,” St. Thomas
Aquinas wrote. Maimonides called him a madman.

To Bill Donohue, there may be a world of difference between Charlie Hebdo
and Aquinas, but not to a Muslim.

In a multi-religious society, in which every religion has its own variant
theological streams, the right to blaspheme is also the right to believe.
Liberal theology can contrive interchangeable beliefs which do not
contradict or claim special knowledge over any other religion. But
traditionalist faiths are exclusive.

Everyone’s religion is someone else’s blasphemy. If we forget that, we need
only look to Saudi Arabia, where no other religion is allowed, as a
reminder.

Muslims who question freedom of speech are not calling for a special status
for all religions, but only for their religion. They don’t intend to censor
their own Hadiths which claim that Jesus will return and break the cross or
that the apocalypse will climax with Muslims exterminating the Jews. Their
objections aren’t liberal, but exclusively theocratic. They want a
blasphemy law that exclusively revolves around them.

Islam relates to other religions on its terms. It grants special treatment
to Christianity and Judaism, despite nevertheless persecuting them, because
of their relationship to Islam. It persecutes other religions even more
severely because of their greater distance from Islam. Islamic theocracies
are not respectful of religion, but respectful of Islam and disrespectful
of all other religions.

Religious people need not embrace the extremes of French secularism or the
anti-religious positions of the ACLU to see that some distance between
religion and state is a good thing for both. A separation between religion
and state should not mean compulsory secularism, but at the same time it
avoids the religious tests for office which existed in colonial times in
states with established churches that banned Catholics, Quakers and Jews,
among others, from holding political office.

A neutral state allows us to believe what we please. Islamic efforts on
blasphemy however warp us all around the theology of Islam.

When governments prosecute tearing the Koran or drawing offensive cartoons
under hate crime laws, they are eroding the separation between state and
mosque. Their efforts, even if well intentioned, lead inevitably to a
theocracy which not only hurts critics of Islam, but destroys the religious
freedom of all religions.

The legal distinction between secular blasphemy and interreligious disdain
disappears in a theocracy. Each religion has beliefs that offend the other,
actively or passively. When one belief becomes supreme, then religious
freedom vanishes, as it has throughout the Muslim world where the practice
of Christianity and Judaism are governed by how closely Muslims choose to
be offended at other religions.

While some religious people may take issue with the celebration of the
Charlie Hebdo cartoons, equating them with such things as the infamous
“Piss Christ,” there’s a fundamental difference between blasphemy against
the innocent and the guilty.

Piss Christ or a museum which exhibited photos of naked women dressed in
Jewish ritual garments are committed against the unresisting, making them
the theological equivalent of spiteful vandalism. There are no Jews or
Christians murdering artists or bombing museums. By attempting to enforce
the theocracy of blasphemy laws, Muslims made the Mohammed cartoons into a
symbol of free speech.

It was not the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, who specialized in offending all
religions, who made their Mohammed cartoons into a symbol. It was their
Muslim enemies who did it by killing them. It is intellectually dishonest
for Muslims to create martyrs and then complain about their martyrdom.

Blasphemy against Christianity and Judaism fizzles because the lack of a
violent response makes those responsible seem like bullies. Instead of
revealing flaws in those religions, works like Piss Christ or Monster Mohel
reveal the flaws in their makers. Their attempts at blasphemy prove
self-destructive.

Muslim violence against the Mohammed cartoons however turns them into the
bullies. The Hebdo cartoons did no damage to Christianity or Judaism. They
did a great deal of damage to Islam, not because they were well done, but
because Islam is shot through with violent anger and insecurity.

The spiritual power of religion balances between violence and non-violence.
Most religions believe that there is a time to fight, but only Islam
believes in violence as the first and final religious solution.

Mohammed cartoons exist because of the Islamic inability to cope with a
non-theocratic society. Islamic Cartoonophobia is not only a danger to
cartoonists. It’s a threat to all of our religious freedoms.

Written by Daniel Greenfield, originally published here: The Importance of
Blasphemy.



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People Should Be Able to Say What They Wish Without Being Killed For It

Posted: 19 Oct 2020 11:52 PM PDT
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“This has become the flashpoint for the defense of the freedom of speech,”
said Robert Spencer at the recent Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest. “These
cartoons are offensive to Islam, and there is a death penalty for those who
blaspheme against Muhammad. The jihadis believe that these cartoons cross
the line, and those who draw them and publicize them have to be killed.

“If we believe in free speech in a free society, then we have to stand up
for the right of people to offend Muslims or even subject Islam to mockery.
If it were anything else, it would be the same,” he said.

Spencer said he thought some of the cartoons were “in poor taste.”

“But that’s not the point,” he said. “The point is that there are people
who can say what they wish without being killed for it.

“To say that we will succumb to violent intimidation and allow ourselves to
be silent in the face of it is just to encourage more violent intimidation.

“Either we knuckle under or we stand. And we are standing.”

Read more at Texas Terror: Inside Event Targeted by ISIS.



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