Dick Strawkins wrote:Even though we tend to dismiss a lot of Ophelia's preoccupations, I share her love of the Jesus and Mo series. There's been a big row about this in the UK in the past couple of weeks that has resulted in it being dragged into the news media in a big way.
The 'artist' or (author) behind the series was even interviewed by Jeremy Paxman the other night on Newsnight.
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Basically the story behind the current kerfuffle is that a muslim member of the liberal democrat political party claimed that he was not offended by the Jesus and Mo cartoons - which resulted in him being targeted by all the screaming fundies. It has also exposed the fact that the media is still completely terrified by islamicist threats - they showed a picture of the Jesus and Mo cartoon with Mo obscured by a giant black egg!
And as usual, the SJW brigade is keeping quiet to avoid accusations of islamophobia - they would rather side with extreme fundies than get accused of that.
Indeed. For something different from Pinker, the last chapter in Ibn Warraq’s
Why I Am Not a Muslim – titled
Islam in the the West – continues on with an elaboration of the theme he broached in the first chapter with a discussion of the book
La Trahison des Clercs [The Betrayal by the Intellectuals] at which point Warraq argued:
This book is first and foremost an assertion of my right to criticize everything and anything in Islam even to blaspheme, to make errors, to satirize, and mock. Muslims and non-Muslims have the right to critically examine the sources, the history, and dogma of Islam. Muslims avail themselves of the right to criticize in their frequent denunciations of Western culture, in terms that would have been deemed racist, neocolonialist, or imperialist had a European directed them against Islam. Without criticism, Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified in its totalitarian, intolerant, paranoid past. It will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality, and truth.
And that last chapter discusses in further detail the betrayals – as far as Islam is concerned and particularly in Britain – by politicians, educators, and additional ones by intellectuals, largely in the furtherance of “multiculturalismâ€. Which is maybe a good idea in principle but not when we bend over backwards to “positively supine lengthsâ€. But “a letter from a prospective Labor parliamentary candidate, published in the British daily newspaper
The Daily Telegraph of December 31, 1990†is, I think, illustrative of the depth and scope of the problem, a repudiation of many fundamental principles of democracy:
As a nation we have extended to fundamentalist Islam a tolerance which as you rightly state (editorial, Dec 28), we would never extend to any other religious group and which is contrary to all the principles on which our freedom is based. The question must be: why have we done this? Blame can be laid squarely at the doors of both the Government and the parliamentary Labour Party and leadership; the former perhaps mostly for reasons of trade, the latter for electoral advantage.
I will leave it to Conservatives to deal with the motives of their party leadership; as one who was a Labour candidate in the last general election, I express my shame and regret at the way the Labour party has behaved in putting votes before democratic principles.
In numerous constituencies it is believed that fundamentalist Islam can manipulate the outcome of an election. A decision must have been made that freedom of speech take second place to electoral success; that not to antagonize certain fundamentalist Moslems is more important than the life of Salman Rushdie. The leadership has therefore kept quiet and, in doing so, has prostituted for votes the most basic principles of life and liberty. In the event of Labour coming to power, it has put itself in danger of creating the equivalent of the Jewish vote in the United States.
Now we, in this country, are in grave danger of seeing the Labour party serving the whim of what is, though numerically a tiny section of the electorate, one that is strategically positioned and ruthless enough to utilize its influence solely to its own advantage.
I never thought I would work for more than 20 years for the principles of the Labour movement before witnessing its leadership and parliamentary party abandoning some of them so shamelessly in order to achieve ephemeral electoral success. Michael Knowles.
But Warraq also had an earlier comment which seems to summarize the nature of the problem:
Warraq wrote:A report on Muslim attitudes to education in Britain, prepared by the Islamic Academy, Cambridge, and the Islamic Cultural Centre, London, makes it clear that Muslims are not happy about the secular approach to education. Muslims want to keep their basic, Islamic values, which are threatened by the values of the host community, even if it means disobeying the laws of Britain.
Seems to me that if push-comes-to-shove, as seems to be the direction things are developing in, and Muslims insist on attempting to impose their “Islamic values†on the rest of the society, values that Warraq rather convincingly demonstrates are antithetical to the principles of democracy, then they should be or will be given the choice between repudiating those values – as happened in Spain some 600 years ago – or being declared “persona non grata†and being deported forthwith.
